I have had a sort of reverse experience, but which has led me to believe that poverty is a "contagious mindset, nothing more" as well: My family were academics, so our bank accounts were mostly empty, our clothes were pretty old, etc, but we grew in upper middle class New York. I pretended to be blue collar in my twenties, thinking I would be the next great socialist author. However, when I got sick of, well, being poor, I just started taking classes at the community college, schmoozing my teachers and my bosses, and voila, I am a solidly middle class data hacker 15 years later. I don't have the bank account I would have had if I went to college earlier and started investing, but whatever, I am so not poor. For the blue collar people I worked with before the transition, however, the idea of getting a bunch of education and then becoming a manager was inconceivable and frankly immoral; they have probably not done as well as I in the last 15 years.
I hope God appreciates humor, because if I say grace, it always includes something like "and thanks for giving me an upper middle class cultural background", because, well, I would be f*ed with out it (as are LOTS AND LOTS of people in the US).
Also -- note that I have not mentioned race. I think it has become largely irrelevant to the dynamics of poverty, thank god, but only because my experience shows me that you can be totally screwed by the above culture of poverty and be of the same british isle/ german descent as my upper middle NYC friends.
EDIT: And I think we should be throwing our weight into fixing this massive cultural problem, along with the wasted human potential it causes (really expensive to hire prison guards and social workers). However, the left says "there is no cultural problem" and the right says "screw em, its their own damn fault", even while the US rots from the inside.