Federal programs are lifting 10 times as many people out of poverty now than they did before the war on poverty, according to a new government report aimed at rebuking politicians on the right and left who have declared the government’s anti-poverty efforts a failure.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ study concluded that safety net programs cut the poverty rate almost in half in 2012, to 16 percent, which means nearly 40 million people were lifted above the poverty line by government programs. The study noted that in 1967, before the war on poverty began, programs only cut the poverty rate by 1.3 percentage points, and brought fewer than 3 million people out of poverty.
“Without the federal safety net programs, millions of American families would not have the resources to meet their basic human needs,” said Richard Frank, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the agency, in a statement introducing the study.
The conclusion that programs have significantly cut poverty contradict the claims of liberals like Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking the Democratic nomination who has claimed that poverty is increasing. It is also a rebuttal to the claims of Republicans who have noted that the official poverty rate is as high now as it was in the 1960s, at around 15 percent.
The HHS study relied on an alternative to the official poverty rate created by researchers at Columbia University. The official poverty rate, calculated by the Census Bureau, does not take into account the effects of in-kind government benefits like food stamps or housing benefits, nor does it include anti-poverty tax credits, and therefore misses many of the government programs designed to lower poverty. The alternative measure takes those benefits into account to determine how much material deprivation Americans are experiencing.
By that measure, poverty has declined about 40 percent since 1967, the study said.
The report also found that the safety net responded to the recession by expanding to accommodate families losing jobs or their homes. Without the safety net, according to the study, poverty would have risen by over 5 percentage points. Instead, it only grew by 1.3 percentage points.
The programs that are currently doing the most to cut poverty, the study claimed, are Social Security, tax credits for poorer families (like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit), and the food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, which helped 45 million people in 2015, according to the Department of Agriculture, and accounted for $74 billion in spending.
