Being poor vs. being broke

Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.

I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha

I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.

There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.

My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.

It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".

Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)

There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.

These people are gross.

It's true that it may not help a lot if you're "missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever" which apparently is the article's definition of poor. Unfortunately we're not told what they would need such an amount of additional money for exactly.

On the other hand, maybe going from "missing $40,000 a year" to "missing $28,000 a year" is enough to not be poor anymore? It's difficult to understand the author's idea of the boundary between being poor and not being poor.

Sure. OP didn't say otherwise.

OP did say that some folks "will always be poor" because they are "under the cognitive capacity to meaningfully contribute to society" and that "[t]hat doesn't mean that they are bad people, but they will always be poor/broke" and that "Maybe eventually we will have enough mastery over genetics where we can make people truly equal in ability." but until then "The only thing we can do is be compassionate and help out.".

Perhaps you've been so lucky as to never encounter folks who hold the bone-deep belief that being unable to work [0] makes you worse than worthless. If so, celebrate your good fortune, I guess?

[0] Typically, these sorts of folks have carveouts for retirement, pregnancy, childbearing, and maybe a begrudging carveout for short-term injury. Anything else and you're a filthy drain on society.