People are making bad choices. How do you get them to make better choices, or do you just put your hands in your pockets and tell them it's their fault?
One might start by recognizing that poor people are, first of all, just people, which means there are lazy ones and hard-working ones and smart ones and dumb ones and some who've had bad luck and some who have brought all their problems on themselves -- and every possibility in between.
It isn't empathetic or helpful to treat a group of people as though they have no control over their own lives.
Indeed! My dismissiveness comes from repeated encounters with well-meaning, well-off liberals who seemingly cannot find a single behavior they aren't willing to excuse on the basis of poverty, until they've by degrees whittled the poor down to automaton-like slugs in their minds, useless dependents, capable of nothing, completely lacking in agency.
I've been poor. I could make rice.
If the person I'm responding to's experience was different, I take them at their word.