bfulk

Maybe 2012 will be the year that voters and political leaders finally start paying attention to the tragedy that is mass poverty in contemporary America. It is a tragedy that ought to occupy a position full-center in the American political debate. That fifty million Americans live in dire poverty, their economic security shattered, their prospects dim, ought to trigger both outrage and creativity: outrage that such a situation has been allowed to fester, to grow, for so long; creativity in that solutions to these problems have to emerge at every level of society — amongst the political classes, but also at the grassroots; amongst regulators and policy innovators, but also in classrooms, in community credit unions, in union halls and amongst the poor themselves.