IT CAN BE the best of times or the worst of times, but whether in prosperity or recession, there is one constant in the U.S. economy: the richest country in the world maintains a permanent class of people who are poor.

That is not an accident. It is maintained by official action as deliberate as Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan's protection of the prosperity of banks and stock markets.

Those in this permanent class are not the momentarily unemployed. Most of them work. Neither are they merely temporarily unlucky in a world of global economic change. Even before the "new economy," none of our affluent Western European peer nations sustained a permanent poor class like one in the United States.

Those countries have social policies that prevent it.

When confronted with persistent poverty in the world's richest country, the U.S. mainstream print and electronic media seem to take as their mandate the biblical words from Matthew "The poor ye will have always." They do this with little concern that poverty in the midst of plenty is an American exception among all advanced societies. (The United States is the richest in gross domestic product, and in per capita income is second only to Luxembourg.)

The news media may protest that they do cover the poor. And in one sense they do. But these are typically isolated stories about hard-luck families in disaster areas or profiles of plucky downsized Midwestern managers flipping burgers at McDonald's – sympathetic features but depicted as isolated cases. It is reported only rarely and obscurely why the United States, among all its affluent peer countries, retains a poor class year in and year out.

Given the symbiotic relationship between our national politicians and the mainstream news media, that media failure has consequences. What the media ignore, political leaders know they can safely ignore. The needy appear only at election time in stereotyped rhetoric and campaign photo ops. The empty speeches without media follow-up have deepened the comfortable assumption that in the United States poverty is an unavoidable act of god.

Permanent poverty may have been inexorable in biblical times, when there really was inadequate food, inefficient use of arable land, rigid class systems, slavery, and serfdom. But today's world has enough food for everyone, and affluent countries like the United States have enough resources to guarantee their populations enough decent food, housing, health care, jobs, and pensions. Most of our peer countries do exactly that. Only the United States has chosen not to rid itself of a permanent poor.

No mystery

Why do we permit this when our peer nations do not? The answers are not mysterious: official housing policies, deliberate shifting of wealth to the top through destruction of the national progressive income tax, mammoth special favors for corporations, and cynical treatment of the national minimum wage.

Why do the mainstream news media share the blame?

A dramatic demonstration of the media's guilty involvement occurred 20 years ago when, suddenly, as though from nowhere, we had homeless families living in the streets. For national civic life, it was the dead canary in the coal mine. We know why the canaries die in the mines: it is a warning of methane gas, which kills sensitive canaries before it kills human beings. The dead canary of structural American poverty was the sudden appearance of the homeless in the early 1980s.

"Homelessness" is a social phenomenon usually associated with countries like Bangladesh but has now survived as a visible urban fixture in this richest of countries.

Emblematic is the failure of the big newspapers and broadcasters to search out the source of the new homeless when they first appeared in the 1980s.

Most often the media refer to the homeless who are alcoholics, drug addicts, or mentally ill. But we had always had alcoholics, addicts, and the mentally ill before without large numbers of families living in the streets.

Something had radically changed.

A hint of what's changed is that homeless people – a minority of the total poor – are homeless even though, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 64 percent of them have jobs. Some have two jobs, but they are still poor by government standards.

No affluent democracy has been able to house its low-wage families by depending on the private real estate industry. Government-subsidized low-cost housing has been found indispensable if all are to be housed in minimally decent homes and apartments. Before 1979 the United States subsidized 200,000 such low-income units a year. In the early 1980s, in the new fervor for shifting everything possible to the free market, subsidized low-cost housing subsidies were cut by 92 percent. That is the central reason we suddenly had a permanent beggar class and families living in the streets. Few readers or TV news watchers were ever told the basic reasons why homelessness happened "out of nowhere."

The rich get richer

Underlying the issue is the shameful phenomenon of a radical shift of national personal wealth from the bottom 80 percent of the population to the top 20 percent, with the lion's share of that going to the top 1 percent.

The fact that such a gap exists gets into U.S. news occasionally, but as a routine statistic, like the corn crop in Kansas.

The massive shift of U.S. wealth to the top has been reported in the media, but without the sense of outrage and alarm that would puzzle a Lincoln Steffens, an Ida Tarbell, a Franklin Roosevelt, or any number of political and media leaders of past eras.

Other affluent countries lack a permanent underclass like the American poor. Why? The other rich countries have housing, employment, pension, and tax policies that prevent it.

The overall answer is an inexcusable fantasy aided and abetted by our major media. The media fantasy has convinced the people of the United States of a falsehood, namely, that we are a brutally overtaxed country. The truth is that of all the affluent democracies, the United States has the lowest taxes in the world, including the sum of all local, state, and national taxes.

Consequently, when this fantasy is shrill in every political campaign – promising lower taxes as a dire necessity – it is accepted as an urgently needed rescue of that beleaguered population the very rich. Though the mainstream media love to find culprits in social problems, on this they practice selective amnesia. For more than half a century, the share of federal taxes paid by corporations has been dropping radically and been shifted onto families and individuals. In 1940, corporations paid 40 percent of federal revenues. By 2000 it had dropped to 12 percent.

Guess who pays for that shift?

Except for Japan's, U.S. income taxes (34 percent of the GDP) are lowest among industrialized nations. The rate in Canada is 36 percent, Germany 39 percent, Switzerland 50 percent. It is not coincidental that most of those other countries have universal health care, guaranteed housing, and more generous social benefits than the United States.

The top federal income tax rate for the richest Americans was once 70 percent, though people that rich hired the best accountants to find tax shelters, so few paid anything like the top bracket. The top rate in 2000 had dropped to 39 percent, and in practice it is closer to 33 percent, and few in that theoretical bracket pay that much for the same reasons.

The final insult to the poor is the minimum wage. Corporations and the rich fight every move for an increase, the way they fought against creation of the minimum wage in the first place. In 1970 the minimum wage was worth 29 percent more in real terms than it was in 2000. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1970, minimum-wage workers were living above the poverty level. In 1998 only 19 percent were.

A standard objection that higher minimum wages will reduce the number of jobs available, or force small businesses into failure, has no basis in reality. The institute says a raised minimum wage has never resulted in significant reductions in jobs or closed businesses.

Corporations and Washington legislators may point with helpless resignation to the biblical assertion that the poor will always be with us, but the experience of other rich countries, like Germany, France, Canada, and the U.K., suggests the answer lies less in the Book of Matthew and more in the Congressional Record.