Each print issue, I write a feature called “The Stat,” a short description of an interesting statistic, as part of The Week. From here on out, I’ll start posting them on the Corner as well.

Here’s the Stat from the January 2025 issue:

$29,402 — the amount that the federal government spent on anti-poverty programs per person in poverty in 2023.

And that’s a conservative estimate. For the purposes of this calculation, I’m defining anti-poverty programs to include Medicaid, CHIP, and all nonveteran income-security programs (SNAP, the earned-income tax credit, the child tax credit, Supplemental Security Income, unemployment compensation, child-nutrition programs, and family-support programs). According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal outlays for those programs in 2023 totaled $1.082 trillion. Now, some of that spending went to people who are not in poverty, as eligibility for these programs has been expanded; but because these programs are supposed to protect against poverty, we’d expect some of the money to go to people who are living just above the poverty line. The total does not include outlays for Medicare or Social Security old-age or disability benefits. (Some of those benefits go to people living below the poverty line, but the programs are designed differently and aren’t intended to protect against poverty, so I have excluded them.) It’s a conservative estimate for another reason: I am using the Census Bureau’s official poverty definition, which, because it does not include most government benefits in the calculation, substantially overstates the number of people actually in poverty. According to that definition, there were 36.8 million people below the poverty line in 2023. So, with a numerator that is too small and a denominator that is too large, that works out to government anti-poverty spending of $29,402 per person whose income falls below the official poverty line. As Milton Friedman once said after doing a similar calculation, if that money actually went to the poor, they’d be rich.