In Mother Jones, Scott Carrier reveals the new and highly successful anti-homelessness strategy that is sweeping America: "finding and building apartments where they can live, permanently, with no strings attached." Housing the homeless: it really works.

"Government assistance for families whose incomes flutter just above the poverty line nearly doubled from 1983 to 2004... The numbers look very different for those scraping along at the bottom, generally unemployed single mothers with children. Their benefits declined in real terms by about one-third."

"In the late 1960s, more than half [53%] of the households in the United States were squarely in the middle, earning, in today's dollars, $35,000 to $100,000 a year... But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow [to 43%], the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom."

Not long ago, "microlending" was the world's hottest poverty-fighting tactic—the UN even declared 2005 to be the "International Year of Microcredit." Now, a barrage of new studies say that microcredit isn't as great as everyone thought it was.

For a while, it was very en vogue for American retailers and corporations to tout that their products (or some of them) were Made in America. That trend is reportedly coming back into fashion. But "buying American" is not the best way to be a good global citizen.