Poverty is like starting a race in last place. There's only one person who's responsible for making sure you don't finish last. No amount of welfare, coddling,

Poverty is like starting a race in last place. There's only one person who's responsible for making sure you don't finish last. No amount of welfare, coddling, etc is going to make up for lack of motivation and drive. My parents weren't poor, we were middle-class - but they lived paycheck to paycheck and that scared the daylights out of me as I got older. That's what motivated me to succeed IMO - and I'm obviously fortunate to have picked software dev as a profession. My grandparents were poor (my grandfather never learned to read - he went to work in the fields in Sicily at age 8) - that didn't stop him from working hard all of his life, buying a house, raising a family.