Welcome to Laboratories of Democracy, a series for Vox’s The Highlight, where we examine local policies and their impacts.

The policy: Alcohol sale restrictions

Where: Almost 2,000 jurisdictions across the nation

Since: 1933

The problem: In New Hampshire, liquor stores are run by the state. In Utah, you can’t buy beer with more than 4 percent alcohol at normal retailers. In Texas, you can’t buy liquor on Christmas Day or on New Year’s. 

Almost 90 years after the end of Prohibition, almost 2,000 jurisdictions — towns, counties, and more — are dry, typically meaning you can’t legally buy alcohol.

Besides this obvious form of alcohol control, there are still often byzantine laws that govern how and when alcohol can be bought and sold that vary widely state to state and have unclear, if any, empirical connection with public health.

Among the most popular are “blue laws,” which are rooted in the Christian tradition of Sunday worship. Blue laws prohibit alcohol sales on Sundays and not only restrict alcohol sales but are responsible for the closing of businesses entirely. These laws have largely faded away, though some more recently than others: In Arkansas, blue laws banning the sale of liquor were only overturned in 2009, while Minnesota’s 159-year-old Sunday ban was scrapped in 2017. Meanwhile, Texas still won’t sell on Sundays.

Alcohol policy after the 21st Amendment, which overturned Prohibition in 1933, was not only delegated to the states but was also frequently pushed down even further to the town, city, and county level. Legalizing alcohol was popular — 74 percent of the nation voted to repeal Prohibition — yet some Americans held onto the dream of a totally dry country.

Some 18 states officially continued Prohibition, though most allowed some sort of opt-out. According to David Hanson, an emeritus professor at State University of New York at Potsdam, 38 percent of the US population lived in dry areas after Prohibition ended. Kansas only lifted statewide Prohibition in 1948, while it took Mississippi until 1966 to become fully wet.  

The entire regulatory architecture for alcohol at the federal level encourages the business to be dispersed. Thanks to the “three-tier” system, which dates back to the end of Prohibition, companies are typically not allowed to combine the production of alcoholic beverages with wholesaling and retailing. (So Budweiser can’t brew beer, distribute beer to stores and bars, and also sell beer on its own.) That’s to prevent any one company from gaining too much market power as well as to make new entry more difficult, according to Hanson. 

This system also gives leeway to states and localities to step in at any point in the chain of companies from brewers to retailers, whether by restricting where and when retail or wholesale sales can happen or by limiting it to a small number or even one state-licensed or state-run company.

“When the 21st Amendment was passed, it gave states the right to regulate commerce in alcohol if regulation met any of the three litmus tests — one, to raise revenue; two, to promote orderly distribution; and three, to promote the public health,” Michael Moore, an economist and longtime alcohol researcher, told Vox. While taxes on alcohol can discourage heavy drinking (and, of course, raise revenue), state control over distribution serves more nebulous ends. The question at the heart of Prohibition — of whether regulation can limit drinking behavior and subsequent criminal behavior — lives on in today’s patchwork of local alcohol laws.

How it worked: Prohibition’s repeal, combined with a certain amount of political lethargy, has led to a number of idiosyncratic alcohol laws and regulations, along with shifts in public opinion and attitudes toward alcohol. States have a mix of restrictions, like Mississippi, which has several dry counties but no law against having “open containers” of alcohol while driving.

But the laws have given researchers the opportunity to study their effects. When the Community Preventive Services Task Force, a federal government panel connected to the US Department of Health and Human Services, looked at alcohol sale restriction rules in 2010, it argued that “increasing days of sale by allowing previously banned alcohol sales on either Saturdays or Sundays increased excessive alcohol consumption and related harms, including motor vehicle crashes, incidents of DUI, police interventions against intoxicated people, and, in some cases, assaults and domestic disturbances.” 

But even their evidence was mixed. The researchers looked at an experiment in 1984 when Norway banned liquor and wine sales on Saturdays in some communities for a year. In communities with Saturday sales, liquor and wine consumption fell by just over 3 percent while beer consumption went up over 6 percent. There was a similar mix with domestic disturbances and public drunkenness, which went down, while overall violence reports went up. “In sum, there was little net change in alcohol consumption” and mixed results on other effects, the task force concluded. Norway scrapped its experimental ban.

The Canadian province of Ontario did it in reverse, scrapping its Sunday sale restrictions with a 1997 law, allowing residents to buy from government-run liquor stores on Sundays. Economists Christopher Carpenter and Daniel Eisenberg found “little support for the idea that Sunday sales policies affect aggregate drinking outcomes.” Instead, what they found is that the change made it more likely people drank on Sundays. 

Looking at blue law changes in the United States and the impact on the secondary effects of alcohol consumption — namely violent and property crime — the economists Baris Yörük and Jungtaek Lee found something similar to the effects on drinking in Ontario: “States that legalized Sunday sales of alcohol experienced up to a 16 percent to 23 percent increase in the total number of violent and property crimes committed on Sundays.” But repeal of the Sunday alcohol laws led to significant decreases in total violent crimes and assaults committed on Mondays and Saturdays. It seems that removing single-day bans on alcohol purchasing merely shifts alcohol drinking (and subsequent criminal behaviors) around the days of the week instead of touching off a large overall bump.

Typically, lifting these bans has come in a wave of voter enthusiasm, with only some special interests, like smaller liquor stores, opposing and large businesses and chains in favor of getting rid of the old rules. 

While nationally, the trend has been to liberalize rules around alcohol and lift what strict restrictions still exist, there is at least one noteworthy exception: Whiteclay, Nebraska.

The town sits at the border of Nebraska and South Dakota, but more importantly, it’s just outside the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation, which has long banned alcohol due to high rates of alcoholism and alcohol-related diseases, including fetal alcohol syndrome rates as high as 25 percent for newborns. The then nine-person settlement of Whiteclay, according to the Associated Press, “sold the equivalent of about 3.5 million cans of beer annually,” largely to the 20,000 residents of the reservation. Nebraska’s alcohol regulator didn’t renew the stores’ licenses in 2017, citing the town’s lack of adequate — or any — local law enforcement, along with dozens of people living in the streets and reports of sexual assault.

The effective ban predictably led to some bootlegging on or near the reservation, according to the Omaha World-Herald, and panhandlers looking for money to buy alcohol moved on to other towns, while the town of Whiteclay itself no longer stinks of urine. A neighboring mayor told the paper last year, however, that his town of Rushville was getting more cars on the road, more sales taxes — and more vodka sold. 

While Whiteclay, Nebraska, sits on the border of not just two states within the United States but on a sovereign nation as well, most wet and dry jurisdictions — even with and without state monopolies on liquor distribution — are at best hardly distinguishable or at worst a short drive away. The temperance movement’s vision of a dry nation continues to steadily erode, and the alcohol controls that do exist, like the 21 year drinking age, are most effective because they’re universal.

“Both sides are pretty much wrong,” Hanson says. “Becoming wet doesn’t typically bring great economic progress and it doesn’t lead to these horrors that the opponents say.”

Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York.

Welcome to Laboratories of Democracy, a series for Vox’s The Highlight, where we examine local policies and their impacts.

The policy: Parking lots for people who live in their cars

Where: Up and down the West Coast

Since: 2004

The problem: 

The housing affordability crisis — most acute in the Bay Area, but stretching up and down the West Coast — has helped exacerbate a homelessness crisis in states like California, Oregon, and Washington. Many people who are no longer able to afford or find stable housing are now forced to spend their nights sleeping in the one major asset they have left: their cars.

California has about a quarter of the country’s homeless population, with almost 130,000 people experiencing homelessness, according to estimates from one night in January (known as a “point in time” count) from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The state’s neighbor Washington has just over 22,000 people experiencing homelessness, and Oregon has almost 14,500. Nearly half of all unsheltered people are in California, according to HUD statistics from 2018. In Los Angeles County alone, there are some 16,500 people living in vehicles. (Note that New York State has about 92,000 people experiencing homelessness, which is 17 percent of the national total). 

“These folks by and large have not made any choice to experience homelessness,” said Cassie Roach, the program coordinator and senior case manager at New Beginnings Counseling Center in Santa Barbara. “They haven’t chosen to do drugs or make poor financial choices, and they’re not all alcoholics or any of those biased and ignorant assumptions people make. It tends to be folks that are dealt a really difficult hand; they’re making the best of a bad situation.”

In Los Angeles County, for example, 71 percent of people who are first experiencing homelessness cite economic reasons, according to Gary Dean Painter, the director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute and a professor at the University of Southern California. About a third of people in the county pay half their income in rent, making them vulnerable to losing their homes when they have a negative shock to their finances. “I point a finger at the economy and housing market,” Painter said.

People who live in their cars are more likely to have been recently living in permanent housing and have some kind of income, making them a unique population that may not require or be able to use the same types of services other people experiencing homelessness do.

“This is a population we should think strategically about,” Painter said. “They’re not a high cost population to serve, they don’t have an accumulation of challenges, [but] they’re experiencing something they’ve never experienced before in their lives, they likely don’t know any of the services available to them.”

How it works:

On any given night in Santa Barbara or its neighboring city of Goleta, around 150 people who are living in their cars post up in otherwise undistinguished parking lots for the night. The biggest of the 24 lots has 15 spots for people, while most have only around six. They aren’t allowed to place any belongings or tents outside their cars. “It’s a safe place to be at night,” said Roach, whose homelessness organization has a contract from the city of Santa Barbara to run the Safe Parking program. The lots’ locations are not publicized, Roach said, so “we don’t invite neighbor scrutiny or NIMBYism; we don’t want to attract people who have ill will towards people with homelessness.”

While it’s not a stable home, designated safe parking lots are spaces for people who live in their cars that don’t draw the ire of residents or the prying eyes of police officers handing out tickets. But they do require about an hour of intake “to really drill down on what their current situation is and how they got to this situation and where they want to go in the future,” Roach explained, adding that this allows them to determine what benefits parkers might be eligible for and to connect them to other resources in the area.

Programs exist currently in several West Coast communities, including East Palo Alto, Eugene, and Los Angeles. The Santa Barbara safe parking program has been around since 2004 and has fast become a model for cities that have seen larger populations of people living in their cars. They even have a manual for other cities that want to start their own programs. “We get calls all the time from other communities that want to start the program,” Roach said.

“I think of it as a new shelter model, they have an asset — their vehicle — and it makes sense to provide a shelter model that accommodates those kinds of individuals,” Rashi Kesarwani, a Berkeley City Council member, said. 

Kesarwani’s district has a “particularly high concentration” of people living in RVs and a large overall homeless population. He has had to deal with the competing interests of residents who don’t want to see public streets turn into permanent encampments while still being compassionate with those people living out of vehicles, many of whom have connections to the region and some of whom have children in Berkeley schools.

“We have found that having no limits on … public streets is not healthy or safe for anyone,” Kesarwani said, noting that people are living without access to sewage or electricity. 

“They’re not all dumping sewage into a storm drain. … We’ll hear complaints about trespassing into private property to use someone’s hose or electrical outlet, that creates a situation that’s unmanaged, we need to give people a place to be, for people who can move on or a place to live in their RV safely.”

But just as it’s not easy to find housing in the Bay Area, it can be hard to find parking, especially for those who aren’t going to pay. “Berkeley is challenged because we don’t have a lot of really large city-owned parking lots,” Kesarwani said. He added that while they were working with the city manager to find sites for up to 20 RVs, Kesarwani said that priority would be given to people who had previous permanent housing in Berkeley, had children in Berkeley schools, or worked in the city. 

The safe parking plans are combined with a new ban on street RV parking between 2 am and 5 am. The combination of new enforcement with new resources, Kesarwani said, was an effort to “reconcile with Berkeley values.” 

Safe parking programs, Painter said, are often a natural response to high rates of people living in their vehicles. “You can easily imagine that in a city you don’t want your streets ‘taken over’ by RVs, so why not provide space that isn’t utilized to be safely parked and potentially connected to appropriate services that these families might need?”

Beaverton, a Portland-area city with around 100,000 people, launched its own safe parking in April for six vehicles over two sites, said Megan Cohen, Beaverton’s community services coordinator. The city is looking to expand to five sites with a total capacity for 15 cars. “We see a lot of older men who maybe are on Social Security or have a fixed income that no longer are able to meet their rent,” she said. “We’re also seeing families that aren’t able to afford rent anymore, and we’re able to wrap several services around them to get back into housing.”

According to the University of Southern California Homelessness Policy Research Institute, safe parking programs can lead from anywhere to 5 percent to 70 percent of their clients obtaining housing after using them.

This is the key potential these programs have, Painter explained. “It’s really an opportunity to have that first intervention for a large set of folks that likely won’t need a lot of services, but just a reconnection to job placement or something else that might be able to resolve [their lack of income] and move them back into permanent housing.”

But the scope of homelessness in California and the West Coast as a whole requires large-scale government intervention. “I understand why [the homelessness crisis] is happening,” Kersawani said. “I have full compassion and concern for how serious the shortage of affordable housing is,” she said.

“This is a massive problem that needs massive intervention,” Painter argued. “What hasn’t been talked about nearly as much is what to systematically do with populations living in their cars.”

Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York.

Looking at the nation’s most intriguing experiments in local policy.

The policy: $15 minimum wage

Where: Seattle, Washington

In place since: 2015

The problem:

A Taco Bell in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle shut down a couple hours early in the spring of 2013. All three employees and one off-shift worker walked off the job to protest low wages and work conditions. One of them was Caroline Durocher, a 21-year-old Taco Bell employee, who said the decision was “easy.”

“What we’re getting right now isn’t fair and not right,” she told the Stranger, in reference to her wage of $9.19 an hour, then the city-wide minimum wage. “It’s easy to not think about the person serving you your food.” The very next day, a Burger King, two Subways, and a Chipotle all shut down after employees continued to walk out. 

Durocher was part of a nationwide wave of labor activism among the traditionally scattered and disorganized fast-food workforce, made up of largely low-wage workers at the mercy of fast-food franchise owners who set their schedules and pay. The walkouts would eventually help lead to Seattle passing a historic policy that continues to serve as an example to politicians and researchers to this day.

Seattle’s minimum wage hike, which would jack up wages to $15 an hour by 2017 for companies with more than 500 employees, was passed five years ago by the City Council. By 2021, at which time the $15 wage would be phased in for all employers, it would be the highest minimum wage in the country, well north of Washington’s already relatively high wage of just over $9. “Worker voices and folks taking to the street shifted the conversation about it and made the policy feasible,” Rachel Lauter, the executive director of Working Washington, an activist group that helped organize the protests, said.  

Today, Seattle’s wage is at $16 for large employers, and $15 for all other employers (unless they provide a certain level of medical benefits or employee tips, which allows them to knock it down to $12 an hour). It remains one of the highest in the country, and a useful case study as we head into a presidential election where a higher minimum wage has become the standard policy position for Democratic candidates.

At the time the Seattle bill was passed, the federal minimum wage had stagnated at $7.25 since 2009, where it still is today. While minimum wage increases are generally popular with voters, they also tend to kick up extreme opposition from business owners, who warn of massive job losses and killing off new businesses. It’s one reason why the minimum wage has stayed so low nationally.

Seattle was a natural place for this progressive policy to pass. It is both a very wealthy city with fairly liberal politics — ranging from socially liberal businesspeople to a democratic socialist on the city council — and a high level of union penetration and a history of disruptive labor activism that goes back to its 1919 general strike. But the bill faced a fair share of opposition. Employers, like restaurant owners, raised the alarm that the new wage would force them to close businesses, raise prices, fire workers, or move their businesses outside of the city limits. 

When the policy went into effect in 2015, Seattle’s minimum wage became not only the highest in the nation, but likely the most studied. A group of researchers at the University of Washington, with support from philanthropic groups, have been examining the effects of the wage increase on workers’ hours and take-home pay as well as business closures and the price of some goods like groceries.

What the researchers have found over the last few years is quite a mixed story.

How it worked:

Policymakers are still looking at Seattle as a case study in how a high minimum wage could actually work in practice. The results are complex. But here’s what happened.

Generally, those business owners who threatened to leave Seattle to evade the new wage haven’t been following through. “The restaurant industry moans and groans about minimum wage increase, but the Seattle newspaper every month has a story about 40 new restaurants opening,” said Jennifer Romich, a University of Washington social policy researcher. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs in restaurants and bars in the Seattle area has grown from 134,000 to 158,000 since 2015.) Surveying employers, Romich and other researchers found the most common response to the wage increase was to raise prices or fiddle with workers’ hours, and a “very small percentage were thinking about withdrawing or leaving the city.” 

The story for employees is much more varied. The minimum wage for some large employers jumped from $11 to $13 from 2015 to 2016. The economists observed the impact of the hike in 2017 and found it had dramatic effects on the low-wage workforce and employment.

Not all of them were good. They found that the policy “reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by 6-7 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by 3 percent … consequently, total payroll for such jobs decreased.” That means the total amount that employers paid to workers was less with the new minimum wage in place than projected payroll if the policy hadn’t gone into effect.

The data, researcher Mark C. Long explained, suggested a “tipping point” between $11 and $13 “when it becomes less tenable to keep work in the city.” (Critics were quick to point out that this likely wasn’t solely due to the minimum wage policy — Seattle’s labor market continued to heat up during that period, reducing the number of low-wage jobs compared to high-wage jobs overall.)

But a year later, the team published another paper that complicated their findings. They looked at the same time period and same wage increase, but this time broke down the actual take-home pay of workers. They found that workers who were already employed at the low end of the wage scale in Seattle “enjoyed significantly more rapid hourly wage growth,” following wage increases in 2015 and 2016.

Those who were already working more hours before the wage increase saw “essentially all of the earnings increases,” while the workers who had fewer hours saw their hours go down, but wages go up enough so that their overall earnings didn’t really change. They theorized that a slowdown in new hiring for low-wage jobs could explain their earlier findings that overall payroll had gone down.

Ultimately, workers already employed either saw their take-home pay go up or stay roughly the same while working fewer hours.

Critics of the UW researchers have seized on Seattle’s uniqueness to discount the UW findings. Ben Zipperer of the liberal Economic Policy Institute wrote that the UW research is based on a “flawed comparison” between Seattle and the rest of the state. He argued that the decline in low wage jobs was due to a hot economy boosting low-wage jobs into high-wage jobs, not the new minimum wage. The data did show, Zipperer argued, that all of the workers they studied were “better off after the minimum wage increase” — higher-hour workers earned more with a higher wage while the low-hour workers got the same pay for less work. 

There are still questions about the policy’s impact that are harder to observe, such as new employees who may or may not have been hired had the minimum wage been lower. And of course, the question of whether this would work in any other city remains. “I take this research as a cautionary tale for other cities like Seattle,” Long said, noting that Seattle’s booming labor market, especially at the high end and in technology, “is a very particular thing.”

What all sides would agree on is that the people advocating for a higher minimum wage — those among the already employed like Caroline Durocher who went on strike six years ago — were right to do so.

Matthew Zeitlin is a journalist in New York City.

Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, the president likes to say, had a lot to do with taking a stance on trade and economic policy well outside the Republican mainstream, arguing for using tariffs to keep foreign goods out of the US and build up industries at home. 

“We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” Trump declared in his inaugural address. 

But was his appeal to voters on trade, especially in the Upper Midwest, separate from his more baldly inflammatory arguments on immigration and refugees? Or was it all wrapped up into one overall message that appealed not so much to people’s economic circumstances but instead to their anxiety over their place in the American and global power structure?

This question is not just important for figuring out why Trump won in 2016 and if he’ll win again in 2020, but also for figuring out how people think about trade policy. This is of special concern to Marcus Noland, the director of studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of Washington’s most respected economic think tanks and a bastion of, as he puts it, the “pro-globalization liberal, rule-based order consensus” that Trump had so disrupted.

So after the election, Noland started doing work that looks less like trade policy and more like political science, looking at the factors that helped determine support for Trump on a local level. He found, he writes in a new paper, that the backlash to more free trade was not spread evenly around those affected by it or who were made worse off. Instead, the turn towards protectionism was associated with the views, largely held by white people, about America’s perceived decline in global position and the status of whites within America. 

The negative reaction to the rising tide of globalization “is particularly intense among some communities, low-education whites and older whites,” that “diversity in and of itself seems to be provoking and intensifying these reactions,” he told Vox.

This is not to say that Trump’s trade message didn’t matter or was inconsistent with his broader anti-immigration message that appealed to white voters anxious about rising levels of demographic change. 

Instead, Noland writes, “considerable evidence indicates that attitudes toward international trade and domestic minorities are not separable … the Trump campaign’s articulation of protectionist positions and the use of racially charged, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic political language amounted to a self-reinforcing package.”

His research suggests that the trade portion of the Trump message can’t be isolated and neutralized by his opponents. 

From the perspective of those who believe in this old trade consensus, it raises serious questions about the typical remedies for helping out the so-called “losers” from more trade: financial, educational, and workforce training assistance. While these programs could even out the fall in living standards that new trade arrangements can induce for some, it may do little to rebuild the political coalition around trade policy. 

It also comes at a time when mainstream economists have paid more attention to the domestic downside from increased trade integration. One of the most important pieces of research was the identification of the so-called “China shock.” Researchers identified a set of related social issues that followed China’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its increased manufacturing exports to the United States. These included everything from lower employment in manufacturing that competed with Chinese imports to an uptick in welfare programs, and even lower rates of household formation. 

The shifts weren’t just in the lives of those affected by China’s increased exporting prowess, but also in their politics — the areas affected by the China shock tended to end up with more extreme Republican politics that may have, per David Autor, the main author behind the research, been “enough to swing several swing states” in the 2016 election. 

Noland cites research showing that between 2000 and 2010, “productivity change accounted for 88 percent of the job losses,” while the shift toward protectionist views and the preference for Trump “was uncorrelated with household economic distress or perceptions about the impact of international trade on household economic well-being.” Protectionist ideas were, instead, “correlated with voter perceptions of American global dominance and the group position of whites domestically.” 

One way of separating out the effects of trade policy and overall cultural and demographic anxieties is to look at what happens over time, especially before and after the election of Barack Obama.

After all, the China shock did not start in 2008 or 2012; it started at the beginning of the 21st century, and lasted through the entire Bush administration. Norland finds that racial diversity of an area become more associated with “a shift toward the Republican candidate” between 2012 and 2016 as opposed to between 2000 and 2016. 

“Diversity in and of itself seems to be proving and intensifying these reactions, and that occurs for the post-Obama cycle but not the longer cycle,” Noland told Vox. Thus, you find something rare for a working paper from an economics think tank: a citation to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay describing Trump as the “first white president.”

While these results have an obvious attraction for the pro-trade, pro-globalization, pro-liberal, rules-based worldview articulated by institutions like Peterson, there’s a dark side to them as well, suggesting that the political backlash to open trade policies cannot be easily fixed with policy adjustments. 

“If it were just trade, then you would come up with technocratic worker adjustment solutions that would ameliorate these problems and reestablish some kind of consensus for open trade, which is a desirable thing overall, although some have been disadvantaged by developments,” Noland said. “This may not be the whole story. You can do all the trade adjustment assistance you want — it won’t address the underlying anxieties and concerns.”

There’s a huge debate among scholars who study the lives of the very poorest about just how many very poor people there are in America.

Some researchers, using survey data, estimate there is a large and growing portion of Americans living on less than $2 day — in other words, in truly extreme poverty. Other researchers have made a strong claim that this data is severely exaggerated, arguing that surveys either exclude or just don’t end up counting substantial sources of income and assistance that the poorest get: tax refunds, Social Security, housing benefits, and especially the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps.

But where these analyses agree is that SNAP has become a primary income support to poor individuals and especially families. And a new paper from a group of researchers — Dean Jolliffe, Juan Margitic, and Martin Ravallion — published last week as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research argues that the “floor” of US living standards, the very lowest amount that people in the US live on per day, has been falling, at least according to an analysis of survey data, and how SNAP is raising it higher. 

The three economists try to estimate a floor of income using survey responses from the poorest, weighted toward the most poor, and then seeing how that floor has moved over time. They put this figure at about $4.55. With SNAP, however, the floor goes up to $4.93, about a third of the official poverty line. 

But SNAP coverage in America is incomplete: Not everyone who’s eligible ends up receiving benefits. (They cite a range of estimates for how many people are left out, ranging from about a third, according to the Congressional Research Service, to 15 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.) But, the authors argue, if SNAP coverage were more complete — “if all the poorest received the mean SNAP spending per SNAP recipient” — the floor would rise to around $8 per day.

This type of data has been the subject of a massive debate recently, not just because of what it counts and what it doesn’t, but how accurately it reflects what those surveyed say it does.

Bruce Mayer and his fellow researchers have argued that the bottom of the surveys are “likely to yield a group filled with more gross errors than households that are truly impoverished,” pointing to factors like those receiving benefits that are greater than the lowest levels of poverty that show up on the survey. They have heavily criticized other estimates of extreme deprivation, arguing that very few Americans and vanishingly few families with children live at or below $2 or $4 a day. For the specific survey, the Current Population Survey, used in the Jolliffe paper, they argue that the rate of extreme poverty is much lower, thanks to misreported earnings and assets data, as well as including transfer programs like Social Security and tax credits. In Mayer’s work, some of the biggest adjustments to reported poverty come from transfers like SNAP, showing that even if there isn’t a consensus about how poor the poorest are or if that portion of the population is expanding, there is a consensus on the importance of food stamps. 

Joliffe and his collaborators have tried to address limitations in the data. They use survey data, and they do adjust it to throw out non-zero incomes, but they assume that the lowest reported positive income “has the highest probability of being the poorest.” They note that doing similar studies measuring what people buy, which some argue is a better way of measuring the living standards of the very poorest, in other countries has resulted in higher estimates of the “floor” but “a very similar evolution over time.” 

One of the more striking findings is that while poverty measures of all sorts jumped in response to the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn, the authors’ income “floor” stayed “relatively stable,” indicating that efforts to expand SNAP as a stimulus and income support measure were effective for the very poorest. But they also argue that the program could be better at reaching the very poor, pointing to how welfare reform in the mid ’90s limited the very poor’s access. 

“The program helped assure that the poorest could at least maintain their (low) living standards during a period of inequitable growth,” the authors write. “We find a marked longer-term decline in the extent to which SNAP has raised the floor, associated with declining efficacy of food stamps in reaching America’s poorest since the mid 1990s.”