> There are probably 10 guys like him for every person who actually is so broke there is no way out...This is what America's "poor" looks like, it is far more a mental state than concrete reality.
No, this is what poverty looks like in the strawman you've built up in your head. I guarantee you the person you describe exists, and is just as you describe - but they're also not representative of American poverty. But they're certainly the caricature of it that certain groups love to push for political reasons and have been doing so consistently for decades. In the 80s it went by the myth of the 'welfare queens'. A caricature that was demonstrably false - but that didn't stop it from becoming a commonly held perspective at the time (people have since learned the truth). And the process goes back further than that.