Thank you Paul Krugman:

That conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages.

How are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities. Social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena.

And of course, the greatest truth of all:

It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it! – Upton Sinclair