One of the ways in which the poor are isolated is through economic barriers to working and operating businesses. You can't run a food stand without a license. You can't work in many occupations without meeting minimum skill standards, which often requires undergoing an expensive licensing process.

Even minimum wage is a barrier for some. Marginalized groups (e.g. chronic drug users) can find it difficult to find an employer who values their labor at the minimum wage. The stepping stone of working below minimum wage is made illegal for them, which leaves them with bottle/can collection, squeegee-ing, panhandling and petty crime as the few other alternatives.

Overall, it's good to be aware of problems afflicting the poor, because the adverse effects of repressive government policies seem to fall disproportionately on this subset of the population.

I think where the article discredits itself is when it presumes that people are entitled to welfare:

>>If they want to get public health insurance while they are pregnant, they have to answer questions and give up information about their sex lives, their romantic histories, their medical past, their incomes, their ideas about the future of their families. In some states, if they want to receive public assistance, they must agree not to have more than a certain number of children. Their family lives are subjected to a routine scrutiny that is entirely different from the experience of middle-class families.

No one is entitled to public health insurance. It is provided at the expense of others, through the taxes they are compelled to pay. Where is the privacy for those who are required to file an income tax return? Where is the privacy for those who are audited, and forced to produce an untold number of documents to prove their reported income and deductions are accurate? Where is the individual liberty in the entire process?

The mandates imposed on the taxpayer fully justify conditioning use of public welfare on information disclosure. That the article overlooks this completely indicates an ideological narrow-mindedness, and callousness toward the other, who is forced to pay for these public benefits.

The ideological angle is seen again here:

>>It is true that the decimation of the American welfare state has helped to create a tremendous pool of people living on remarkably low incomes, who may be only tangentially connected to the labor market.

The idea of the American welfare state has been decimated is a common, and inaccurate trope, often peddled by leftists. Since the War on Poverty began, per capita social spending has rapidly grown.

It was vastly greater in the 1980s than the 1970s and it was vastly greater in 1990s than the 1980s:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...

By all indications, the War on Poverty has failed, given the poverty rate was declining far faster before its institution than during the 50 years since it began. Social welfare spending's negative unintended consequences, like having a measurable effect on the proclivity of women to have children out of wedlock, appear to outweigh its positive effects.