Here's some news that comes as a downer to Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary celebrations: According to a new Census Bureau report, city residents have the fifth-lowest median household income among residents of larger U.S. cities.

Pittsburgh's median income for 2007 was $32,363 -- up slightly from the $31,779 of the previous year, but worse in the rankings because the city was seventh lowest in 2006.

These doleful facts come from the 2007 American Community Survey, which ranks Detroit, Cleveland, Miami and Buffalo below Pittsburgh. That insight offers a little cold comfort. Anybody who has been to a city like Detroit knows that widespread inner-city blight is not generally the Pittsburgh experience. This city still has plenty of attractive, socially cohesive neighborhoods, even if some residents are struggling.

The truth is that America is hurting all over. According to other Census Bureau figures, the nation's official poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent, which was not statistically different from the previous year. (In Pittsburgh, an estimated 56,847 people, or 21 percent, were below the poverty level.)

In all, 37.3 million people were in poverty last year in the United States -- a shocking number for a country that prides itself on its superiority. Some 45.7 million people (15.3 percent) were without health insurance, which was a slight improvement from 47 million the previous year.

Figures like these ought to be at the forefront of every presidential discussion -- and every candidate for Congress should be bringing the debate home. The voters should demand to hear plans for revitalizing older cities with older populations such as Pittsburgh. Universal health care and the redirecting of resources away from the black hole of Iraq would be a good place to start.

But Pittsburgh can't sit around and wait for more enlightened policies in Washington, D.C. What is in the city's power to help itself? More efficient government through municipal consolidation is in order, but that is the local equivalent of the famous saying about the weather -- everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it.

The very reason that Pittsburgh is ranked fifth poorest of the nation's larger cities is that this Census Bureau report considers all cities in isolation from their suburbs. Tellingly, Allegheny County did not make the bottom 10 list of median household incomes.

Pittsburgh has reinvented itself many times in 250 years, the last after the steel industry soured a quarter of a century ago. The Census Bureau's community survey is a stark reminder that much more needs to be done to improve the lot of those left behind by change and increasingly hard times.