As The American Prospect goes, so goes the American prospect?

Answering The American Prospect's call to readers to help save the magazine from extinction, I donated some money and subscribed.  Honestly, I don't know if I'd ever even seen the print edition before my first issue arrived a couple of days ago. May it not be the last!  It's "The Poverty Issue," taking grim stock five decades after the U.S. declared war on poverty, and it's terrific.

Mark Levinson, writing about measurement of poverty, gives us to understand that by the most credible measures, there are currently between 69 and 100 million poor people in America. Roughly one third to one quarter of the nation is, if no longer ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished, still unable to meet a Basic Needs Budget with any consistency.  Peter Edelman, Bill Clinton's onetime Assistant HHS Secretary who resigned in protest when Clinton signed the Republican welfare reform law (which Edelman reminds us, knocked 10 million people off the welfare rolls), examines why the percentage of Americans in poverty stalled for 30 years after 1970 and backslid in the past decade -- mainly because "well-paying industrial jobs disappeared to other countries  and to automation"  and because we allowed unions' strength to erode rather than to migrate to the kinds of jobs that have filled the void.

Edelman offers various policy prescriptions to rebuild the middle class, and the article headline insists, "..We Can Solve This." While that would doubtless be true for a government with the desire and freedom to act, it's hard to imagine this generation of Americans mustering a fraction of the political will that would be required: