According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 25 percent of Americans would have been poor last year if not for the social safety net.

The safety net was responding to the downturn even without the Recovery Act initiatives.  Between 2007 and 2010, the share of Americans that the safety net kept out of poverty rose from 9.5 percent to 10.8 percent.  This increase mostly reflects the growth of programs like unemployment benefits and SNAP, which expand automatically to help people hit by the recession and then shrink as the economy recovers.

But these automatic increases wouldn’t have been enough by themselves to prevent a large increase in poverty in the recession.  Without the temporary Recovery Act initiatives, the poverty rate would have jumped from 14.9 percent to 17.8 percent between 2007 and 2010, and 6.9 million more people would have become poor than actually did.