But Steve, you're confusing two questions that really aren't the same.

One is: "Why is any particular person poor?"

The other is: "Why does poverty even exist in the first place?"

The rules of the economic game, which are largely set by government, determine how many people will be poor and how crushing their poverty will be. Who, exactly, those people will be, is determined more by their own actions and abilities. The government doesn't specify that of two children born in the same lower-class circumstances, one will work his way through college and become a professional, while the other will end up homeless and on the streets. But it does determine that one of them will be homeless. Which one? That's up to them.

Whey I was a boy, although we still had poverty, we also had factory workers making a middle-class income and living a middle-class lifestyle, including my father, who was a machinist but managed to send me to college. Today, you can't do that on a working-class income. Have the people doing the work changed? Are they less hard-working, less responsible, than their predecessors in the '50s? No. The rules of the game have changed, that's all: the big winners are winning bigger, and the working class has gotten the shaft. As for the poor, well, that hasn't changed much. It sucked then, and it sucks now. But the poor are only a small portion of our society, the real losers of the game on the bottom. For most Americans, who aren't either the big winners or the real losers, the rules have gotten worse, and they suffer accordingly.