Gary Brunk: Strong safety net lifts families out of poverty

More than six years past the end of the Great Recession, many Kansans continue to struggle to find their economic footing. Median household income in 2014 was lower than before the recession. Most people in Kansas, including most families in poverty, have jobs, but the path to greater opportunity is hard to find because of a struggling economy and because so many jobs pay not much more than the minimum wage.

Given the weak economy, the important news is that according to data recently released by the Census Bureau, safety net programs in the United States cut poverty nearly in half in 2014.

Those findings contradict claims, such as recent ones by Gov. Sam Brownback, that our nation’s efforts to reduce poverty have been a failure. The real failure is that of an economy that does not benefit average workers.

The Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure (SPM) is a broad measure of poverty that most policy analysts, regardless of their ideological inclinations, favor over the official poverty measure because it includes noncash benefits such as food stamps and tax credits such as the earned income tax credit.

An analysis of the SPM data released in September shows that accounting for noncash benefits and taxes lowers the national poverty rate from 27.3 to 15.3 percent in 2014. This means that the safety net lifted 38 million people, including more than 8 million children, above the poverty line.

The effect is even greater in our state. A study using SPM data averaged over four years (2009-12) found that the safety net reduced poverty in Kansas from 25.2 to 9.6 percent.

When critics claim that federal anti-poverty programs are ineffective because poverty rates haven’t changed since the 1960s, they’re using the official poverty measure. But that doesn’t count programs such as food stamps, which were small or nonexistent in the 1960s. Columbia University researchers, using an SPM-like measure and adjusting for inflation, found that the poverty rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012.

Poverty remains much too widespread in America, so it would not be accurate to say that we have won the war on poverty. It is also not accurate to say that we have lost it.

What we can say is that while there is still too much poverty in America, the safety net is lifting millions out of deep poverty – the first step on the path to self-sufficiency and opportunity.

This story was originally published November 27, 2015 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Gary Brunk: Strong safety net lifts families out of poverty."