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In 2011, the poverty rate not including unemployment insurance or Social Security would have been 7.8 percentage points higher, and it would have been 3.1 points lower if you take food stamps and EITC into account. So all told, these four government programs reduced poverty by 10.9 percent, or 33.6 million people.

Since the late 1960s, the poverty rate for people over 65 has fallen dramatically.

The poverty rate for people in households headed by single women is significantly higher than the overall poverty rate.

In 2010, 19.9 percent of foreign-born residents lived in poverty, compared to 14.4 percent of residents born in the United States. Foreign-born, non-citizens had an even higher incidence of poverty, at a rate of 26.7 percent.

Children represent a disproportionate share of the poor in the United States; they are 24 percent of the total population, but 36 percent of the poor population.

The official poverty measure has been criticized for not accounting for several factors that can affect a family's economic well-being and for not having been updated, except for inflation, for four decades. 

For example, while cash benefits from government assistance programs are included in a family's income when calculating the official poverty measure, benefits received in-kind such as food stamps, Medicare or Medicaid, employer provided health insurance, housing subsidies, and other social services are excluded.  Taxes that families pay and tax credits they receive such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) do not enter into the official poverty determination.

Additionally, the threshold value a family must earn to escape poverty was developed in the 1960s by combining emergency food budget data from the US Department of Agriculture with an estimate of what fraction of income families spend on food. Although the thresholds are adjusted each year for inflation, some analysts believe that these numbers no longer accurately reflect the minimal resources a family requires.

These alternative measures tend to show lower levels of poverty than the official measure in any year, but the timing of increases and decreases in the poverty rate is very similar across measures. This similarity suggests that, despite the criticism it receives, the official poverty measure provides a reliable indicator of changes in the poverty rate from year to year.

These alternative definitions tend to show higher levels of overall poverty than the official measures in any year, although the difference is usually less than one percentage point.