Poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society

As was noted more than a decade ago: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap/ "Middle-class parents are stretched thin these days. Between health care costs, child care hassles, looking for a home in a good district, and paying for college, raising a child is becoming increasingly expensive. Little wonder, then, that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and 75 percent more likely to have their homes foreclosed. And the danger is growing worse by the year: In 2002 1.6 million people filed for bankruptcy, many of those middle-class parents. a record . As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now “the single best predictor” of bankruptcy.“"

What kind of society have we made for ourselves in the USA where such a thing is true?

Maybe that also helps explain why the US birth rate is below the replacement rate. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/24/is-u-s-ferti...

It is worse in other countries like Italy though, where one woman has on average about 1.4 children, leading to about a 30% population reduction every generation. Some countries are looking out of desperation to pay people to have kids. Or, of course, increase immigration. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/europe/italy-births...

Further, as economic trends change, marriage is becoming less feasible, with women seeing less and less value in a long-term relationship with a man (and vice versa). https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are... "The study, published this month in the journal American Sociological Review, found that in areas with the greatest income inequality, young men and women were more likely to have their first child before marriage. ... The researchers give this explanation: Men without well-paying jobs are not seen as marriage material."

Most modern schools are essentially prisons: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids

And they remain mental prisons even at the PhD and postdoc level: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

Why should parents voluntarily send their children to prisons? Why should anyone want to live their lives in a prison if they have alternatives? As NYS Teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto put it: https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev... "I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system. Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

Many jobs are likely going away with increasing AI, robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, 3D printing, and so on. http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ "Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order."

While the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, the USA has to guard its medicine cabinets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park "Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to them is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself."

So, without necessarily disagreeing with you about the minimum needed for most people to not fall quickly into poverty right now, where do we go from here?

Here are about fifty options to consider of all sorts (both good and bad) I collected about a decade ago (basic income being one of them, but there are many others): http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Study after study has proven that a society that cares for its members is an order of magnitude better off for it. And yet, we always fall back on this moral argument that people failures are 100% their fault, and we have no obligation to do anything about it.

It's getting exhausting.

I think this overestimates our ability to establish a solid "rule" when it comes to a complex social phenomenon.

It's so reductionist to think that complex systems can be boiled down to simple, all-encompassing explanations. This has failed over and over, from nutrition to economics. And yet people of all political persuasions still want to argue that "the REAL problem is Y" and claim smug superiority over anyone who disagrees.

I agree. That's a choice, but regardless of whether he decides to put on an oxygen mask or not, he has a huge emotional baggage he has to carry.

That example is only used illustrate the difference with an immigrant who has no money but doesn't have to carry the emotional baggage. The immigrant in the same situation who chooses to support the family back home financially might very well be better off compared to the American one. That is because the cost of living in the home country was so low, so he can both support the family, be OK financially, feel good about it emotionally, and doesn't have to deal with the annoyance every day.

Oddly enough, I'm the first to admit that I've achieved my level of income by luck, and without hard work. I was lucky to have two educated parents, their wealth to fall back on, and an affluent, healthy environment to grow up in. My parents paid for my undergraduate education, and the government paid for my graduate degree.

I "work" in a nice office, by playing with equations and gadgets, and talking to people. Meanwhile I see people doing actual physical work, and even emotionally hard work such as teachers, police, etc. And it is virtually assured by our society that they will be less affluent than me, despite working a lot harder.