With all due respect, Kelsey, I understand where you’re coming from, but having been both highly educated and destitute — at the same time — I can tell you that information/credentials alone aren’t enough to pull someone out of poverty. “Lifetime handouts” aren’t being advocated here either, but I’ll give you a couple examples.

Sometimes all that stands between you and stability (e.g., an apartment deposit, a work visa) is a couple hundred bucks. Or, in the past, sometimes what stood between myself and better jobs — in the same small town (we’re not talking an expensive city) — was my inability to afford all the bus fare, much less afford a car that could take me directly there… and then I had to patch together shifts across three different part-time jobs in such a way that accounted for the HOURS I spent per day walking from place to place. If I’d been wealthy enough to own a car, for instance, I could’ve zipped from one job to another (they were maybe 5–10 minutes apart, by car). But I couldn’t, and a bus didn’t connect most of them, so… walking it was, and this meant literal hours that I couldn’t be working (because those were the hours I spent hoofing it). Sometimes this meant I didn’t get an entire shift, because they needed someone when they needed someone, and I didn’t have the means to get there.

My point is simply that it’s easy to judge if you haven’t been there. But money helps. Money helps a lot. The vast majority of people do want to be productive members of society. But it takes money to make money, and sometimes poor people need a bit of cash in order to get a foothold. If fewer people had to worry about such basic needs as food, housing, medical care, and transportation, I think we’d see a lot less crime, not just because the financial incentive for crime would diminish, but also because the psychic stress of poverty that makes some people feel hopeless enough to resort to crime would be a non-issue. :)