I don't mean an educated person that is down on their luck, or college students eating ramen...
If poverty were actually the cause of assorted bad things, then why wouldn't college students experience those same bad things? Clearly something else is at work.
You provide one possible alternative factor: crime. Perhaps we need more police in certain regions, drone powered surveillance, or other such solutions. That's a problem, but it's a) unrelated to the question of whether time spent working prevents poor people from cooking and b) minimally related to poverty.
It's impossible to go to college or enter the workforce and just switch off all the bad things in your past and present. From my experience a lot of my college friends who left midway through had family problems, often financial or health problems. Again this is stuff that poor people go through much more, and it negatively impacts their ability to hold down a job, finish college, and succeed in general.
It's a complicated issue but you seem to have no desire to understand it further than "get off your ass, get a job, and stop being poor".
And I strongly disagree that the US needs more police.
Surveillance is inevitable and if data and access are open, then I'm relatively at ease with it.
Edit: Crime is minimally related to poverty? I don't know how you can justify that statement.
So the claim is not that being poor is directly an issue, but that poor people are more likely to have other issues.
You seem to strongly disagree with me even though I said basically the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8613583
Relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Most people here probably agree with you that poor people tend to have worse impulse control. But you seem totally unaware of how significantly stress, trauma, or desperation affect impulse control. It's more than just stress about paying the bills. I tutored reading at an intercity elementary school and there were kids there who had family members incarcerated or murdered, homes foreclosed, parents making the local headlines for child abuse, etc. One boy I taught had to move out of his house because someone shot it up in a driveby looking for his older brother. A girl from a refugee family had 19 siblings and a physically abusive, alcoholic father. My coworker taught a boy whose parents were both in prison for murder. It was not uncommon to see little kids wearing RIP shirts for friends and family members. These stories are so much more common than you'd think. I'm not being hyperbolic, look at gunshot and homocide maps for Chicago in a single year:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Yt65uE9YlMk/UR7-1mGIo8I/A...
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?oe=UTF8&source=embed&ie...
Sure, a phenomenally resilient person can make it out of horrible circumstances, but the average person isn't able to. I personally don't think I would have fared well if I grew up in a bad environment. As a younger person I was angry and depressed enough already without the reality of hearing gunshots nightly, losing family members, facing systemic discrimination, going to bed hungry, etc. I had a great family and I still fucked up along the way sometimes. I also had a support system that allowed me to take the risks that made me independent and not poor today.
I somewhat disagree with your last point too. I grew up in the US but now live in a very poor country. The struggle is bad in both countries, just different.