First of all, it is incredibly expensive to be poor. If you’re poor, everything costs more. If your insurance is shitty or nonexistent, medical bills cost more. If your expenses total more than your income per month — and money is objective this way — you always wind up in the hole. You need to work, you need more jobs: in most places this means you need a car.

But suppose your car breaks. If you buy a used beater of a car, the kind a poor person is still unlikely to be able to afford without tremendous financial upheaval, the maintenance costs and sudden breakdowns will create bills that the poor person cannot pay, especially because there are no warranties in place. If you need to lease something, either (a) you need a cosigner, or (b) you will pay two or three times per month what a wealthier person with better credit will pay. Suppose something else breaks. You’re on a budget. You can only budget so much when your expenses exceed your income, or when you just break even.

Not if, but when, something extra goes wrong, and you have no choice but to fix it — your heater stops working, say, in the dead of winter — then it’s time to play a fun game: Which Bill Can I Pay? This game is often followed by an equally awful game of What’s Going to Collections Next? and, finally, a lightning round of How Bad’s My Credit Score Now?

And if you have children, you know children are a money pit, and that their exigent needs are unpredictable and sometimes shockingly expensive. Why did you have a child if you were poor? Not all of us did this on purpose; not all of us had a choice in the matter; not all of us were always poor; but if they exist, they count on us to feed them, clothe them, house them, make time to be with them, to love and care for them, to give them a childhood and joy and freedom from too many adult worries. This is a difficult security blanket to provide when you’re freezing your ass off yourself.

But the short answer to this question is that poverty begets poverty in countless insidious little ways, only a bare few of which I have highlighted above. Some of you know that I was driven by medical expenses and sudden unemployment and a run of bad luck, and then by the inadequacy of the pay I make, as a single father and an adjunct professor pushing my way back into teaching, to post this. The Quora community, fortunately, is overflowing with kind people.

But I am not the only person who has been put in such a position, and this answer is not about me except insofar as I am a member of the working poor. (I mean, it is, but…)

Suppose that instead of a single dad whose various jobs don’t add up to the costs of survival in a state where everything, even the polluted air one breathes, is expensive, you are a single mother in Kansas, and that you receive enough child support (barely) to take care of your son of whom you have custody 6–7 days of the week every week because your ex is remarried and tends to ignore his first kid — but who also ties your hands so you can’t leave your immediate environs, however desolate the prospects for gainful employment might be. Now suppose, on top of that, you had eye surgery when you were younger to improve fading eyesight, and instead you were damn near blinded, and can no longer work in the profession for which you were trained, and at which you were very good. No one expects to walk into a doctor’s office one day and come out near-blind the next. But there it is. Now you can’t do your old job anymore.

Imagine that, clinging to what scant employment you can find as a single mother, you find your already damaged eyesight fading toward total blindness. And there is no way out, no hope, because the cycle of poverty rolls over you ever and always, and your only concern is keeping your food on the table, gas in the car, the car itself not falling apart, etc., etc., etc. In those circumstances you might find also find yourself in straits similar to mine, and you might have fewer followers than I am fortunate enough to have. You might have to do something like this too, eventually, when the perfect storm lined up.

The person I’ve just described is one of the most generous, kind, decent, and funny people I know, and is someone at least 3,300 of you know too. If you’re reading this particular answer of mine on poverty, then, the “TL;DR” is simple:

It is a vicious cycle;
It is a condition social realities work to punish;
It leaves good, hardworking people — not just “lazy” unemployed people, who may actually make more money on unemployment than the working poor do holding down jobs — in desperate straits, and finally willing to pawn their dignity in hopes of making ends meet;
And the people who do that will often do it not for themselves, but for the well-being of their children, none of whose fault this ever is, even if their existence (for which no child has ever asked) is among the reasons poverty can prove inescapable.
For that reason, people like my friend (and me, but forget me right now, or until you’ve helped her first) need more help than the current social structure affords them.
Asking theoretical questions about poverty on Quora is easy enough, and it can be done to elicit honest accounts of how the poor stay poor, or with the presumption that poverty is the fault of the poor person.

But I know that the better angels of Quorans’ natures are mighty indeed. That second link I posted? I hope you’ll investigate it and help. I don’t have a pot to piss in and I already have.

That’s another thing about poor people: they have little, but they give what they can, because they know what it means to hang by a string. Those who have much tend to give less, perhaps because they believe no luck was involved in where they ended up, or perhaps because they buy into myths about self-reliance and bootstrapping and rugged individualism. But I find that to bespeak one of the deepest disconnects in the current form of capitalism practiced in my country: that the greater one’s resources are, the less, oftentimes, is one’s charity. And that, I think, is to miss a central point about life in the modern world, with wealth and income inequality widening: