[yummyfajitas]

Have you ever been a poor person?

This is a fallacy. If you were to claim AGW occurs or that outer space is a vacuum, it would be a fallacy for me to say "have you ever been planet-sized body warming due to excess CO2?" Of course not, but one can still reason about such things.

If you are claiming that the poor are incapable of taking responsibility for their choices, recognize that there is a term for this: incompetent. Are you claiming the poor are incompetent and unable to make choices like the rest of us?

[OrwellianChild]

@yummyfajitas - I often appreciate the clear thinking you can bring to a discussion, but I just as often see you reduce human beings to logic machines in ways that are unfair to both them and your intellect...

There is a large and growing body of research around the limitations and capabilities of human decision making that shows just how/when these gaps appear. At a very basic level, poor (and otherwise distracted/overwhelmed) people suffer from decision fatigue [1]. There is much more going on, however, and I'm sure you'd find the studies fascinating, given your penchant for data-driven analysis. I cannot recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow for starters...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue