Too often the media assumes that "poverty" is an African American or a Latino issue. Of course, that's nonsense. While a higher percentage of the African American and Latino population does live in poverty as compared to the white population, when overall numbers are looked at, it is clear that people of all races, ethnicities, and colors, are represented amongst America's poor.

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.

I do think there are ways to increase wages significantly, even in a global era. But you have to take voters and consumers with you on this journey - and that involves a tremendous, and long-term, public education campaign.

Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.

Today there are a huge number of think tanks working on poverty-related issues; there are books written on the topic; and university centers being created to study poverty. But, at the same time, the media has a terribly hard time with this issue; it's very hard to convince editors and publishers to devote resources to complex investigations of the lives of America's poor. And, as a result, too often poverty is portrayed in stereotypes, in sound bites, in a few pat images rather than in its full Technicolor complexity and diversity.

To really tackle poverty, politicians, activists, academics will all have to think outside their boxes, will have to start developing much more integrated approaches to these problems. And a large part of this will involve working out ways to push for living wages. Partly this will involve re-empowering the union movement, which has been massively weakened in recent decades. Partly it will involve a willingness to restructure tax codes to penalize companies that don't provide basic benefits and decent wages to employees.

I argue that in the long run, the US would be on a far more financially secure footing if we recalibrate how we spend about two-to-three percent of the country's GNP, using state and federal taxes to create pools of money for spending on America's poor - which would, as numerous economists have argued in recent years, create virtuous spending circles, since those on lower incomes spend more of each extra dollar in their possession than do those on higher incomes.