The passage above is from a book,
Stealing From Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit, by Edgar K. Browning, Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. It highlights the falacity of the common argument on the left regarding the poor or the percentage of those who are poor. Capitalism is a dynamic process and at any point in time, we can segment its players into various strata. The critical element is, over time, how many who were in the bottom quintile or the fourth quintile are still there X-years later.
Maybe more importantly, it demonstrates that the argument from the left is straight from their beloved Karl Marx - we should all be "equal" at any point in time.
I’ve read this statistic before. The article was very interesting, and absolutely correct; welfare is essentially the cause of poverty, which is the direct result of simply not working.
It would be interesting to see what his solutions are (to be discussed in another article).