There's a whole middle-America segment that has vanished, and not in a good way. There were communities of modestly-paid people with secure jobs doing useful work for paying customers. These people owned small homes with comfortable mortgages they were able to pay after feeding and clothing their families. There wasn't a lot left over to pay for catastropic events like fires or medical emergencies and college wasn't an option for most of them. Over the course of the Industrial Revolution (1865-1965 in my counting) these families had children living better than their parents.

     I picture Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood where fathers worked in the textile factories and mothers stayed home with their families in row houses with neat gardens in front. Summer evenings found families outside sitting on the steps with kids playing in the streets. It wasn't an easy life, these people worked hard, and there wasn't much money left over after food, clothing, and shelter were paid for. Stability was the mainstay of a community like this because the loss of a job was a major financial crisis for a family with only two months of savings in the bank. People with major illnesses died uncomfortably at home.

     These middle-class neighborhoods had stability and family fortunes grew slowly and steadily from one generation to the next as productivity per worker grew in the factories. That comfort at the 30^th percentile of income in America is gone.

     We do owe the poor something, the same something we owe everybody in America.

     We got out of Vietnam when we realized we were making that country worse off being there. We're figuring out that we should get out of Iraq because we're making that country worse off being there. We should get our government out of our poor neighborhoods because we're making those people worse off, too.