Julie had the correct take. "Poor people need higher wages and opportunity." That is the short answer.
The article below is just blaming people for their own poverty. Blaming the victim.
No matter what "attitude" people have, or what education or training they get, none of that is going to change the set of jobs that are available.
Meanwhile, when and if good jobs suddenly become available, as happened in Korea in the mid 1970's, and Japan in the 1950's and Germany in the 1800's, all of a sudden people's attitudes turn on a dime. Koreans, Japanese, and even Germans used to be though of as "lazy" "kooks" and "crooked" before their respective countries got moving.
Now, if YOU are the one that has the best education+training+attitude, then you may be the lucky one who gets the 1 in 10 good jobs (if there were any good jobs anymore) that falls from the establishment tree. And the 9 in 10 other people aren't. And it's not the fault of those 9 people that society only creates 1 in 10 or fewer good jobs. That's the fault of the greedy neoliberal establishment that's been disinvesting in USA for decades. Every job, or at least nearly every job, can and should be a good job that takes advantage of people's intelligence and creativity, rather than stifling them.
When there is greater equality, more money is being spent by formerly poorer people, therefore business scrambles to get that money, and hires more people. Jobs are created when money is being spent!!! That's what creates good jobs, not attitude, education, and training.
But if only rich oligarchs have money, they don't spend it locally, instead they build factories in some foreign country. That's why inequality needs to be solved up front, with things like unions and a high minimum wage (which takes the needed place of a union for people at the bottom who are going to find it near impossible to organize one). Without equity-improving measures like these, there won't be enough money being spent locally to create a healthy economy to create good jobs.
I remember when if you didn't have the education and training and experience you needed, and employer would hire you anyway and see that you got the education, training, and experience you needed. It is not really necessary for people to get training first to create better jobs. You have to have the better jobs FIRST, and then all else follows. This applied to me. I got into programming because way back in 1980 they were desperate enough to hire someone without professional experience or specific training. Nowadays you need to be vastly overqualified to get any decent job.
What created those first good jobs I got was the vision that we "needed to protect ourselves from USSR." That was paranoia, but it created jobs. Jobs could be similarly be created to deal with real problems like Global Warming, and as a country we would make ourselves richer in the process. But the crop of oligarchs we have doesn't want to do that. They like all the fossil profits they can bleed, and then hope to run away and hide when catastrophe hits.
So, what's needed is less inequality, and an establishment with a positive vision like the Green New Deal (which HAS a jobs guarantee) and $15 minimum wage and unions and that's a way to create less inequality. That's how to create a virtuous cycle rather than a destructive one. And so we need leaders like Bernie Sanders to be pushing the positive ideas like Green New Deal into the establishment, which after all, is supposed to be for all of us, rather than the usual "sorry, you can't have that" which becomes self-fufilling prophecy.
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Julie wrote
I really have a problem with the article below, not that there isn't some truth to it, but it seems to me the thing poor people need is higher wages and real opportunity.
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