Reports about poverty in America are not uncommon but it was jarring to see one published during the same week in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed 13,000 for the first time, symbolizing the continued creation of massive wealth for some of America's richest corporate shareholders. The report, published by a Washington think tank called the Center For American Progress, released recommendations on April 25 for cutting poverty in half in ten years.

Called From Poverty to Prosperity, it was spurred by the heightened awareness of American poverty following Hurricane Katrina and prepared by a distinguished committee of individuals - like Peter Edelman, Angela Glover Blackwell, and Dorothy Stoneman just to name a few, who have devoted much of their lives to the fight against poverty. Its twelve recommendations include familiar ideas like raising the minimum wage, guaranteed child care for low income families, and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and some newer recommendations like helping former prisoners find stable employment.

The total cost of the recommendations if implemented would be $90 billion a year, which the report's authors would offset by closing certain tax loopholes. While the recommendations don't seem realistic in the current political environment, the need for action becomes more compelling in light of certain facts also underscored in the report's introduction.

-- Inequality has reached record highs with the richest one percent of Americans in 2005 having the largest share of the nations income (29%) since 1929. At the same time the poorest 20 percent had only 3.4% of the nation's income.

-- One in eight Americans lives in poverty, which is 37 million Americans or 12.6 percent of our population, and nearly one fifth of children are poor, of which children living in single parent families are the poorest.

-- Five million Americans are poor today who were not poor in 2000, and eight million Americans live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty where at least 40 percent of residents are poor.

Some of the report's ideas may be rejected as old and tired, and some deserve to be. It would have been more compelling had the Center served up an agenda that was bold, new, and entrepreneurial. But at least the glaring disparity of wealth and poverty is being brought to the attention of the nation and the presidential candidates who aspire to lead it. When it comes to cutting poverty in half, the stock market reminded us last week that we have the wealth. The report of the Center for American Progress shows that we need the will.