Put differently some four million Americans in the US of America are surviving on less than $60 a month, which, according to some experts, is no income, though in the third world countries like India, it still is counted as  big money.

The study used the World Bank’s bench mark for poverty: $2 a day or less as subsistence income.

H. Luke Shaefer (School of Social Work, University of Michigan), and Kathryn Edin, (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) came up with the study for the National Poverty Center, (NPC). Primarily, it is a critique of the welfare reform signed into law by President Bill Clinton fifteen years ago.

The authors hold the view that the Clinton reform has undermined the social safety net, and therefore resulted in a dramatic decline in cash assistance to the poor.

The number of monthly beneficiaries used to be 12.3 million when the ‘welfare’ reform was taken up. It dropped to 4.4 million by June 2011 and of them only 1.1 million are adults.

Both Republicans and Democrats championed the ‘reform’ as a measure that would put the poor “back on their feet.” Instead, a combination of legislative ruthlessness and a deteriorating economy have produced a significant population living in wretchedness, the NPC document says.

Children have been especially hard hit, says the Shaefer – Edin study. “About 2.8 million children lived in extreme poverty at the beginning of 2011… This was roughly 16 percent of all children in poverty.”

The number of American households with children in extreme poverty has risen sharply since November 2008. The study dismisses the notion that the American safety net “is strong, or even adequate, when one in five poor households with children is living without meaningful cash income.”

Some 48 percent of these households were headed by white non-Hispanics, 25 percent by African Americans and 22 percent by Hispanics in 2011. The report comments, “Thus, extreme poverty is not limited to households headed by single mothers or disadvantaged minorities, though the percentage growth in extreme poverty over our study period was greatest among these groups.”

Detroit leads with 67 percent of affected children residing in high-poverty neighborhoods. Some 57 percent of Cleveland’s and Michigan children live in such conditions; their number is 49 percent in Miami, 48 percent in Milwaukee and 43 percent in Fresno, California and Atlanta.

About 8 million children in the US as a whole reside in such economically deprived areas.

Shaefer – Edin study has examined the data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), collected by the US Census Bureau from sample households every four months. It also factored in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program that today covers some 45.2 million, up from about 25.5 million people per month in 1996.