OK. I guess it's time for me to chime in with the life story that leads me to think that poverty is almost never a choice.

I will compress hy hard luck story as much as i can. I had a great job in manhattan, i had a cool apartment in TriBeCa I had a lot of money and spent a lot of money. I got fired. I started a business. I got involved with a crazy woman. The business failed. I was broke beyond broke, in debt for tens of thousands of dollars. Ended up moving into my grandmothers basement. I lived there for a while - I turned 30 living in grandmas basement with no car, no money, no job, no work.
I borrowed money from my parents and went into new york city every week and visited people who i thought would hire me. My grandmother cooked me meals. Eventually i found work, I met my future wife while still living in the basement, I saved my money, we got married, we moved into a tiny cottage, we saved our money, my job got better, I ended up at a dot com, it went public, i cashed out, we bought a small house and a minivan, I started my own company, the dot com craze crashed, we lived off of savings for two years, i did construction work, i shoveled mud, I put on a tie and did internet consulting and took off the tie at night and hauled rocks out of a hole at a construction site, i got a job lead in cyprus, worked there and the bills rolled in at home and we were down to our last few dollars and i came home and managed to land a job, and another, and a better one and now i am a director level here and that's the short version.

Never, once in that story was i ever up against the hardships that lead people to poverty. Never. I had family with money. They could afford to give me some. I had access to my mom's car. I had a telephone so i could at least pretend to my consulting clients i was in an office. I had decent clothes that were clean. I had a community network of friends in various industries and i had people willing to hire me to shovel mud, lift rocks, whatever and i was able to get to those jobs even though they were far from home. Even though we didn't have health insurance, and we had a baby born and surgery on my son and various other stuff we had savings to pay the bills. When the savings ran out, we had a house to live in that we could have sold. The "see how hard i worked for what i have" story is - in my case - total bs. I had every advantage crawing out of the holes i found myself in in life. I don't know what it means to be poor and to live in a place where there are no jobs to be had, where a $20 bus ticket is too much to spend, and to be in a situation where nobody you know can help you find work.

Now, I am not a mush-head love and granola type. I encounter poor folks who aren't really poor. Whenever i encounter someone in new York city asking me for money for food, my response is ALWAYS the same - I point to the nearest food place (in new York, that's never far) and I tell them I will buy them ANYTHING they want to eat, in any quantity. 7 times out of 10 they reject my offer. I'm no fool, i know that many are hustling money for nonfood purchases, but until you look into the eyes of someone who accepts your offer of food, and you watch them eat, you don't know poverty. The last guy who took me up on my offer of food got an egg salad sandwich, chips, and bag after bag of trail mix and nuts and four jars of peanut butter. He kept asking if it was ok for him to take so much. I could see he was picking correct foods for storage and energy. He asked me if I needed an assistant if i needed anything done at all. I didn't but he said that it was ok and he was going to find something. That was February. He was living on the streets, trying to stay clean, and trying to find a job. He had a cell phone and gave me his number in case i ever had anything for him. That's poverty.