it is very difficult for a competent and hardworking person who starts near the bottom to rise towards the top, and even more difficult for a useless and lazy person who starts near the top to fall towards the bottom. The system protects the incompetent at the top from the competent at the bottom.
This is the essence of it, perfectly stated.
If poverty in the US is nothing more than the result of poor people making poor decisions then that automatically implies that wealthy people made smart decisions. But that can't be the case, because most of the current wealthy's wealth wasn't generated from scratch in a single generation - they inherited a large fraction of it, upon which more was built. Same thing with poverty - most poor people are born into poor families. That's entirely outside of their control, and they shouldn't be penalized for being born that way. I also think wealthy people shouldn't be rewarded for simply having the good luck of being born to a wealthy family. But then again I'm a "radical lefty"
If this "poverty is your own damn fault" premise were true, we should expect that other countries would see larger inequality problems, since USA#! is the land of most opportunity. We should expect to see more poor people in the USA#! being able to bootstrap themselves into the middle class than elsewhere. We should also expect to see more wealthy people falling down into the middle class (or further) as a result of their poor decisions.
Source:
http://www.verisi.com/resources/prosperity-upward-mobility.htm
EDIT: for a really interesting aspect of this, click the source and set the data comparison to look at
daughters instead of sons.
Oh my! Why is it that mobility in the US is so much worse than in Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, the UK -- even
Ireland?!
How is it possible that the poor people in those countries aren't making nearly as many bad decisions as poor people here? What are they doing differently, I wonder