Food stamps. Unemployment benefits. Social security. Earned income tax credits.



Do these social welfare programs work? Yes, according to a new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Safety nets like food stamps prevent millions more people from struggling to put food on the table, says Jake Grovum, who analyzed the data for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Consider Grovum’s findings:

For people of all ages, the official poverty rate in the US was 14.5%. That’s equivalent to 45.3 million people.



Without food stamps, the poverty rate would be 17.10% – another 8 million Americans would be living in poverty.



Without social security, the poverty rate for Americans 65 and older would be 52.67% instead of the current 14.6%.



Without tax credits like the federal earned income tax credit, poverty for children under 18 would be 22.8% instead of the official poverty rate of 19.9%.

These numbers are important. US lawmakers have long struggled to show exactly how and where certain types of government assistance are helping Americans stay out of poverty.

Nobody, on the right or the left, wants more people to live in poverty. Yet America has a dismal record on poverty for an advanced nation. Already, over 14% of US households have experienced food insecurity. One in seven Americans live in poverty, including one in five US children. Of all the millions of unemployed people in the country, fully one-third have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.



Where the opinions divide is how to address the problem. Republicans including Paul Ryan have advocated cutting and consolidating government programs. Congress put that belief into legislation last year, cutting both food stamps and unemployment benefits.



The assumption in the slash-and-burn approach is that poor Americans have no one to blame but themselves for their poverty, and they only need more discipline to get out of their circumstances. Welfare skeptics find the accounts of those struggling “another sob story” and wonder why more people can’t just bootstrap themselves.

If only the poor could be more organized. As Ryan put it in his poverty plan,



Providers must be held accountable, and so should recipients. Each beneficiary will sign a contract with consequences for failing to meet the agreed-upon benchmarks. At the same time, there should also be incentives for people to go to work. Under each life plan, if the individual meets the benchmarks ahead of schedule, then he or she could be rewarded.

Meanwhile Democrats and advocates for the poor cite the fact that downward mobility has become a big factor in the current manifestation of American poverty.



“For most of the American public, this downturn in the last six, seven years was a wake-up call because people in their families that they knew lost their home, were out of work for a longer period of time and they looked at that and went: ‘Holy cow, maybe we do need government assistance when something like that happens,’” Dave Reaney, executive director of the Bay Area Food Bank in Alabama, told the Guardian. “I think that’s why a majority of Americans today do feel that safety nets are important.”

What has complicated the discussion for years is that the official poverty rate, based on the income of American households, does not tell the true story of America’s poor.

“A lot of people don’t remember that [the official poverty rate] doesn’t include things like food stamps and other programs that are really important and actually do help a lot of people,” Grovum says.

That is why, in 2010, the US government decided to introduce yet another measure of poverty: the supplemental poverty rate, which takes into consideration consumer spending on necessities like food, shelter and utilities as well as any assistance that they might receive.



Since the supplemental poverty measure also considers cost of living in different places around the country like housing and medical expenses, it more accurately captures the way people experience poverty.



“The one thing that can get missed when you are talking about poverty rates is the way that different factors around the country can play into that,” explains Grovum. “You have states where it’s expensive to live and it’s really different to be poor there than it is in states where it’s less expensive to live.”

He adds:

In some sense, it’s kind of missing this whole system that we have set up for people who are poor. The other measure helps put that in context and helps people remember that there are these programs that help people and how they help them.”

Take California. If one were to account for all the expenses accrued and benefits received by the 38 million people living in the Golden State, the real poverty rate would be closer to 23.4% than 16%, which is the official poverty rate. In New Mexico, on the other hand, the supplemental poverty rate, 16%, is much lower than the official poverty rate, 21.5%. According to Grovum, the poverty rate was lower under the supplemental measure than it was under the official measure in 26 states.

Unfortunately, the official poverty thresholds will still be used to award government assistance. The new measure, in the meantime, will be used to measure the health of the US economy and to better understand the effects of government assistance, according to the US census bureau website.

The upshot: especially in post-recession America, these so-called “hand-outs” are exactly what keeps millions of Americans from living in deeper poverty.

You can check out the full interactive here.