Food Stamps Reduced The Poverty Rate By Nearly 8 Percent
In 2009, As GOP Tries To Gut The Program
By Travis Waldron
Think Progress
April 10, 2012
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/04/10/461337/food-stamps-reduce-poverty

Congressional Republicans have targeted the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as
food stamps, for budget cuts, and have attempted to
paint it as a program rife with fraud and abuse that is
on an unsustainable path. While their argument ignores a
host of facts, including that food stamp fraud is at an
all-time low, it also ignores the economic benefits that
the program brings to millions of low-income families.

According to a new study from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, food stamps substantially reduced the
poverty rate in 2009, the last year data is available,
the New York Times reports:

The food stamp program.reduced the poverty rate by
nearly 8 percent in 2009, the most recent year included
in the study, a significant impact for a social program
whose effects often go unnoticed by policy makers. [...]

The study, which examined nine years of data, tried to
measure the program's effects on people whose incomes
remained below the poverty threshold. The program lifted
the average poor person's income up about six percent
closer to the line over the length of the study, making
poverty less severe. When the benefits were included in
the income of families with children, the result was
that children below the threshold moved about 11 percent
closer to the line.

[moderator: the USDA study is here -
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR132/ERR132.pdf ]

The USDA study aligns closely with a similar one
released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
which found that food stamps reduced the number of
Americans living in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46
million to just over 800,000. SNAP's effects on children
are even bigger - the program cut the number living in
extreme poverty by half, according to CBPP.

[moderator: a recent CBPP study of SNAP is here -
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2226.]

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