This op-ed by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) first appeared in National Review on February 11, 2026.
Over the past 50 years, the federal government’s welfare spending has increased by 765 percent, yet the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line hasn’t budged. Roughly 12 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 1974. Today, it’s roughly 11 percent.
Is America really that bad at bringing people out of poverty?
Some of my Democratic colleagues would answer that question with a resounding “yes” and argue that we need to spend more than the $1.4 trillion we already spend on welfare to fix the problem. But it matters how you define poverty. The definition of poverty that the U.S. Census Bureau uses today is far too narrow for Congress to understand how many Americans are truly in need.
The poverty level in the United States today is roughly $16,000 for a single person, $21,000 for a family of two, $27,000 for a family of three, and $32,000 for a family of four. According to the Census Bureau, 35.9 million Americans have incomes that are at or below those poverty lines.
When the Census Bureau calculates a family’s income to determine whether it falls below the poverty line, however, it does not consider non-cash benefits that individuals may receive from the federal, state, and local governments, such as health insurance or housing subsidies. The federal government says this is only fair because people cannot spend non-cash benefits on anything they want.
But money is fungible. Giving someone Medicaid frees up money the person would otherwise have to spend on health care.
That’s why the Census Bureau’s narrow poverty definition is misleading. The only benefits the agency considers when determining an individual’s income are the cash payments that the person receives from either work or federal government programs such as Social Security benefits, Supplemental Security Income, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the welfare program known as TANF). The Census Bureau’s definition does not include non-cash federal payments, including refundable earned income tax credits, food stamps, housing subsidies, utility bill subsidies, Medicaid, or free school meals.
If you include the non-cash benefits and cash payments (from the person’s earnings and from the federal government), the actual percentage of Americans with incomes at or below the poverty line is only 1 percent.
For example, a single mother with two kids making $11,000 a year in part-time work is also eligible to receive $4,100 in refundable earned income tax credits, $3,400 in refundable child tax credits, $9,200 in food stamps, $9,500 in housing subsidies, $900 in utility bill subsidies, $16,000 in Medicaid, $3,100 a year in free school meals, and $6,600 in TANF (welfare) payments. When both cash and non-cash benefits are counted, she has a total income of $64,100. That’s 237 percent higher than the $27,000 poverty line for a family of three.
Non-cash benefits matter, and all of them are tax-free. A middle-class family making $64,000 in income that they earn themselves would have to pay taxes.
The truth is that many people receiving welfare benefits from the federal government are middle-class. There’s a reason people walk across entire continents to try to live in the United States. America doesn’t have a poverty problem; we have a Census Bureau definition problem.
Fortunately, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has designed a new way to measure poverty in America. The CBO’s methodology takes into consideration a family’s access to both cash and non-cash federal welfare programs. This provides a much clearer picture of a family’s ability to pay for its basic needs.
Last week, I introduced the Poverty Statistics Enhancement Act to require the Census Bureau to include the CBO’s methodology in its reporting on poverty in America. This would not eliminate the Census Bureau’s current narrow poverty definition, but it would ensure that Congress can consider both numbers when deciding how to improve welfare programs in America.
The rampant welfare fraud we’ve seen in Minnesota, California, and elsewhere throughout the country has been fueled by the fact that Congress does not know how many Americans are in need. When the nation is more than $38 trillion in debt, we cannot afford to let misleading survey numbers dupe the country into more costly, fraud-prone welfare programs.
