off the charts
POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
I recently described a new study finding that public programs keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty. The same study illustrates that after policymakers weakened certain elements of the safety net, deep poverty — that is, the share of the population with incomes below half the poverty line — rose sharply.
The study, which goes beyond traditional poverty data in a number of ways (such as by counting non-cash public benefits like food stamps and tax provisions like the Earned Income Tax Credit), finds that poverty fell over the past two decades but deep poverty rose.
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- The poverty rate declined from 15.3 percent in 1984 to 13.5 percent in 2004. (In 2004, the poverty line for a family of four was $19,307 a year or $1,609 a month; the study uses monthly rather than annual poverty data.)
- Yet the deep poverty rate rose by nearly half during this period, from 4.5 percent to 6.6 percent.
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