There are some Republicans, however, who aren’t subscribing to this agenda. According to a new poll, a majority of low-income Republicans believe that the America’s economic system unfairly favors the wealthy and that the government does not do enough to help the poor:

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early October, 57% of lower-income Republican and Republican-leaning voters said the government does too little for poor people. Just 18% said it does too much.

By contrast, higher-income Republicans took the opposite view; by roughly two-to-one (44% to 21%) Republicans with incomes of $75,000 or more said the government does too much, not too little, for poor people.

Indeed, while sharing the public’s general distrust of the government, 70 percent of low-income Republicans agree with the 99 percent movement that “a few rich people and corporations have too much power in the U.S.” And given that nearly half of all Americans are one financial shock away from falling into poverty, it is no wonder that even Republicans are questioning their party’s priorities.

ROMNEY: It was a mistake. I misspoke. I’ve said something that is similar to that, but quite acceptable, for a long time. And you know, when you do I don’t know how many thousands of interviews, now and then you may get it wrong. And I misspoke. Plain and simple.

RALSTON: What did you mean to say?

ROMNEY: Well, what I said was that my focus, my primary focus, is on helping people get in the middle class and grow the middle class. That we have a safety net that cares for the poor, I want to keep that safety net strong and able. The wealthy are doing just fine. But we really need to focus on the middle income people in this country. And you know what, if people are going to go after me when I make a mistake — when I slip up on a word I say, even when I say I got it wrong, sorry, that’s not what I meant — you know that’s part of the political process and I understand that.

Watch it:

However, Romney’s claim that he misspoke flies in the face of the fact that he’s used similar language before to explain his lack of concern for the poor. “The people who need the help the most are not the poor, who have a safety net,” Romney explained during an Oct. 20 town hall at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. “The very poor have a safety net, they’re taken care of,” he said in an October debate.

According to the latest data, the percentage of Americans qualifying as “very poor” — meaning that they live in a household with an income of less than half the federal poverty rate — has hit a 35 year high, so they are decidedly not taken care of. And Romney’s economic plan wouldn’t make them any better off. In fact, Romney would raise taxes on 20 percent of households making between $10,000 and $20,000, because of his less generous tax credits.

Not only that, but his plan would cut critical safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid, and limit the ability “to leverage federal resources to provide necessary social services to assist people in need.” As the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Desmond Brown wrote, Romney’s plan “would provide $2.24 trillion in tax breaks to the superrich while cutting $2.17 trillion from critical health care services for poor and elderly Americans.”

The bill’s sponsor Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-LA) says he’s trying to close a “strip-club loophole” which allows beneficiaries of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program use state-issued debit cards at strip clubs, casinos, and liquor stores. “It’s pretty rampant around the country,” he insists.

Naturally, no one thinks adult entertainment is an appropriate use for TANF funds. But as Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Melissa Boteach notes, the use of funds at strip clubs, liquor stores, and casinos is hardly a “pressing national crisis,” but rather a politically valuable message for the GOP, regardless of its veracity, because it’s useful to the GOP to paint vulnerable Americans as “delinquent and criminally inclined“:

But putting politics above policy in this crass way is unfortunate and cynical. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program has experienced benefit cuts of more than 20 percent, after adjusting for inflation, even as the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery have caused elevated levels of unemployment and poverty. Many low-income workers on TANF are unable to access the child care they need to make work possible and ultimately end up paying nearly half their income towards care for their children. And low-wage workers are constantly facing the threat of a layoff because more than 80 percent lack access to a single paid sick day to take care of themselves, a sick kid, or an elderly relative.

And the big vote on TANF is about strip clubs?

This vote represents yet another instance in the creeping trend of conservatives to demonize the poor — and then threaten anyone who votes against the legislation with supporting “welfare spending” for strip club admissions. The tactic enables conservatives to imply that tough economic circumstances somehow make poor people delinquent and criminally inclined.

Boustany pushes the common refrain that such bills are an “obligation to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately.” But as Boteach points out, TANF and other social safety net programs are already subject to federal and state audits. And for measures like drug-testing welfare recipients, such proposals can cost thousands to catch one drug user because the positive test rate is so low.

At a time when nearly half of the U.S population is just one financial shock away from poverty, Republicans should focus on bolstering the very programs that ensure the economic security of families. Instead, Republicans seem committed to push a strip club stereotype for a political win while stripping vulnerable Americans of a safety net.

ROMNEY: I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America. [..]

HOST: You just said said, ‘I’m not concerned about the very poor because they have a safety net.’ But I think there are a lot of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, that sounds odd. [...]

ROMNEY: The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor. And there’s no question it’s not good being poor. And we have a safety net to help those that are very poor, but campaign is focused is on middle-income Americans. My campaign — you can choose where to focus. You can focus on the rich, that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus.

Watch it:

Later, Romney said, “we have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it. But we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.”

Romney’s claim that the safety net is “very ample” suggests a lack of understanding . While safety net programs kept seven million Americans out of poverty in 2010, according to a study from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, government assistance fell far short of insulating all, or even most, poor Americans.

But his comment is especially tone deaf considering that Romney has proposed weakening many of these safety net programs. Under Romney’s proposed reductions in federal spending, it’s likely that Medicaid would be cut by $153 billion by 2016, the food stamp program would have to throw 10 million low-income people off the rolls, and a key program supporting poor children’s health would face cumulative cuts of $946 billion through 2021. As ThinkProgress’ Igor Volsky has said that Romney is living in a “dream world” when he claims his Medicaid cuts won’t hurt the poor.

And Romney’s tax plan suggests his focus is really on the wealthy, as it includes massive giveaways to upper-income earners and investors, while doing almost nothing for middle- and low-income Americans.

DANIELS: Contrary to the president’s disparagement of people in buisness, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs, what a fitting name he had, created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew. [...] The extremism that stifles the development of home-grown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands…is a pro-poverty policy.

Watch it:

While Daniels claims Obama is “pro-poverty,” a closer look at his own state shows that it’s Daniels who is a pro at making people poor. Under Daniels’ leadership, Indiana’s poverty rate ballooned to 16.3 percent in 2010 — a three-decade high that is more than a full percentage point above the national average. In 2008, before Obama took office but a full three years into Daniels’ first term as governor, five Indiana cities had poverty rates of at least 20 percent.

Despite the rising poverty rate, Daniels has remained committed to making it harder for Hoosiers to get assistance. Enrollment in Indiana’s welfare program — which is among the stingiest in the nation — decreased during the recession because of stringent qualification requirements. The state cut food assistance programs, made it harder for kids to qualify for Medicaid, and cut funding for programs like Planned Parenthood that provide health care to low-income women. Daniels has also promised to sign right-to-work legislation, even though such laws reduce take-home pay by about $1,500 a year.

Meanwhile, Daniels’ criticism of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ignores the 64,000 Indiana jobs it had saved as of March 2010, and his “pro-poverty” quip fails to acknowledge that Obama’s defense of the social safety net from budget-cutting Republicans kept millions of Americans out of poverty.

In the middle of Indiana’s explosion of poverty and cuts to programs to help the disadvantaged, Change.org asked if Indiana was “the worst state for poor people.” While the answer to that isn’t clear, what is obvious is that when it comes to being “pro-poverty,” Mitch Daniels doesn’t have room to criticize anyone.

The letter acknowledged that the global economic and political climate puts foreign aid expenditures under pressure, but warned that a cut in these funds could have severe implications for populations struggling to pull themselves out of poverty:

The world faces a clear choice. If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don’t, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation. My annual letter this year is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.

Gates argues that investment in poor farmers can “increase their productivity so they can feed themselves and their families,” and “contribute to global food security.” The past fifty years has marked dramatic improvements in poverty reduction — global poverty levels have dropped from 40 percent to 15 percent — but Gates is concerned that the historic improvements could slow if funding for irrigation and agricultural research dry up:

We can be more innovative about delivering solutions that already exist to the farmers who need them. Knowledge about managing soil and tools like drip irrigation can help poor farmers grow more food today. We can also discover new approaches and create new tools to fundamentally transform farmers’ lives. But we won’t advance if we don’t continue to fund agricultural innovation, and I am very worried about where those funds will come from in the current economic and political climate.

The Gates Foundation — which has committed more than $25 billion [PDF] in grants since its inception in 1994 — has been an outspoken supporter of government funding of global public health and poverty reduction programs. Gates’s letter emphasized that development assistance programs “has a significant impact on people’s lives” and “modest investments in the poorest make a huge difference.”

The U.S. Census Bureau today released new data that provided a more detailed picture of poverty and hardship in the United States. For the first time, the Bureau released 2010 poverty statistics under a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

The SPM includes a more comprehensive list of items in determining the number of Americans who are poor. It reflects items such as work related expenses, out of pocket medical costs, and child care expenses. At the same time, the SPM factors in tax and transfer programs such as SNAP/food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and housing subsidizes in determining those who are poor.

As a result of this more detailed analysis, the SPM offers a slightly different picture of poverty than the official poverty measure, which was released earlier this year for 2010. Overall, the SPM presented a higher rate of poverty than the official measure, showing 16 percent of Americans living in poverty, as opposed to 15.2 percent.

One of the major improvements of this new analysis is that it provides a better picture of the impact of government programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and school lunch. These safety net programs were tremendously effective in 2010 in keeping vulnerable Americans out of poverty. Below is an illustration if their impact:

In an interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, Bachmann said she would “do away with the EITC,” and force someone who made only $3 to pay taxes on it:

This would be through the income tax system because the problem is, and this is where I deviate from Reagan, he instituted the Earned Income Tax Credit, it’s known as the EITC, and that effectively took many many Americans out of even having to pay any tax liability at all. I would do away with the EITC and if a person has $3 in income they would be subject to something. Obviously, no one has $3 in income. But they would have to pay something through that system.

Watch it:

The EITC is a tax credit for those at the lowest end of the income scale, going to families with children that make less than $36,000 per year (though the income level can vary depending on year and number of dependents). Individuals making less than $18,000 annually can also qualify for a small credit.

President Reagan called the EITC “the best antipoverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.” According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “research indicates that families mostly use the EITC to pay for necessities, repair homes, maintain vehicles that are needed to commute to work, and in some cases, obtain additional education or training to boost their employability and earning power.” And in recent years, the EITC has been essential in lifting families out of poverty:

The EITC reduces poverty by supplementing the earnings of workers with low wages and low earnings. There has been broad bipartisan agreement that a two-parent family with two children with a full-time, minimum-wage worker should not have to raise its children in poverty. At the federal minimum wage’s current level, such a family can move above the poverty line for an average family of four only if it receives the EITC as well as SNAP (food stamp) benefits.

In each of the last two years, the EITC kept 3 million children out of poverty. But Bachmann would eliminate it in order to tax those who make the least amount of money. At the same time, she has said that she is “open to” eliminating the corporate income tax.

Sometime this week, the 7 billionth child will be born. And there’s a good chance that child will be living in energy poverty.

Even today, there are roughly 1.5 billion people living without access to modern electricity services, limiting education opportunities, health services and quality of life. And there are 2.5 billion people who only have access to biomass for indoor cooking — resulting in more deaths per year than Malaria, according to the World Heath Organization.

Expanding access to these billions of people in energy poverty is one of the most important global challenges of our time, says Kandeh Yumkella, director general of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. And not doing it in a way that also addresses climate change will be “the biggest threat multiplier of all,” he says.

“The poor will play the biggest price if we continue business as usual. If countries impacted by climate change don’t have resilience capabilities, they become failed states,” says Yumkella. “We see this as the issue of the century.”

That’s why Yumkella, together with dozens of world leaders and global investors, are working on raising $45 billion per year by 2030 to finance clean projects that expand access to the energy poor — all while doubling the penetration of renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency. In this week’s podcast, we speak with Yumkella about his vision for enabling sustainable, universal energy access with private-sector capital.

“So you look at the whole issue of lack of energy, it means lack of prosperity, it ties down women, it causes high mortality rates. So access and the centrality of energy now to climate security, to food security, water security, and of course, prosperity, is undeniable.”

“We want to make sure that we don’t only rely on top-down, grid-based solutions. Because we do know that in other parts of the world now there are great opportunities for decentralized solutions…We think this is a model for the future.”

The Climate Progress Podcast is a weekly audio program focused on the science and politics of climate change and clean energy. You can find our podcast RSS Feed here.

Related Post:

• Introducing the Climate Progress Podcast: Jigar Shah on Why Renewables Will Win This Decade, Even Beating Natural Gas

In Time follows Will (Timberlake) a factory worker literally working for the time he needs to survive the day, after he obtains a large and unexpected amount of time and uses it first to gain access to upper-crust society, then to return to his own world with an heiress, Sylvia (Seyfriend) in tow. At first, she’s a hostage, but as her experience living in poverty and in constant risk of running out of time changes her, she becomes Will’s partner in a revolutionary crime spree, stealing and redistributing time from her father’s own company. Too anxious, perhaps, about the risk of being mistaken for a talky movie of ideas, In Time relies heavily on action sequences that work best when they comment on themselves and stall when played straight. “It went off! I was trying to help!” yelps Sylvia after she shoots a cop, in a nice little parody of mysteriously competent female action heroines. “Unfuckingbelievable,” Will mutters crankily after a ridiculous number of rounds have failed to dislodge that same cop from an interminable rooftop chase. But when the movie wants us to accept various transparently ridiculous ploys Will and Sylvia pull off — and when it expects us to buy that after a series of highly successful heists, Sylvia hasn’t bothered to pick up a decent pair of running shoes — it becomes just as silly as the tropes it’s riffing off. In one sequence, where the camera lovingly follows Will and Sylvia wrecking a gorgeous car in slow-motion, my screening companion leaned over and whispered “movie over” in my ear. I was hard-pressed to disagree. There’s a lot of showing rather than telling and general movie silliness about Seyfried’s outfits, though the movie’s depiction of eternal youth raises queasy implications of sexual confusion.

But for all the sound and fury the movie subjects us to, In Time has a vastly better claim than any movie I’ve seen in ages to using loud, attractive nonsense to deliver a message that otherwise would be confined to art house theaters. Avatar may have given us heartwarming visions of environmental interconnectedness, and Wall-E offered a disconcerting commentary on a world where we’ve destroyed ourselves and our planet through consumerism. But both of those movies displace their messages to the distant future and offer salvation through empathy. In Time may be in the future, but it’s a close one, in a world that looks disconcertingly like our own. And brutal confrontations with reality and revolution are what writer and director Andrew Niccol has on offer as solutions.

In Time is a perfect example of how science fiction, by displacing us from our present circumstances, can create space for us to talk more directly about them. It’s striking to see what movie characters can say when the word “money” is replaced with “time” that they’d never say without the linguistic switch,. “For a few to be immortal, many must die,” warns the wealthy Henry Hamilton at the beginning of the movie. “Everyone can’t live forever…Where would we put them?…The cost of living keeps rising so people keep dying…But the truth is, there’s more than enough. No one has to die before their time.” In a world where coming out as one of the 99 percent is still a cathartic act, a clear statement that income inequality kills is stark but important. When Timekeeper Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) spits, “Around here, they’re killing for a week…You can’t hide a year in the ghetto. They can sense when a man has a month more than he should,” his contempt is withering, but it’s almost more refreshing than the supreme hypocrisy of hearing Paul Ryan talk about how much he cares about the preservation of the social safety net. “How does anyone live like this?” Sylvia asks Will, appalled by the sense of panic she’s feeling for the first time. “You don’t generally sleep in,” Will tells her. Disgust for the poor cuts especially deep when you’re asking someone to literally choose between bus fare and dying before they get home to someone they love.

The enemy is everywhere. “If it’s a matter of resources, I’m happy to make a contribution,” Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser) says to the Timekeepers chasing his daughter in a vicious parody of noblesse oblige, and the desire for reform only when the rich have need of social services. “It’s a scandal what we pay our Timekeepers.” It’s sickening to see Weis preach “Darwinian capitalism” when he’s benefiting from regulations that allow him to enrich himself on the backs of the desperately poor. When a woman goes in to a usurious moneylender who works for Weis’s vast company, she’s told that the interest on a month is 30 percent, and interest rates and prices in Will’s neighborhood rise as corporate interests try to undermine Will’s generosity by erasing the benefits the poor get from the time he’s giving away. And a sociopathic criminal (Alex Pettyfer) stalks the residents of the district, explaining to Will that “the reason the Timekeepers leave me alone is because I have boundaries. I steal from my own people.” There are all kinds of predators.

And the movie is uncompromising that the only solution is radical redistribution. “If you guys are looking for stolen time, you could arrest everyone here,” Will tells the Timekeepers when they first come to arrest him, then repeatedly asserts that he and Sylvia aren’t stealing if they’re liberating stolen wealth. “Don’t think of it as stealing,” he says at one point, inverting a term that’s come to mean taking things from people who can’t afford to keep up payments on them. “Think of it as repossession.” Redistribution is the sexual glue between Will and Sylvia.

But the subject of the movie’s most incisive movements may be the social signifiers that show who’s grown up with wealth and who hasn’t. Watching Will wolf a meal in a gorgeous restaurant, a waitress tells him, “You’re not from around here, are you? You do everything a little too fast.” And Sylvia, who’s grown up drowning in languorousness, is drawn to Will’s haste. “I saw you run,” she tells him. “It reminds me of people who come from the ghetto.” Even if there’s a revolution, people will still cling to distinctions of rank and privilege. And culture can be hard to kill than economics systems.

During last night’s GOP presidential primary debate, the candidates were asked by the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty for their thoughts on this troubling trend. Instead of pointing to the true culprits — growing financialization of the economy, excessive executive compensation, dropping rates of unionization, tax cuts for the wealthy, and stagnant wages — Gov. Rick Perry (TX) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (PA) blamed, respectively, President Obama and single mothers:

TUMULTY: Governor Perry, over the last 30 years, the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans has grown by more than 300 percent, and yet we have more people living in poverty in this country than at any time in the last 50 years. Is this acceptable? And what would you do to close that gap?

PERRY: The reason we have that many people living in poverty is because we have got a president of the United States who is a job- killer. That’s what’s wrong with this country today. You have a president who does not understand how to create wealth. He has over-taxed, over-regulated the small-business men and women to the point where they are laying off people. Two-and-half million Americans are out there who have lost their jobs. We have got 14 million without work. This president, I will suggest to you, is the biggest deterrent to getting this country back on track, and we have to do everything we can to replace Barack Obama in 2012.

ROSE: OK. But we are almost out of time. I want to give you a chance, and then we have to go the final questions.

SANTORUM: There is more to it than that. And I agree with Rick, what he said, but the biggest problem with poverty in America, and we don’t talk about here, because it’s an economic discussion — and that is the break down of the American family. You want to look at the poverty rate among families that have two — that have a husband and wife working in them? It’s 5 percent today. A family that’s headed by one person? It’s 30 percent today…We need to have a policy that supports families, that encourages marriage that has fathers take responsibility for their children. You can’t have limited government — you can’t have a wealthy society if the family breaks down, that basic unit of society.

Watch it:

Perry never did get around to explaining how a teenage Barack Obama was responsible for starting a growth in income inequality in the 1970s. A study released last week shows that severe income inequality actually hinders economic growth, while “making an economy’s income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent.”

Half of the poverty line is an income of $5,570 for an individual or $11,157 for a family of four.

CBPP’s Erica Williams noted that “In some states, the poverty rate rose at an especially rapid pace. In Indiana, poverty rose nearly 9 percentage points to reach 16.2 percent. The other three states with the biggest percentage-point increases in poverty — Arizona, Georgia, and Mississippi — ended the decade with poverty rates of 19.9 percent, 18.5 percent, and 22.9 percent, respectively.”

Yesterday, the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest data, which shows that 15.1 percent of Americans were living in poverty in 2010. (The government defined poverty as a family of four with annual earnings less than $22,314.) Last year, some 46 million Americans fell into poverty, an increase of 2.6 million people over 2009, and the largest number in 52 years.

The Census data also showed a decline in income and a rise in economic hardship in the United States, with real median income falling 2.3 percent to $49,445 and 50 million people going without health care coverage.

But the data did include a positive sign that shows the impact of government intervention in supporting low-income people. The earned income tax credit and unemployment insurance kept 8.6 million people out of poverty – showing the ongoing need for these critical safety net programs. The EITC kept 3 million children alone out of poverty:

The overall 2010 poverty data offer a bleak outlook for the fragile U.S. economy, but they also provide a clear sign to policymakers that government interventions work to keep families from falling deeper into poverty and facing further economic hardship. As policymakers on Capitol Hill continue to debate how to fix the nation’s deficit crisis, the 2010 data highlight the need for ongoing investments into programs that can get more Americans back to work.

Stating that “poor children today are healthier than middle-class adults a generation ago,” he even blamed the poor for their own health problems, suggesting “behavioral factors” like a higher incidence of smoking, obesity, or weak family support structures as the only correlation between poverty and health.

Citing the deficit as a primary priority, Paul questioned whether federal low-income programs are “creating unnecessary and unhealthy dependence on government.” He unequivocally declared that “poverty is not a state of permanence” and that “the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.”

PAUL: We also need to understand that poverty is not a state of permanence. When you look at people in the bottom 5th of the economic ladder — those at the bottom — only 5 percent are there after 16 years. People move up, the American dream does exist…The rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.

Watch it:

Summing up his thesis, Paul said, “Rather than bemoan or belabor something [poverty] that is really truly something that is overwhelmingly being treated in our country, we should maybe give more credit to the American system, the American dream, and give credit to what capitalism has done to eradicate poverty in this country.”

First of all, then notion that the poor are getting richer faster than the rich requires an impressive level of ignorance. Currently, income inequality in the United States is greater than that of Pakistan and Ethiopia and higher than at any other time since the Great Depression. Indeed, thanks to exceedingly low tax rates, the rich are getting richer, with the richest one percent earning nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country.

Meanwhile, nearly one in three middle-class Americans is slipping down the income ladder as an adult. And with stagnant wages and the purchasing power of the minimum wage at a 51-year low, it’s hard to see how suddenly “the poor are getting richer faster.”

What’s more, Paul’s overwhelming deluge of pseudo-evidence to downplay the connection between poverty and poor health cannot shake incontrovertible facts. As the American Journal of Public Health found, deaths resulting from poverty, income inequality, and low social support each totaled more than homicide deaths in 2000.

Paul’s claim that Americans now have a greater life expectancy still doesn’t change the fact that low-income individuals can expect to live a shorter life due to poverty. Indeed, a report released at the hearing noted that “this is the first time in our history that children born in certain parts of the United States can expect to live shorter lives than their parents’ generation.”

But the idea that we have not had the courage to stand up and look Americans in the face, young mid-career professionals or kids that are my children’s age and look them in the eye and said, listen, this is a broken system. It has been called a ponzi scheme by many people long before me. But no one’s had the courage to stand up and say, here is how we’re going to reform it. [...]

If what you’re trying to say is that back in the ’30s and the ’40s that the federal government made all the right decision, I disagree with you. And it’s time for us to get back to the constitution and a program that’s been there 70 or 80 years, obviously we’re not going to take that program away. But for people to stand up and support what they did in the ’30s or what they’re doing in the 2010s is not appropriate for America.

That program that Perry deems inappropriate for the federal government, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, kept nearly 14 million seniors out of poverty last year, as well as 1.1 million children:

The poverty data released today presented a sobering picture of the economic struggles Americans face. A record 46.2 million people were in poverty last year and median incomes are lower today than they were in 1997. But Perry, and many other Republicans who want to do everything from raise the retirement age to privatize Social Security, would take away yet one more piece of the social safety net that has helped millions of Americans stay economically afloat.