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.

The Brooking's Katrina Index released its latest report on the slow-going hurricane recovery. The report explains a few of the policy barriers to a full recovery: Despite this progress, many other obstacles to recovery remain.

• The Road Home program will stop accepting applications after July 31, largely due to the estimated $5 billion shortfall in the program. Neither Congress nor the Louisiana legislature have committed to providing additional funding for Road Home.

I thought I'd point up an interesting article I read over the weekend in Reason, a libertarian magazine.

Jared Bernstein has his speech up on TPM Cafe. Very much worth a read. It's a quick sum-up of his views on inequality and the way towards greater equality. A good passage: I'd like to offer three principles against which we can judge the nature and scope of the economic problems we face; three concepts that I suspect most of us would agree must be present in a viable social contract (and I'm borrowing here in part from the work of Fred Block): reciprocity, fair competition, and fair opportunities.