People are ignoring the elephant in the room: a lack of intelligence on the part of these people. It's one thing to have a CS degree and figure out the maths of owning vs renting, but quite another to expect a ninth grade dropout to do the same. The idea that all people are capable of making rational choices is a myth.

And yes, stupid people tend to be poor, and poor people tend to be stupid. I live in a country where the vast majority of people were kept uneducated (and I profit handsomely from the educational/intelligence differential between me and them). They would be eaten alive by big business if the government didn't make an effort to protect them-and the givernment knows it is into own interest to protect the poor in the interests of social stability, since there are so many of them.

The way I see it, is that governments in the US have no need to protect the poor from the consequences of their own stupid choices, even if it is ethically the right thing to do.