Tuesday the Census Bureau released its CPS-ASEC and Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2023: — for human needs advocates, the most important Census Bureau release of the year when our government measures the progress we are making when it comes to fighting poverty, lack of health care, and income disparities between rich and poor. 

It is also a time for us to come together as a human needs community and celebrate the progress we have made – and we have made progress, although there is still much work to be done.  

First, some background. 

You may have seen CHN’s chart released on September 10, First Look at Poverty, Hardship, and Health Insurance 2023. It reported, among other things, on the number of Americans lifted out of poverty by various safety net programs. 

For example, Census Bureau data show 27.6 million were lifted from poverty by Social Security, 6.3 million by refundable tax credits, 3.4 million by SNAP, 2.7 million by housing subsidies, 2.3 million by the refundable Child Tax Credit, and 1.1 million by school lunch assistance. 

How do we know this and why is it important in our fight against poverty? 

We know it because of the Supplemental Poverty Measure. And it’s important in the fight against poverty, because the first step in fighting poverty is being able to accurately measure it – and that includes knowing what works and what doesn’t. 

From the 1960s on, the U.S. has maintained an Official Poverty Measure (OPM). But it was only beginning in 2011 that the U.S. began releasing statistics known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The difference is that OPM is more limited in scope, while the SPM “uses a standard of living based on expenditures that include food, clothing, shelter and utilities, compared against a household’s post-tax income, which accounts for government aid and the Earned Income Tax Credit,” according to the Center for Public Integrity 

The SPM tells us what a big difference the various programs we fight for make in people’s lives. Keep in mind that it measures only how many people moved out of poverty from these programs. Many people benefit from these programs but don’t move out of poverty, either because they are so deeply poor that even with help they remain poor, or because they hover just above poverty and the help they get helps them make ends meet even though they are not officially poor without it.  

That means that every year, when the SPM data is released, we at CHN can take a moment to appreciate how much our hard work has meant for people around the country. CHN staff and coalition members fight for these programs every day. We know if our voice was not here, these programs would shrink and perhaps disappear. 

It’s also our chance to thank you for your voice in preserving these programs. Time after time we ask you to weigh in with policy makers, and time after time you respond. Our work only makes a difference because policy makers know that many people care about what we say. So please, take a bow, or take a tea break, and congratulate yourselves on having helped literally millions of people.  

Why should we care about this data? Because we know how vital it is to lift people out of poverty, and we want to utilize our nation’s resources as effectively as we can. When we see real evidence that incomes can rise above poverty because of SNAP, or housing, or tax credits, we know that these policies are worth investing in. When we see reports that people “sometimes or often” don’t have enough to eat, or are falling behind in their rent, we know there is more work to do. This data needs to move off the pages of reports and into the toolkits of advocates.