The barrage of media criticism over Mitt Romney’s February 1st claim that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” ignored a critical fact: Romney’s views reflect public policy in the United States since the 1970’s. No other industrialized nation does less for its “very poor.” America allows millions of families to live in shelters or inadequate housing, maintains an under-funded public school system that lacks the resources to effectively educate very low-income kids, has a deplorable public transit system by European standards, and, as recent studies show, offers the very poor far less chance to leave poverty than other nations. Most states offer less than subsistence welfare payments to unemployed families with children, and millions of kids go to bed hungry each night. Romney’s mistake was verbalizing what other politicians demonstrate through their actions.

Mitt Romney’s since retracted claim that he does not have to care about the very poor because they have a safety net led to a massive media pile-on over his ignorance about poverty in the United States. But in focusing on Romney’s disconnection from those most in need, the media ignored that he exposed an inconvenient truth about United States policies toward the very poor for decades.

A Worsening Crisis

By most measures, the very poor in the United States face worse life conditions today that at any time since soon after the War on Poverty began in 1965.

We didn’t have millions of homeless persons in the United States in those days. In fact, widespread visible homelessness did not exist from the end of the Depression until 1982, when the impact of federal housing cuts that began under President Nixon became clear.

President Reagan’s 1981 budget further decimated federal housing funding, and the percentage of low-income Americans receiving federal housing assistance has declined ever since; the United States never committed the money necessary to end widespread homelessness, which is why it persists to this day.

The media and even some activists prefer to localize the fact that so many Americans live without homes, blaming this policy in San Francisco or that policy in New York City for what is clearly a federal abandonment of its responsibilities on a massive scale. It’s not Mitt Romney who has allowed the federal government to break its commitments to house all Americans under the 1949 National Housing Act, or who has failed to keep promises to rebuild public housing buildings demolished under Hope VI.

President Obama did not mention the millions of Americans who are ill-housed and/or homeless in his recent State of the Union, and this was not an issue in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. National Democrats don’t like to talk about homelessness because their record is so dismal.

Recall that for all of the longstanding Republican bashing of the very poor it was President Bill Clinton who led the effort to repeal the federal welfare entitlement in 1996; Clinton also presided over the first federal budget in decades that included no new Section 8 vouchers. Think Clinton’s support for “ending welfare as we know it” has something to do with rising family homelessness since the economy brought rising unemployment?

Crisis in Schools

Talk to teachers in a low-income urban school district and ask if they think that the resources they get reflect a nation “concerned about the very poor.” To the contrary, in the United States low-income residents get a barely subsistence level of education dollars, and there is little prospect for improvement.

The Republican Party opposes increasing funding to reduce class size, opposes adding money to help students already behind, refuses to fund the hiring of new teachers, and does not even believe in adequately compensating teachers. It is more concerned with destroying teachers unions than in educating the very poor.

The Democratic Party does support increased spending to improve public education for the very poor, but only by marginal dollar amounts. Under President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the focus is test scores and n untrustworthy “accountability” standards, which becomes poor substitutes for the government providing the massive influx of resources necessary to give very poor kids a real chance to succeed.

Back in the 1960’s, we used to say that it would be a great day when the Pentagon had to have bake sales while the government gave schools all the money they need. Military and prison industrial bloat could provide all the money schools need for educating low income children – but that would require a nation whose policies reflected “concern for the very poor.”

Nobody understood better than Ronald Reagan that as long as a politician claims to care about the very poor, their actual policies can be ignored. Reagan’s racially-charged attacks on “welfare queens,” slashing of all federal programs for the poor, and plan to define ketchup as a vegetable for school lunch programs never led the media to question his “concern for the very poor” as they have Romney.

Mitt Romney learned his lesson. Maybe it will open the nation’s eyes toward our lack of concern for those most in need.

Randy Shaw is author of The Activist’s Handbook and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.