I'm going to take your statements at face value as a genuine skeptics-driven desire for further exploration.

As someone who was once "just a poor boy, from a poor family" (to quote the bards) I've seen both sides of the coin.

My mother was a clever woman - as a child, too clever for the schools she went to, constantly picking fights with the teachers. As she tells it, she would usually win (at least on an intellectual level) but invariably - nobody likes a smart-arse - she would get expelled.

So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for not keeping their heads down and working within the system. An instinct to rebel against the flow is bad.

In my early childhood, she was a factory worker, then she became a care assistant. Neither pays very well, but she worked nights (which pays marginally more for a significantly worse quality of life).

Of course, myself and my brother were a massive drain on her finances. She ended up as a single mother early on due to a manipulative relationship.

So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for having children, trusting people, trusting the wrong people, or being human beings with human families. Being human is bad.

At one point, she tried door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales. She sucked (joke intended). She couldn't bring herself to lie to people about how a vacuum could change their lives, even if it was a pretty powerful vac.

So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault refusing to become morally corrupt to earn a liveable paycheck.

When she became a care assistant - again, night shifts, and again, reasonably low-paid work. She tried to become a car mechanic - she had the physical strength to do the task, but her patchy education meant she couldn't handle the algebra. She could multiply any two numbers in the blink of an eye, but as soon as you replace one of the numbers with letters, her eyes would glaze over and she would yearn to discuss the weather.

But to her credit, throughout her life she never once took out a credit card (that I'm aware of). She treated credit as akin to the devil. Many many others did fall in the credit trap, because society tells you that's the way to cope, that it's better than failing to pay your bills on time, and the credit checks were nowhere near as stringent. (though, equally, there was no such thing as a pay-day loan).

So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for working within the system. An instinct to rebel against the flow is good.

Now, she has MS. She can't see, walk, or even stand most days. The government gives her an ungenerous stipend which is enough for her, as she spent our whole childhood skipping meals to meet bills anyway, and she throws up if she has to move after eating. Of course, they still sometimes try to claim that she could work because she can move her index finger (because those jobs exist) or because on a really good day she can distinguish between two dissimilar faces.

So one might argue that some of the poor can be at fault for being poor while other poor people are becoming morally corrupt to earn a liveable paycheck.

Now go through this and identify all the places that a non-poor person actively worked to keep the poor person down:

- The school teacher who would rather expel a kid than have a genuine conversation

- The factory bosses who pay their employees peanuts so they can charge their customers pennies less

- The care homes that charge each patient more than 3000/week, yet even with more than 4 patients per carer, budget for less than 1000/carer-week (that's idealized, 1 person for 24 hours, 7 days a week)

- The person who felt they "owned" her because they were the major breadwinner

- The salespeople who create ads for credit cards or pay-day loans that will never be repaid, and the salespeople who sign users up (or these days, the developers who build the systems to sign people up)

- The government-funded nurses who have a quota of "spongers" - a monthly number of people that they have to declare as fit for work, even if they're not, even if any appeal would reject the declaration without a second look, even if the disabled person has no money left, even if it will break the person's spirit, even if it might drive them deeper into credit, into depression, into suicide, into starvation.

I could go on. And, arguably, it's not the morally corrupt non-poor person who is at fault - if they don't do their morally-corrupt job, then they become poor. But there's never anyone up the chain of command who has any moral responsibility.

It's the poor person's fault. You know. For being poor.