Last week’s annual Census Bureau poverty report offered encouraging news about growing US incomes and declining poverty in 2025. As the Bureau’s press release highlighted, real median household income reached “$87,460 in 2025, the highest on record dating back to 1967.” Meanwhile, according to the nation’s official poverty measure (OPM) developed in the 1960s, the overall poverty rate, along with the rate for Hispanics and children, all fell to historic lows.
But you wouldn’t know about any of that progress from the New York Times headline: “Poverty Rate Was Stable Before Trump’s Safety Net Cuts Gained Force.” Veteran blogger Mickey Kaus dubbed that
One of the sleazier @NYTimes headlines–reads like it’s saying the cuts have raised the poverty rate. But we don’t know that. We do know it was at a record low in 2025. “Poverty Rate Was Stable Before Trump’s Safety Net Cuts Gained Force”
The Gray Lady never bothered to inform readers that the poverty rate in its headline comes not from the OPM, but from the newer supplemental poverty measure (SPM) first released in 2011. Both measures have distinct shortcomings. The SPM is a more “relative” metric, which adds significant complexity while making it in practice impossible to ever eliminate poverty. It counts more government benefits as income but uses an elevated poverty threshold that defines millions more people as poor. Instead of noting that detail, the headline and opening lines simply reference the “poverty rate.” Readers must wait until the eleventh paragraph to find mention of the OPM, which fell sharply (or “ticked down,” as the Times understatedly put it) from 10.7 to 10.2 percent—the lowest level in recorded history, as Kaus noted.
One could view the Times’ focus on measuring poverty via the SPM (which rose slightly) and not the OPM (which declined significantly) as reflecting a bias against giving the Trump administration credit for good news.
But the real reason resides in liberals’ longer-run zeal to promote more government benefits and chastise anyone who might cut them. That’s why the Times used the SPM to judge Democrats’ massive but temporary expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic. Tax credits, among other benefits, are countable as income under the SPM, but not under the OPM.
That similarly explains the latest Times headline’s reference to “Trump’s Safety Net Cuts.” On July 4, 2025, Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which tightened eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid. Caseloads have started dropping, but many effects won’t register until 2026. Times writers know that if they want to blame the administration for potential poverty-increasing effects of reducing benefit income, they have to use the SPM, which unlike the OPM counts food stamp and Medicaid benefit income in determining who is poor. Never mind that recent changes follow massive pandemic-era expansions in benefit caseloads, which hadn’t previously adjusted back down to pre-pandemic levels. For liberals, benefit caseloads can only be an escalator headed up.
It’s clear the Times anticipates casting just that sort of blame, noting that this year’s
poverty data does not capture many of the changes enacted in the sweeping Republican domestic policy bill passed in July 2025, including substantial cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other government aid. Analysts and advocates for those programs anticipate that the effect of reductions to the country’s social safety net will become more visible in the reports that cover 2026, 2027 and beyond.
“In many ways, 2025 represents a base line from which we’ll see bigger cuts in the years after,” said Gideon Lukens, a senior fellow and the director of research and data analysis at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It’s the calm before the storm.”
Stormy premonitions for Republican-sponsored welfare reforms might sound familiar to some. Thirty years ago, in the wake of the 1996 welfare reform law, the Times similarly expected poverty to spike in the wake of work-based welfare reforms. Following pre-reform poverty declines, Times editors in September 1996 suggested
The recent gains, though welcome, ought to be kept in perspective….Peering into the future, Congress made matters needlessly worse. The welfare bill that it passed, and the President signed, will throw millions of children and adults into poverty. Just as the economy opens the door to prosperity for families, rich and poor, Congress has slammed the door back shut for the most disadvantaged.
Just as in this year’s coverage, the Times also cited liberal experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who predicted growing poverty among especially Hispanics:
And with continuing immigration and the loss of benefits to legal immigrants who are not yet citizens, some economists expect the Hispanic poverty rate to worsen.
”We just enacted a welfare bill that has very deep cuts in all basic forms of assistance to legal immigrants, not an insignificant number of whom are Hispanics,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group. ”I would think that in the years ahead we will reach all-time highs in Hispanic poverty.”
Fortunately, none of it happened.
Instead of “throw(ing) millions of children and adults into poverty,” between 1995 and 2000 the number of US residents in poverty declined by almost five million, as measured by the OPM (which counted both rising earnings and falling income from welfare checks). Today there remain nearly two million fewer poor people than in 1995, despite US population growth of over 74 million. That’s the result of a 26 percent decline in the official poverty rate across three decades.
The story among Hispanics is even more impressive. Instead of reaching predicted “all-time highs in Hispanic poverty,” between 1995 and 2000 the number of Hispanics in poverty fell by nearly one million as their poverty rate plummeted from 30.3 to 21.5 percent. The Hispanic poverty rate never returned to pre-reform levels, falling in 2025 to a record low of 13.9 percent—less than half the 1995 rate.
In April 2002, when those impressive poverty declines through 2000 were known, the New York Times editorial board admitted that “welfare reform has been an obvious success.” But since then, the arrival of the SPM has offered twin advantages for liberals: more problems for government to solve by counting millions more in poverty, and new rhetorical cover for benefit expansions and barbs against the few instances when in-kind benefits are reduced. It’s no accident that, since 2021, every Times headline about the annual Census Bureau poverty report referenced data from the SPM, not the OPM.
Taxpayers should get credit for benefits they provide to assist the poor, but the excessively complicated, poverty-increasing SPM is not the way to do it. In the meantime, we’ll have to wait until next year’s Census Bureau report to find out whether poverty rose or fell in 2026. But history shows that just because “experts” project doom and gloom this year won’t make it so.
Or as Ira Stoll of the Washington Free Beacon recently put it, “the numbers are the numbers. And if you don’t like the numbers, there’s always, ‘Experts fear worse ahead.’ As James Taranto used to say, what would we do without experts?”
