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United States Census bureau has produced what may become another landmark reference. Based on an updated method for assessing poverty, the bureau has found that far more Americans are scraping by than was previously known: 100 million Americans — one in three — are “deep poor,” “poor,” or “near poor.”

As Harrington observed, poverty is more than lacking minimum standards of health care, housing, food and education. “Poverty,” he wrote, “should be defined psychologically in terms of those whose place in the society is such that they are internal exiles who, almost inevitably, develop attitudes of defeat and pessimism and who are therefore excluded from taking advantage of new opportunities.”

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed tools to measure “well-being,” looking at such things as material goods, relationships and self-beliefs.

the effects of the government programs are still large. The programs reduced poverty for children under 18 by 8.8 percent (or 6.5 million children) and for people 18-64 by 6.1 percent (or 11.8 million people).

Government programs reduce poverty among seniors by 36 percent, and 34.9 percent of that decrease is due to Social Security.

Were it not for Social Security, 43.6 percent of seniors would be poor. That’s 14.5 million seniors that one program is keeping afloat.

When measured to include taxes and government benefits, poverty did not rise between 2007 and 2011, and that shows why government policy is seriously off track.

rnment help, that amounts to 100 percent taxation (providing more benefits as income falls is sometimes called “implicit taxation”).

It is almost as if our present programs of public assistance had been consciously contrived to perpetuate the conditions they are supposed to alleviate.

Beginning next month, Britain will strive to put its welfare system on a different path by unifying many programs under a single “universal credit” system, what the department describes as an “integrated working-age credit that will provide a basic allowance with additional elements for children, disability, housing and caring.” The department forecasts that its “universal credit will improve financial work incentives by ensuring that support is reduced at a consistent and managed rate as people return to work and increase their working hours and earnings.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Affordable Care Act’s means-tested subsidies and cost-sharing will implicitly add more than 20 percentage points to marginal tax rates on incomes below 400 percent (see Page 27 of the C.B.O. report) of the poverty line (a majority of families fit in this category) by phasing out the assistance as family incomes increase, although a number of families will not receive the subsidies because they already get health insurance from their employer.

In summary, the United States intends to move in the direction of more assistance programs and higher marginal tax rates, while Britain intends to move in the direction of fewer programs and lower marginal tax rates.