By  Jake Grovum

Without Social Security, the poverty rate among senior citizens in the U.S. would be more than 50 percent; instead, it’s just 14.6 percent.

For people of all ages, food stamps cut the poverty rate by about 10 percent, and they reduce poverty among those under 18 by even more than that. And refundable tax credits, many of which help the working poor, reduce the poverty rate among children by more than a quarter.

That’s the power of the safety net, as shown by new U.S. Census Bureau data measuring poverty in America. The federal poverty rate is based solely on income—for 2013, it was $23,624 for a family of four. But the so-called Supplemental Poverty Measure, released this month, adjusts income to account for the value of housing subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (also known as welfare), Social Security, food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and other programs.

While it’s difficult to discern how much each program reduced poverty in each state, it is possible to calculate the extent to which people in each state benefit from some of the primary safety net programs. (See Stateline’s data visualization.)

The U.S. supplemental poverty rate in 2013 was 15.5 percent, the census found, equal to 48.7 million Americans. That rate was higher than the official poverty measure — which was 14.6 percent, or 45.8 million.

For individual states, the rates are an average of rates from 2011, 2012 and 2013. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia were poorer under the supplemental measure than under the official one. California had the largest gap between its supplemental and official poverty rates, followed by Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, Nevada, Maryland, Virginia, the District, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Alaska, New York and Illinois.

In 26 states, the poverty rate was lower under the supplemental measure than it was under the official measure. The states with the biggest differences were New Mexico, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Montana, Idaho, South Dakota and Oklahoma.

The census analysis illuminates the extent to which individual programs cut the poverty rate, by calculating what the poverty rate would have been without the benefit. For example, without Social Security, the poverty rate would have been nine percentage points higher among all Americans.

National school lunch programs reduced the child poverty rate by one percentage point. Even relatively small programs, such as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which on average pays about $500 per household, left a dent.

Tax credits are a powerful anti-poverty measure. The most well-known is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and couples and totaled more than more than $65 billion last year. Many states have similar credits that piggyback on the federal one but aren’t included in the federal data.

Mississippi claimed more than $1 billion in EITC dollars. Mississippi taxpayers who received it got an average of $2,817, compared to the national average of $2,300. Vermont recipients had the lowest average payment, at just under $1,900.

The impact that a benefit has on a state’s overall poverty rate largely depends on the number of state residents who receive it. In West Virginia, for example, nearly one in four residents is on Social Security. Last year, West Virginia received a total of $524 million in Social Security payments, or $282 per capita. In Alaska, only one in 10 residents receives Social Security. In that state, Social Security payments totaled $97 million, or $133 per capita.

The benefits of food stamps also vary by state: States with high percentages of their populations enrolled, like Mississippi, saw more than $330 in food stamp payments per capita. In Wyoming, it was less than $100 per capita.

Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The teacher told me about a time he’d gotten his hand slapped.

We were at a conference for high school students. He told me he’d pulled into his school’s parking lot with a load of yard signs touting the political candidacy of a friend of his in the back of the vehicle. He planned to distribute them after school.

A school administrator parked beside him and said it wasn’t a good idea for him to have the political signs on school property, even if they were locked away in his car.

Indiana state law prohibits public school teachers from doing any political work on school time or while on school property.

A little while later, I mentioned the incident to some students at the conference. One of them – a bright young woman from Southern Indiana – shook her head.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “You mean you can bring guns to school in your car but you can’t bring yard signs.”

Everyone laughed.

“Well, that’s Indiana,” she chuckled.

A few days later, the joke doesn’t seem so funny.

Once again, there’s been another school shooting in America – this time in Washington. A young man went to his school and apparently shot some schoolmates, including a couple of his cousins and a girl he had dated, before turning the gun on himself.

The girl the shooter dated died. So did another girl. And several others remain in critical condition.

Once again, before the sounds of the weeping even have died away, the gun enthusiasts around the country have fired up their propaganda machines, using the same tired arguments to “prove” that a firearm played no part in a deadly shooting.

They contend that, because the young man broke several laws before he got to the school, more gun laws wouldn’t make a difference.

By that reasoning, of course, we should rewrite the entire legal code. Because some people drive too fast, we shouldn’t have speed limits. Because some people steal money that doesn’t belong to them, we shouldn’t have laws against theft. And because some people kill others, we shouldn’t have laws against murder.

Only in the world directed and counseled by the lobbyists and flacks at the National Rifle Association does the argument that because a law isn’t infallible we shouldn’t have any law at all seem persuasive.

The gun devotees also try to make the argument that cars are much deadlier – and they play a deliberately deceptive game in the process.

They point to the number of people murdered with guns each year in this country – generally somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 people – but include all of the people killed in cars in their reckoning. A more accurate comparison would be to include all of the people killed by guns, including those who die by accident, suicide or in undetermined circumstances.

When the counting is done the right way, the numbers are close – more than 30,000 of our fellow citizens every year.

And, while the gun enthusiasts love to play games with some numbers, there are a couple they never want to acknowledge.

The first is that there have been 87 school shootings in the United States since hell visited Sandy Hook Elementary School and more than two dozen little children and dedicated teachers died less than two years ago.

That’s right – 87. We’re on a pace of nearly a school shooting per week.

The other number the gun crowd ignores is: The rate of gun-related deaths in the United States per 100,000 people is 20 times – 2000 percent – higher than the average for the rest of the developed world.

We’re number one when it comes to killing our neighbors, friends, fellow citizens and family members.

In most other contexts, we Americans would work tirelessly to find a solution to a problem this tragic.

In this case, though, thanks to the NRA, we take pride in running away from the challenge. We say we can’t solve a problem every other developed nation in the world has met more effectively than we have.

In fact, here in Indiana, we let the gun lobby ram through legislation that allows people to bring guns onto school property.

But that’s Indiana.

We Hoosiers won’t do anything to protect school children from gun-related violence.

Thank goodness, though, that we’ve protected our kids from yard signs.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.