Poverty and inequality are big problems. But how big are they? It's tempting to define them as only concerning aggrevied parties- the poor, the displaced, the underemployed. But the reality is that these problems have something to do with a whole lot of people. There's the aggrievee, and the aggriever. It takes two to tango. So who are the aggrievers? In other words, who's getting rich under the new inequality? Who are the new Rockefellers and Morgans? And what exactly did they do to deserve all that money?

Reading an article about housing projects in New Orleans that are slated for demolition, I saw something that got me thinking about deserving-ness and inequality. By the turn of the century, when I first walked through a New Orleans housing project for my own work (representing poor people facing the death penalty), I found it difficult to believe that the government could legally allow people to live in such squalor, with windows busted out on many units, with doors knocked in exposing interiors covered with graffiti, with children playing in trash-strewn common areas overgrown with weeds taller than them. By this point, America had given up on the notion of the deserving poor in favor of the view that identified the mostly working mothers who occupied the majority of these units as "welfare queens" having children in order to get bigger government checks. It isn't just the nation. I'd argue that much of the progressive community has all but given up on making a strong case for a deserving poor and middle class.

In the online journal Health Affairs, there's a study of the number of children who are eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) but aren't being covered. The authors- two economists at a federal health care research agency- found that 62 percent of uninsured children are currently eligible for SCHIP. That's 5.5 million kids, the vast majority of whom live in families whose incomes are below 200 percent of the poverty line and are disproportionately headed by a single parent. And for the fiscal policy folks, there's this interesting twist on the cost of SCHIP:

A report by the National Priorities Project finds that of all people that are income-eligible to receive food stamps, only half actually receive them.

• Half of all low-income people did not receive Food Stamp Program benefits.
• Counties with lower poverty rates and higher median household incomes had lower percentages of low-income people that were Food Stamp recipients.
• A significant number of counties, 13.2 percent, had below-average percentages of Food Stamps, yet had above-average poverty rates.