America has extremely poor social mobility, which mean that if you are born poor, you will almost certainly die poor.

As I said: "For some poor black kid growing up in the South Bronx, unless they are the one in a million with some unique talent, all the fight in the world won't get them into a good school."

I would add that unless you already have money, one serious illness, even if you recover, will leave you in debt for life.

Take a look at this chart: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/

This idea of "hard work" being some magic solution is just ridiculous. For the most part, the poorest people I know are also the hardest working.

I've met a lot of rich people - three billionaires know me by name (probably "knew" by now).

Many of them did make their money through their own efforts. Not one of them grew up in poverty.

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Here's an example. In the US, schools are generally paid for by property taxes, which means the poorest areas have the worst schools. If you saw how terrible these schools were, you would cry. I did.

For example, for every dollar is spent on a grade school student in upstate New York, just over $0.50 is spent on a student in the Bronx. How are you supposed to get ahead when you don't ever even get taught how to read properly? When you have no idea how a computer works because you've never been able to sit in front of one?

In Europe, they spend more money per student in poorer neighborhoods, and this is just taken for granted as logical.