I don’t know if it’s designed to keep the poor poor, but that certainly is the result. As mentioned above interest rates are often higher for the poor, the poor have one unexpected problem happen, like an illness even for just 2 days, and they can’t pay all of their bills, and late fees and penalties can be outrageous and unjust and cause them to quickly get into a horrible hole of debt. The poor are in a constant state of being behind the 8 ball financially. I think a lot of people don’t understand how difficult this situation is.
Schools in poor neighborhoods tend to not be as good as schools in better neighborhoods, so the children are at a disadvantage. The parents often are less educated so the school is very important to help the kids with opportunities.
Poor people are connected with other poor people, and networking can be very important to getting higher paying jobs. The wealthy are connected.
Financial help from the government encourages not working as much as one might be willing too [ducking to not get smacked by some jellies]. If making a little more money means losing a lot of assistance, the person may choose to make less and stay on assistance. Remember I said they are willing to work, I’m not calling them lazy. I’m not sure how to fix this, I support helping the poor, but I can tell you even the rich who use the system do their best to not show earnings, etc. The only way I can see around it is to give assistance not based on earnings, like socialized medicine, and UBI of some sort, or housing, but that would be a more socialized system.
About the psychology of the rich, do did you mean the rich having this greed to get even richer?