I'll start with an angle that the decisions of one's guardians have a large impact on their ability to escape poverty. The sad thing about this view is that if you hop back a generation, it kind of loops into itself. Hop back some more generations and some of these descendants are chained up on a boat from Africa...

"Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood." [1]

"America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal insti- tutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream." [2]

"By and large, this research supports the conclusion that family income has selective but, in some instances, quite substantial effects on child and adolescent well-being. Family income appears to be more strongly related to children’s ability and achievement than to their emotional outcomes. Children who live in extreme poverty or who live below the poverty line for multiple years appear, all other things being equal, to suffer the worst outcomes." [3]

How exactly do people make their way out of poverty? Unless they win the lotto, employment is how it's done. Do rates of employment fluctuate along with rates of laziness and poor planning? Or does the Keynesian theory in which decreased demand for goods and services make more sense? Does the Monetarist approach that unemployment is caused by high inflation and decreased investment sound more likely? Either way, it would appear that for many, finding full time employment with which to escape poverty isn't always manageable.

A lot of it comes down to business cycles and the mobility of one's skills as the economy evolves. Think of the regional structure of the economy. Sometimes an industry experiences a heavy downturn in an area in which it is highly saturated. Believe it or not, the personal losses that accompany it are not due to people getting lazier.

Do you know how big of a problem poverty is? Did you know that in the last 20 years we in Canada finally dipped our poverty rate among single parent families below the 50% mark? That is a lot of kids growing up in a situation in which no matter how hard they work, there is a lot to overcome compared to the middle class. Can you see how some of the situational issues might prevent them from escaping poverty no matter how hard they try? What about other at-risk groups like people with work-related disability, recent immigrants and aboriginals? Do you think these people are just not trying hard enough?

Your stance that poverty is the failure of the individual is a dangerous stereotype. It's a type of blame-oriented belief with a dark history. It actually dates back to religious attitudes in the 16th century, when the paupers in the workhouse were dismissed as sinners. Social Darwinism eventually took it's place, applying biological theories to social life and stating that the poor are simply biologically and/or socially inferior. That's your angle, correct? The great depression was nothing more than a mass bout of laziness?

People are let go from jobs for reasons outside their control and many are unable to recover. People deal with issues outside of their control that are powerful enough to prevent them from escaping poverty. People below the poverty line tend to find themselves spending all their money and time attending to basic needs and are incapable of budgeting the time and money for learning new skills. Kids raised in poor families are not given a decent start in life.

You say you would love to see the data but I wonder if you would love to see it enough to search it out yourself? Have you already reviewed these points and decided they are false? I’m just spitballin’ here a bit, there is plenty more proof that poverty creates poverty and that social darwinist theories applied to labour markets is absurd and dehumanizing.

[1] Prison and the Poverty Trap http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-...

[2] Incarceration & social inequality http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00019

[3] The Effects of Poverty
on Children https://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs...

TLDR: The opportunities people are given to build skills and an economy to support them dictates poverty.