More than 1.4 million U.S. families live on $2 a day per person

The number of fam­i­lies living on $2 or less per per­son per day for at least a month in the USA has more than dou­bled in 15 years to 1.46 million.

That's up from 636,000 house­holds in 1996, says a new study re­leased by research­ers at the Uni­versity of Michigan and Harvard Uni­versity.


Govern­ment ben­efits blunt the impact of such extreme poverty, but not completely, says one of the research­ers, Luke Shaefer, a pro­fessor of social work at Michigan.

When food stamps are included as income, the number of house­holds in extreme poverty, de­fined as living on $2 a day, drops to 800,000, Shaefer says. That's up from 475,000 in 1996.

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