Last year, the Census Bureau began releasing the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) alongside the official measure its been using since the 1960s, in order to provide lawmakers with a more sophisticated picture of poverty in America. The Census Bureau today released its updated report on the SPM for 2012, which showed that about 16 percent of the country is living in poverty, roughly the same as last year.

Using that new data, the Center for American Progress determined that, all told, federal programs aimed at helping struggling Americans lifted more than 25 million people out of poverty in 2011:

Refundable tax credits for working families such as the earned income and child tax credits, for example, lifted 8.7 million people out of poverty in 2011, and the child poverty rate would have been 6.3 percentage points higher without them. Similarly, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program lifted 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2011. Without it, the child poverty rate would have been 2.9 percentage points higher.

The official poverty metric used in America since the 1960s takes the basic food diet for a household, accounts for various family compositions, multiplies that by three, and then looks at whether a family’s gross income before taxes and transfers meets that threshold. But that approach leaves out several important factors, including changes in family structures and circumstances since the 1960s, expenses such as clothing and medical costs, and geographic variation. And while it considers the effects of some government spending such as Social Security and welfare, it ignores others, as well as with the effects of many tax credits that help millions of American families.

America’s fledgling economic recovery is being threatened by “obsessive concern with cutting deficits that has infected both parties,” a group of 350 economists wrote in a letter to lawmakers this week. Instead of focusing on deficit-reducing austerity measures that will do nothing to fix the “mass unemployment, rising poverty, and declining wages” that are holding back the recovery, Congress should focus on public investments that will boost job and economic growth, the letter states:

Yet too many in Washington are fixated on cutting public spending to balance the budget, not on how to put people back to work and get our economy going. There is no theory of economics that explains how we can deflate our way to recovery. Businesses are not basing investment decisions on how much Congress cuts the debt in 2023. As Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Greece have shown, inflicting austerity on a weak economy leads to deeper recession, rising unemployment and increasing misery. [...]

The budget hawks have the sequence backwards. Public outlay for jobs and recovery come first, growth is restored, and revenues follow. Budget cuts in a deep slump lead only to a deeper slump.

Austerity measures have plagued Europe in recent years, and the so-called “fiscal cliff” — the spending cuts of tax increases that could take place at the end of the year — would implement an even larger austerity package than European countries have implemented. The economists called for a different approach, telling lawmakers to invest in the nation’s faltering infrastructure, to reverse the decline in public sector jobs, and to increase the affordability of higher education.

President Obama proposed a package that would have accomplished many of those goals in 2011. The American Jobs Act would have invested in infrastructure and provided aid to states to prevent layoffs of teachers, firefighters, and police officers, and it would have both boosted economic growth and created roughly one million jobs, according to economic estimates. Republicans blocked the bill from passage in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

To pay for such investments, the economists suggested a solution that has been anathema to Washington lawmakers: borrowing money at historically-low interest rates available to the government right now. Congress, the economists said, should also “stimulate recovery without increasing deficits by increasing taxes on the wealthy and pumping the proceeds directly into the economy.”

During his first press conference since he was re-elected, President Obama today criticized the tax approach that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) and many other Congressional Republicans have proposed. Boehner and the rest of the GOP have recently suggested cutting tax rates, but raising more federal revenue via a combination of closing loopholes and counting on the economic growth that tax cuts will supposedly cause.

Obama derided “dynamic scoring” — the revenue increases that conservatives claim will occur after tax cuts — saying he would oppose any efforts to only “sorta-kinda raise revenue”:

What I will not do is to have a process that is vague, that says we’re going to sorta-kinda raise revenue through dynamic scoring or closing loopholes that have not been identified. And the reason I won’t do that is I don’t want to find ourselves in a position six months from now or a year from now, where low-and-behold, the only way to close the deficit is to sock it to middle-class families.

Watch it:

Obama also rejected the notion that he would accept new revenue solely via closing deductions and eliminating loopholes for the wealthy, and not via raising marginal tax rates.

There is little evidence that tax reform that lowers rates and cuts loopholes will spark appreciable economic growth that will increase revenue. For instance, as conservative economist Bruce Bartlett shows, the tax reform package of 1986 did not increase growth. Several other studies show the same thing. As Citizens for Tax Justice added, “the highest priority of tax reform should be raising revenue — real revenue, not the voodoo-economics sort of revenue gains that Boehner mistakenly claims will come from tax-rate reductions.”

Failure to extend the federal emergency unemployment insurance program that will expire at the end of the year absent Congressional action would cost the United States economy roughly 400,000 jobs, an Economic Policy Institute study says.

The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, signed into law at the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, provides assistance to long-term unemployed workers who have exhausted their state-level unemployment assistance eligibility. The program’s expiration is part of the looming “fiscal cliff” that hits at the end of the year, and though the fiscal cliff discussions have thus far focused on the Bush tax cuts, EPI found that the unemployment extension would provide a bigger boost to economic growth and create more jobs than an extension of the high-income Bush tax rates:

Spending $30 billion on unemployment insurance extensions in 2013 would increase consumer spending and expand GDP by an estimated $48 billion, raising our $15.8 trillion GDP by roughly 0.3 percent. This increase in economic activity would translate into roughly 400,000 jobs. In comparison, continuing the upper-income Bush-era tax cuts in 2013 would cost $52 billion—nearly 75 percent more than continuing the UI extensions—and generate just 102,000 jobs, nearly 75 percent fewer jobs than the number created by continuing the UI extensions.

More than five million Americans have been unemployed for longer than six months, and more than two million will lose access to federal unemployment insurance if the program lapses in December. Another million would lose benefits in April if no extension is passed.

Congress last passed an extension early this year, though it cut the number of weeks of eligibility. As a result, 500,000 unemployed workers lost access to the program between the beginning of 2012 and July. Republicans have often opposed EUC’s extension, arguing that it fosters laziness and dependency and prevents the unemployed from searching for jobs, even though EUC requires recipients to conduct job searches and studies have shown that people who receive unemployment insurance work harder and faster to find employment than those who don’t.

According to a survey by the benefits consulting firm Towers Watson, workers would rather have retirement security than a vast array of other benefits, including larger salaries, more vacation time, and bigger bonuses:

In several head-to-head questions, researchers asked whether workers would prefer it if their employers offered them a guaranteed retirement benefit (essentially a pension) or other perks. A large plurality – 49% — chose the pension over the opportunity to earn a bigger bonus. (Just 26% picked the bonuses, while the rest didn’t express a preference.) The pension also beat out paid vacation and a better chance at a promotion by similar margins. Guaranteed retirement income was also more popular than bigger salary hikes, although there the outcome was a closer 38% to 33%.

Unfortunately for American workers, retirement benefits are vanishing at a dizzying pace. According to research by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Donald L. Barlett and James W. Steele, 84,350 pension retirement plans have been eliminated since 1985. In 1998, a majority of Americans over age 60 received pension payments. By 2010, just 43 percent did. In the private sector, 38 percent of workers received pensions in 1979, which fell to 15 percent in 2010.

As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron noted, “Estimates show that more than half of middle class workers are likely to outlive their retirement savings, and half of all American workers don’t even have a retirement plan at work.” Pensions are much more likely to keep retirees out of poverty than other retirement plans, including 401(k)s. In fact, the median value of 401(k)s in the U.S. in 2010 was less than $18,000, meaning that, “for most working people, the amount in their 401(k) account would pay them less than $80 a month for life.”