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In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.

This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don't matter is not quite the way our history would define it.

We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

When you question this war on poverty, you get all the criticisms from adherents to the status quo who just don't want to see anything change. We got to have the courage to face that down, just as we did in the welfare reform of the late 1990s, and if we succeeded, we can help resuscitate this culture and get people back to work.

In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs - monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism - have been working their way through the culture ever since.

We don't have to sit by and watch our meritocracy be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.