Regarding low-income as a result of adverse childhood experiences. This ignores the fact that some jobs just don't pay a lot, and even if everyone had super-duper childhood, some portion of those people would still end up working minimum-wage jobs - because somebody has to do them. The way our economy works is just stack-ranking, but at a nation-wide scale. In consequence, if you help one teenager, you'll lift them further the bottom of the stack - at the expense of everyone else who they've surpassed thanks to your help. Another corollary is that, if we want people to not have low incomes, we need to change how our society functions (as say Scandinavians did it, with very high minimum wage), as helping individuals will not matter that much. The one effect helping individuals has is making them more efficient and better adjusted to the economy, so that maybe they'll be slightly better waiters or burger flippers, which produces slighly more GDP for the nation to spread via welfare state policies - but, for simplest jobs, that effect can't be huge.