It’s more honest to address economic ebb-and-flow when we recognize whole swaths of individuals that participate in neither: the poor.

Of course the policy makers are running around like headless chickens to stimulate the economy. The prospect of poverty now touches more than America’s untouchables. It must boggle the minds of the poor that it took the collapse of the middle class for the government to take notice of poverty. And it must not hearten anyone at the bottom to realize that economic recovery proposals tend only to target the middle class.

Most politicians would be satiated in realizing the recovery of the middle class alone. Because some politicians think so small as to ignore the systemic nature of their decisions and confine policy to those matters directly affecting their voting constituency. After all, homeless people don’t vote, right? And Neocons have worked hard to see that minorities don’t vote. And super-capitalism has saddled the working poor with enough of a survival obstacle course to ensure they will have no time to commit to any political participation whatsoever.

For too many Americans, recession is a way of life, chronically. Why is it any more unthinkable for middle-classers to join the ranks of the poor? Who is truly losing in what we’ve only now brought ourselves to call a recession? Isn’t poverty a signal that our society never really “won” in the first place? Only now can’t we tell whether the guy sleeping on a park bench once traded on Wall Street or is one we previously wrote off as lazy. Only now do we recognize the peril in assuming people who can’t work won’t work.

Poverty is a plague on our society, and we’re now aware of its cost to the economy. Now, imagine what kind of “boom” we could experience in an economy bereft of it.