THE Census Bureau reported yesterday that the poverty rate in America held stable between 2011 and 2012, at about 15 percent. According to the official measure, poverty today is higher than it was in 1973, when it reached a historical low of 11.1 percent.

To many, this dismaying fact suggests that taxpayers waste billions of dollars a year fighting a war on poverty that has been largely lost. As Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said earlier this year, “We have spent $15 trillion from the federal government fighting poverty, and look at where we are, the highest poverty rates in a generation, 15 percent of Americans in poverty.”

But this position is wrong, for two reasons. The first is that the official measure is misleading — it measures only cash income, and it does not count benefits from many programs that help the poor. If they were counted, the rate would be closer to 11 percent.

Consider the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which was first put into nationwide use in the 1960s. The immediate benefits are easy to calculate: a dollar of SNAP subsidies spent on food frees up a dollar for low-income families to spend on rent, utilities or other needs. When SNAP benefits are counted as income, they lift almost four million people above the poverty line.