In Mark 14:7 we read: "For ye have the poor with you always…", and this statement made two thousand years, certainly, but unfortunately, still rings very true today. While the United States is still a racist nation in whole, it has begun to turn the corner into a partial acceptance of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's speech that: "…my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." It does appear that as time goes on, that America will become and has become more and more accepting of people of color, but, however, instead of accepting the worth and dignity of all human beings, they have merely replace those born of color as the "boogeyman" of society to those that are simply poor and powerless. There is a two-fold reason for having done so, one is that the sheer numbers of poor people in America are staggering, to which nearly forty-seven million Americans are considered to be living under the poverty line, in addition to the fact that a blanket policy of oppressing the poor is much more saleable to the America public as a whole, since this doesn't discriminate against race, color, or national origin, making it overall quite palatable to the American taste in general; especially considering the historic American Puritan work ethic, that believes all people should be able to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Within our capitalistic society the labor cost is a component that most businesses want to keep down or under control so as to stay both competitive as well as to make money for the beneficiaries of the business, itself. There are some very basic ways to keep labor costs down, such as to make the applicants themselves compete against each other in a "race to the bottom" and for the business to do its upmost not to see its employees or future employees join together into unions or other labor-type organizational units. Additionally, by keeping labor costs unfairly suppressed and/or by expending money on capital equipment and/or outsourcing jobs to foreign countries in lieu of hiring domestic people in the first place, the burden of taking care of the poor and the untrained can be passed from private enterprise onto government or government agencies, itself.
By effectively making poor people, wards of the State, this means that implicitly or explicitly that these poor people in one way or another will sacrifice their Constitutional rights and freedoms in order to just survive and in order to receive their "benefits" from the State. This massive amount of peoples, will now be obedient to the State, or will suffer the indignity of being locked up, or banished in a way, for failing to adhere to the rules and regulations that are specifically set aside to applied to them, or suffer the consequences for their failure to do so. The poor in America have become entrapped into an unending cycle of poverty, one of which there is almost no positive outcome available to them, because they have received in aggregate from the State the worst housing, the worst schooling, the worst living conditions, and the worst opportunities.
The poor have effectively been left behind, left for the State to exploit as they best see fit, as they are considered to be children of a lesser god.