The poverty we see in America is now too widespread, and too complex, for easy fixes. But I do think we can reimagine many of our institutions and can create new ones in ways that would be effective. We could, for example, create social insurance systems, similar to social security, such as that we went through in 2008-9. We could create a financial transaction tax, oil profit taxes and a fairer estate tax system, and we could plow much of the revenue raised from these into job training programs, into better education infrastructure, into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.

The reliance on stereotypes is in part the result of a structural problem within the media. Most newspapers have a business beat, with a number of highly trained journalists who know how to cover companies, trading, the markets and so on. But almost none have labor reporters anymore, and to my knowledge, none have full-time poverty-beat correspondents. And all of this helps to render invisible the lives and the life stories of tens of millions of Americans.

Detroit is a fascinating place, because things are so bad there that the dystopia has almost become utopian. People know they can't rely on the state, that public infrastructure is broken, and they've taken their own measures. People are growing their own food and selling their produce to local stores and restaurants. It's certainly not a fix-all; Detroit's problems are too deep-rooted for quick-fix solutions. But it's a hopeful sign. Detroiters are crafting their own solutions rather than being passive in the face of the city's and state's actions and inactions.

I recognize that individuals and organizations with tremendous financial clout and open access to the political system in the post-Citizens United era, are going to fight tooth and nail against a reinvigorated War on Poverty. But I also think that the elections of 2012 showed the limits of big money in politics, and the willingness of a majority of voters to really think these issues through for themselves.

Big cities like New York are thriving, economically, culturally, in terms of real estate values, and by a slew of other measures. Yet, at the same time, much of the country has been utterly hollowed out. In California, where I live, affluent coastal cities such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley hubs have lower than national average unemployment, higher wages, higher tax bases. Meanwhile, there are inland counties in California where there's still nearly 20 percent unemployment.

It seems to me that large numbers of people are now paying attention to poverty and that large numbers now understand that blaming the poor and the insecure for being poor and insecure is as unseemly as is schoolyard bullying. In that realization lies hope for a reinvigorated discourse around poverty and inequity in modern-day America.

The poverty we see in America is now too widespread, and too complex, for easy fixes. But I do think we can reimagine many of our institutions and can create new ones in ways that would be effective. We could, for example, create social insurance systems, similar to social security, such as that we went through in 2008-9. We could create a financial transaction tax, oil profit taxes and a fairer estate tax system, and we could plow much of the revenue raised from these into job training programs, into better education infrastructure, into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.