A friend, who counsels food pantry customers, tells me that – as the winter progresses – she has noticed increasing numbers of desperate, hungry and homeless “nouveaux poor.” They are formerly middle-class and working people who are have become surplus. They bring to mind the powerful Phil Ochs song There But For Fortune because, like many of us, they were just one illness, one job, one drink, one cop from disaster. (To see Phil Ochs sing his song in a time-warp 1967 Bitter End Video click here , or, for a somewhat downtempo take by Peter, Paul & Mary (1982), here.)

In this context, are you disturbed to see Mayor Bloomberg media boosters cranking out copy concerning his miserable skirmish on poverty? Tuesday’s New York Times, for example, features an editorial Mayor Bloomberg Tackles Poverty praising efforts which, to my mind, are microscopic, half-hearted and feeble. In perhaps the most outsized bloat of an empty compliment, the Times edit. characterizes the Mayor as “working with the National Academy of Sciences” to redefine poverty. While it may be good that Mr. Bloomberg has discovered the NAS report of 1996 , calling him an NAS co-worker for picking up their analysis twelve years later is just empty puffery. Taken all-in-all Mr. Bloomberg policies from bulldozing affordable housing for luxury development to . starving the NYC Housing Authority to finger-printing food stamp applicants (to prevent [totally imaginary, in my opinion] fraud) have been significantly hostile to lower income New Yorkers. Mind you, I’ve praised the Bloomberg data initiative, too, but let’s not fool ourselves, a better measure is better but it is not an anti-poverty program. There are reasons to praise Mr. Bloomberg, but his practical policies
toward moderate and lower income New Yorkers are not among them.

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