You know I have a great deal of empathy for children of poor parents, we grew up on the poor side, I'm well acquainted with government cheese and garage sale shopping. There were seven of us kids with my dad being the only bread winner in the family and him at the time being a car painter for GM. Our "social safety net" was my grandparents living close. Dad went to training to become an electrician, working his way up from apprentice to journeyman and eventually master electrician. At this time robots were a new thing in the automotive business and very few people wanted to work on them. Partly because they were from Japan and were installed by Japanese technicians and Detroit was a very insular city when it came to Orientals, partly because a lot of people just don't want to learn new things. Anyways dad learned to fix robots and eventually program them, got a lot of big raises (unfortunately after I'd moved out) and has a very nice retirement. Yes it's difficult to start out poor, but this country does make it possible to move beyond that without the government having to subsidize your family planning decisions.