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
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.