Washington - The new "working poor" in the United States have all the things expected of average Americans: a house, a car and a television. Though they work to the point of exhaustion, they cannot make ends meet. Their refrigerators are empty, their bank accounts overdrawn.

"If you keep your nose to the grind, you can get ahead in this country," so goes the motto.

For nearly 25 per cent of the US middle class, this no longer applies. Victims of the economic crisis, they have turned the traditional concept of poverty on its head.

Take Vicky Gardner, a 44-year-old geriatric nurse. Every morning she drops her two children off at school on the outskirts of Washington, D. C.

If you saw her, well-dressed and driving a mid-range car, you would not think she planned to stop by a relief agency before work to pick up donated food.

"I've got to get there before the fresh vegetables are gone," she said. "A lot of people come. More and more families cannot feed their kids properly without help."

After work in a home for the elderly, Gardner moonlights as a charwoman. She and her husband, a carpenter, barely scrape by with their combined earnings of 3,500 dollars a month.

"Payments for the house, cars - which we need for our jobs - gas, gasoline, and the children's school fees are so costly now that nothing is left over for food," she said.

The Gardners' plight did not surprise Reuben Gist, who oversaw outreach for the Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB) before his recent death.

With inflation hitting 5 per cent this summer, people in the US are getting less for their money. Prices for milk and bread have soared by as much as 40 per cent since the start of the year.

"One in four people who come to our food distribution points owns a home and earns as much as 80,000 dollars a year," Gist noted. Some 400,000 people in the Washington metropolitan area 
- one of the wealthiest, and most expensive, regions in the US - avail of the CAFB in the poor, southwest of the U. S. capital and supplies 700 partner agencies in the area with food.

Standing in his storeroom amid stacks of canned soup, boxes of cornflakes and heads of lettuce, Gist said the food bank's employees were seeing the new face of poverty. It contrasts sharply with the widespread image of shabby, homeless people, a category comprising 18 per cent of the needy.

"The new poor look like you and me," Gist said. "They're well-dressed, drive to work, and bring their kids to school. But when they come home, they don't have anything to eat."

Middle-class America's diminishing prosperity has sparked a debate.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative U. S. think-tank, asked: "Can people living in such comfortable conditions really be considered poor?" The answer, in its view, is no. The term "poor" is used too loosely.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow in domestic-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, recently pointed out that the living standard of people in the US classified as poor had never been as high as it was currently.

Three-quarters of all Americans classified as poor under government guidelines have a car, air conditioning and a television set, he said.

A third have a dishwasher. More than 40 per cent of "poor" households own their homes. Almost twice as many have at least two rooms per person. And, Rector went on, 73 per cent of the "poor" said their families always had enough to eat.

Such comments incensed Gist. "Of course we have enough to eat in this country," he remarked.

"The question is, who has access to food?" Many people who previously were able to provide for themselves could no longer do so because they had lost their job or had to work for far less money.

"A lot of companies pay the minimum wage of 7.25 dollars an hour, without benefits," Gist noted, adding it was no wonder that nearly half of all Americans could not afford health insurance.

In 2006, the US Census Bureau reported that 12.5 million US citizens were living below the poverty line, defined as an income of 10,294 dollars annually for a single person and double that amount for a family of four.

Some organisations, such as the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation, are critical of the government's poverty criteria, pointing out they had not changed since former president Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" in the 1960s.

The main criterion is the subsistence food budget for a family. "But what about the drastic rise in home maintenance costs?" asked Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Jared Bernstein, senior economist at Washington's liberal Economic Policy Institute, also urges a reassessment. In an interview with the USA Today newspaper, he noted that many occupations that provided a good living 10 years ago had become low-wage jobs.

An increasing number of people in the US with full-time jobs cannot make ends meet without help, said Bernstein, who urged that the "American Dream" be made liveable again: "If you work, you should be able to live on what you earn." (dpa)