This is a complete misunderstanding about what it is to be poor. Poor people including "perpetually poor" aka most poor people are poor because they are lacking

This is a complete misunderstanding about what it is to be poor. Poor people including "perpetually poor" aka most poor people are poor because they are lacking not in financial literacy but rather the necessary skills to make sufficient money to graduate from being poor. It's not that they fritter their money away its that they don't have any. They do jobs that pay them barely enough to afford their shitty lives and invest between commuting and working 50-65 hours doing so in between being parents and spouses and doing not only all the things you do save take time off but doing the paperwork, phone calls, meetings, and leg work to convince people that they are in fact still poor and still need benefits. If were to sit down and spend time optimizing these people's financial lives you would find that the amount "frittered" away is so tiny compared to child care, food, rent, medical costs that it wouldn't make a difference. Taking someone that for example makes and spends 20,800 and helping them not "fritter" away the 800 will not provide them with a means to climb out of poverty. There never was in that scenario enough resources no matter how they are budgeted. The most canonical example of this absurdity used to be complaining about poor people buying TVs with tax return checks as if someone who is $40,000 below a middle class household income would SOMEHOW be doing OK if they hadn't spent that $500. My other favorite example is people complaining about poor people pulling out an EBT card and a smartphone wherein the EBT card signifies that the government has decided that your income is $5000 short of what is required to eat and live and the phone costs $200 once + $20 a month while providing vital utility. Ultimately the benefits you describe as being targeted are pretty much targeted at keeping people from climbing out of poverty. Look at health insurance you can get medicine and care for nothing up until about $2000 a month income and then you have to buy your own insurance. Subsidies are great but they apply only if your employer doesn't offer an "affordable" plan the definition of affordable being if I recall correctly about 12% of your gross salary for the individual plan. There being tax benefits this inspires your employer to offer an "affordable plan" for individuals while jacking up the cost of covering your family. For example with my employers plan the employee + spouse costs 4x as much. Ultimately moving up from substantial poverty to ordinary poor is actually a net loss. You could if you don't ever want to move up or believe you will be able to be better off staying a little poorer working part time and collecting benefits. Think about that! Would you like to work 60 hours to be as well off as you were working 24? How do you think people respond to that sort of incentive structure?