The always-edifying David Cay Johnston writes about the latest income data from IRS: Americans earned a smaller average income in 2005 than in 2000, the fifth consecutive year that they had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion, new government data shows.

The NYT's Robert Pear reports today that the agency that administers the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) has issued new guidelines that could limit eligibility. The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children's Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

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.