Nearly 1.5 million families say they lived on $2 a day or less per person for at least one month in 2011. That's up from 636,000 families in 1996.
Benefits like food stamps did make a difference. When factored in, the number of families living in extreme poverty drops to 800,000. However, the rate of extreme poverty is still almost double what it was in the mid-1990s.
