The one man who ever lived that I truly respect put it bluntly: “The poor you will always have with you.” - Jesus the Christ
So yeah. we will always have a “lowest common denominator”. Keep in mind that the poor in the US today, regarding quality of food, clothing, housing, etc. live better than the middle class did just a few decades ago. However, they are still the “poor in spirit”, so for most of them they live very unhappy lives. There are exceptions.
There's a famous line: "America is the only country in the world where the poor are fat".
The definition of "poverty" is continually shifting, and the effective political definition will always be "the standard of living of the bottom 10%", no matter how good it is compared to the standard of living of the middle class of decades prior.
There are people who are temporarily having bad times, there are the physically disabled, and then there are the people who just keep making bad decisions. The real issue regarding addressing poverty, is dealing with the last category.