Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington and a former chief economist to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

An interesting debate is percolating in the evaluation of our federal antipoverty programs. President Obama’s recent emphasis on the problem of high inequality and low upward mobility has forced conservatives to join that debate, and they’ve developed a meme that, at the risk of straining the metaphor, goes like this:

Our current spate of anti-poverty programs operate more like a hammock than a safety net when what we really need is a trampoline.

Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.

As Representative Paul Ryan, who has been hacking at the safety net for years, put it just the other day (before misrepresenting a fictional story as an actual anecdote against nutritional support), the “left” is “offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.”

In economic terms, it’s pitting consumption against investment. The right is saying that the left focuses on poor people’s consumption while neglecting to invest in their future. Broadly speaking, consumption gets you through today; investment sets you up for a better tomorrow. Representative Ryan might say that consumption is for the stomach; investment is for the soul.

I should start by pointing out that I’ve heard this argument only from people whose personal consumption is unconstrained by the inability to meet their family budget and more. But put that aside. I suspect it’s a resonant argument to many and a potentially challenging one to the status quo.

There are, however, two big problems with it. First, it presumes that those who set up this dichotomy have a robust investment plan, though they do not. But more interestingly, a spate of recent research shows that it’s wrong on the merits. A lot of what you’d mistake for consumption really works like investment: Yes, it fills the stomach today, but it’s also linked to better outcomes tomorrow.

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Start with a program that literally does fill the stomach: food stamps, now called SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. A recent study took advantage of the fact that the program gradually expanded across the country starting in the 1960s, creating a natural experiment wherein researchers could compare child outcomes conditional on food stamp receipt by tapping variation between counties that adopted or expanded the program at different times. The chart highlights the findings.

When poor, pregnant women and their young children had access to food stamps, those children had better health and economic outcomes as adults than did children born at the same time but in neighboring counties that did not yet offer such nutritional support. The authors find that as adults, children exposed to the program (starting in utero) experienced lower rates of “metabolic syndrome” (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes) and, for women, were more economically self-sufficient in that they were more likely to graduate high school, find work and avoid poverty (meaning they were also less likely to collect public benefits themselves).

Income supplements, like the earned-income tax credit or child tax credit, seem like classic near-term consumption boosters, yet they too have been found to have impacts that last into adulthood for children whose families receive them. By following children whose families received these benefits and comparing their outcomes with similarly-situated children whose families did not get them (or got less), numerous researchers have found lasting outcomes here as well.

As my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) colleagues point out, one careful study found that children in low-income families that received an additional $3,000 of annual income (in 2005 dollars) betw​een the children’s prenatal year and fifth birthday earned an average of 17 percent more and worked 135 hours more annually as adults, compared with similar children whose families did not receive the added income.

Other rigorous studies found similar results relating income support to higher test scores in reading and math, which are themselves correlated with better employment and earnings later in life.

Housing assistance is also found to have positive, lasting investment-type impacts, especially when compared with the damage to children who experience homelessness, overcrowding and frequent moves that involve changing school systems. According to CBPP, low-income families with housing vouchers “were 74 percent less likely to become homeless, 48 percent less likely to live in overcrowded housing, and moved fewer times over a five-year period than similar low-income families that didn’t receive housing assistance.”

There’s an important way in which this research is particularly germane right now. Part of the conservative attack on the safety net — which, to be clear, is a setup for forthcoming budgets that are likely to seriously hack away at these programs — is motivated by what they call the “poverty trap.” This is the idea that since eligibility for safety-net programs fades with income, beneficiaries suppress their earnings to stay of the rolls.

While there’s logic to that claim, careful research finds it to be largely unfounded. That’s probably a function of the fact that most low-income people don’t actually face work disincentives of the magnitude that Mr. Ryan and others claim, as the economist Robert A. Moffitt has shown. But the findings above may also play a role. By dint of these investments, low-income parents have a better platform — a stable dwelling, food on the table, a wage subsidy — from which to pursue upward mobility.

The point is that what Representative Ryan and others are thinking of as a hammock is itself more of a trampoline, at least for some children whose families receive these benefits. More direct investments, like Head Start and Pell grants, are also essential, and recent research supports these programs as well. And as I’ve consistently stressed, the best antipoverty program I’ve seen in my lifetime is a full employment labor market, where strong demand for low-wage workers dramatically increases their employment and earnings.

But if we want to correctly understand and evaluate the impact of policies currently helping poor families, we need to recognize that often what looks like consumption is actually investment. Both functions are important, for stomachs today and for souls tomorrow.