The hardy band that reads both The New York Times and The Washington Post is having a chuckle over the headlines on their respective stories yesterday about the 2000 Census. The first headline pictured above is from the front page of The New York Times. The second is from the front page of the Washington Post.

Reported the Washington Post’s first paragraph: “The economic boom of the 1990s raised the incomes of the poorest Americans, held the size of the middle class steady and swelled the ranks of those with six-digit incomes, according to census data released yesterday.”

In contrast, the lead paragraph of the Times had it this way: “Despite the surging economy of the 1990s that brought affluence to many Americans, the poor remained entrenched, the Census Bureau reported today. The bureau’s statistics for the 50 states and the District of Columbia show that 9.2 percent of the families were deemed poor in 2000, a slight improvement from 10 percent in 1989.”

The Times’ dirge devotes but one dependent clause to the fact that not all of the same people were poor at the end of the decade as at the start. That might have been enough to call for some skepticism of the notion that “the poor remain entrenched.” In America, it turns out, many people move out of poverty. Some even get rich. Some rich people, by the way, lose their money and drop to the middle class — or, occasionally, the gutter. But millions move up the ladder, which is why so many poor people come to America.

This is the central plot of the great American story, which is a primary reason why a generation after the beginning of the great boom that was kicked off by President Reagan’s tax cuts and crested in the 1990s, there are still plenty of poor people in America. The wave of immigration in recent decades has been huge, historic, and bountiful. And successful, too, judging by the best headline on the Census story, that on page one of USA Today: “More people identify themselves as simply ‘American.'”