If you've had direct experience with the poor, you know there is a non-trivial segment that have ZERO ability to plan and ZERO ability to defer gratification.

If you've had direct experience with the poor, you know there is a non-trivial segment that have ZERO ability to plan and ZERO ability to defer gratification. I've experience this in both the USA and overseas in the developing world over the last 30 years. These are the ones who will be "once poor, always poor" because you can't unlearn the habits that cause these behaviors after adolescence and certainly never as an adult. Not everyone can ever be "saved". Those without these behaviors/habits absolutely have a potential to raise themselves our of poverty - most of emerge from the developing world or poverty in the US will have the opposite of these destructive traits. But this latter group is small (it's easier NOT to learn the habits you must have especially if you are poor and struggling) and often the opportunities are not there. This is why the "conversion rate" from poverty to middle class or more is pretty low. And if you've experienced the "once poor, always poor" directly, you will generally not want to have anything to do with them - they are highly parasitic and they never "learn" from their self-inflicted circumstances. They have a lot of traits like narcissists. Because they are often "hand-to-mouth" on everything in their lives. One reasonable theory is that this group are on the low end of the IQ bell curve (yes, that's a real thing because all things tend to fall on a Gaussian). Just as the low end isn't even acceptable to the military, imagine what happens in civilian life: poverty and dysfunction. But IQ does NOT explain everything: if the entire culture is impoverished, the habits becomes cultural and affects even those on the top end of IQ. IQ is affected by poverty (causally) and that can be an "infectious agent" for good or bad for the majority. It's this gap that makes most progressive policies, however well-intentioned, ineffective in practice. Only separating selected individuals from the culture can allow the adverse cultural effects to be overcome. This is the role of education because you can gauge who has potential and who does not, plus you can "goose" the process to push a few more into the "has potential" category. You also have to have a plan/opportunities for those who can't which is the other Epic Fail of most progressive efforts - everyone is NOT the same and you have to account for that fairly but appropriately.