Shiftless? The story about the kid? The kid is not shiftless. Were his parents shiftless? Possibly, but there's nothing in the story to indicate that they were anything but ignorant (e.g. didn't know there might be help available).
How hard exactly did you search for the exact sentence out of that post that, if I was solely responding to that, would invalidate my point?
You have to do your part when reading other people's arguments and at least try to find out why they might have a point, instead of searching for the exact angle that doesn't make sense. That pessimizes the information content you can get from someone; there's always an angle where it's wrong, no matter how you have to torture the English to get there, but because that's always true, that's information-free.
Incidentally, make sure you know what the term means, I had to look it up myself to make sure I wasn't misusing it: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shiftless
It took about 10 seconds, because that was my immediate reaction and I didn't see anything else in your post to contradict it.
And I did look up shiftless beforehand.
Maybe you should consider that your arguments aren't half as clear as you think they are?
Note I dropped the "lazy" qualifier. I'm not convinced that doesn't cut across social classes pretty freely, nor did you talk about it at all.
I do broadly agree, though. Many programs to "help the poor" amount to throwing money at them, but that doesn't strike at the root causes at all, which I think you're largely correct about. Pouring water into a leaky bucket doesn't help; you need to fix the leaks.