I live in a poor part of Appalachia and benefits are common here. Poverty is generational. There are lots of grandparents raising grandkids and getting SNAP/WIC. My wife works in a shop connected to SNAP/WIC, supplying donated clothes/diapers/formula to children. I know people in their 70’s raising kids. We have people in our family raising someone else’s children. The people next door lost the kids living with them (not their children) when the grandmother died. She was disabled by an IED in Iraq and the mother is in prison.
It’s not just an urban, black phenomenon. More than 3/4s of the children of welfare grow up as another generation on assistance. We’ve been paying just our least able to have children for generations now (while they pass on their cultural dysfunction as well), and our country now has an average 2-digit IQ.
Part of the problem is that poverty is also regional. The poor in Appalachia are like the poor in the Black Belt of Alabama: they’re the ones who refused to move to where jobs are. Initiative is not a government program or a college course.
The question rises....... are the poor today better off than previous generations that were also poor?
Then a corollary question...... what is there to allow creation of wealth? The answer is that the area was settled precisely because the land was undesirable and almost free. Settlement allowed freedom that came with poverty.
Opiod assisted misery?