It takes less energy to kick a man that's down, or to step over him, than to hoist him to his feet and keep him standing. I read "high moral character" as sarc

It takes less energy to kick a man that's down, or to step over him, than to hoist him to his feet and keep him standing. I read "high moral character" as sarcastic equivalence to "not poor". I presume that it is very common for people who have never been poor, or even at risk for being poor, to attribute their good fortunes to an imagined causal factor within their own sense of identity, rather than being entirely due to random chance. They reason that they are rich because they are good, and then, though back-formation, also reason that poor people are, if not entirely bad, then at least less good. Thus, "people of low moral character" becomes a euphemism for poor people. It is shot through with fallacies of reasoning and circular argument, but based on the statistics, many rich people didn't get rich by being smart, either. To someone with this type of worldview, poor people deserve to be punished. And since it's less effort than helping them to be less poor anyway, everybody wins. Nobody who deserves wealth has to become less rich in order for other people who don't deserve anything to be less poor. I can't say for certain whether or not this is a real thing, but the hypothesis does fit a lot of observations.