| Sumario: | In this article, we examine the 2012 poverty status of Social Security adult type of benefit (TOB) groups using both the official poverty measure and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). For each TOB group, we compare the SPM estimate with the official poverty measure estimate. In addition, we estimate the effects of various features of the SPM on poverty rates, noting why SPM estimates differ from official estimates. For each poverty measure, we also compare poverty estimates across TOB groups. We find that for both poverty measures, retired-worker beneficiaries and aged spouse beneficiaries have lower poverty rates than aged widow(er) beneficiaries and disabled-worker beneficiaries have. Compared with the official measure, the SPM shows much higher poverty rates for each of the three groups of aged beneficiaries. For the disabled-worker group, switching from the official measure to the SPM does not appreciably affect the poverty rate.
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