Scipio's Golden Bridge

This is the last time that I'll be collecting rent from most of my tenants. I've told most of them to find somewhere else to live and someone else to suck dry.
October 31st is ten years to the day that I've been involved in an effort to rid at least my neighborhood of poverty.
I spent the day running the usual errands for my people and decided to ask them why they were poor.
If one asks a poor person why they are poor, they give you a seemingly endless list of excuses; "It's because I'm Black and a Black a person has no chance in this world, my daddy left when I was two, I got hooked on drugs and couldn't get a good job when I got out of jail, my baby-daddy left after our third child, the teachers at school don't like Black people, ..." . The list of excuses goes on and on.
Ask them what they would have done differently and you get the reasons that they are poor.
You see, the excuses blame everyone else, the reasons cause one to take responsibility.

What do we owe the poor?
Can money alone solve the issue of poverty?
Is it a lack of education, opportunity, a sustainable social structure or just their decision?

IMO - We can do nothing for the poor that they are not willing to do for themselves first.
We should only provide Scipio's "Golden Bridge" of escape from their situation.
(It's up to them to use it.)