Do safety net programs reduce child poverty in the United States?

The expansion of social safety net programs has improved the material wellbeing of children in the United States over the past 40 years. However, official poverty statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau exclude contributions from anti-poverty programs, including sources of post-tax income like the Earned Income Tax Credit and non-cash benefits like SNAP (often still referred to as food stamps).

Using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes these historically excluded sources of income, we find that rates of child poverty have fallen from around 30% in the mid-1960s to around 15% in recent years, suggesting that expanded safety net programs have made a positive and enduring difference in the lives of poor children. For 2020, the supplemental measure estimates that about 9.7% of U.S. children were living in poverty, a reduction of 6.3 percentage points from the official estimate of 16%. This translates to approximately 4.6 million children whom safety net programs lifted above the poverty line in 2020.