It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
What stopped the baltimore kid from getting any valuable/marketable skills? Why did he drop school? In the end, it's a sum of all their little personal decisions. Sure, family and environment play their important role, but it's still personal fault.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.