"People are poor for primarily one reason - because they made bad decisions."
You have it backwards.
Bad decisions get punished harder, the poorer you are.
So when you start out poor, your bad decisions -- like Emmett Till's bad decision, to go into town where the white people are -- gets punished quite severely.
Bad decisions is a way of attributing outcomes to a sense of agency that people like Emmett Till didn't have.
Yes, his momma told him not to go into town dressed like that.
He made a Bad Decision.
The obvious, unspoken conclusion, is that it's Emmett Till's fault that Emmett Till got murdered. That he earned whatever punishment fate had in store for him, when he made his Bad Decision.
But we know, that's not it. It's the racism that killed him.
Just like ICE is deporting people for writing bad checks. That's just the consequences of bad decisions. There doesn't need to be any sense of proportionality to it.
Meanwhile, Trump pardons a drug dealer, I guess his bad decisions weren't so bad after all. I mean, he's not poor, so how could he possibly have made bad decisions anyway? Stalin started out as a bank robber, that worked out well enough right? Do you even know what I'm talking about or are you okay with it because you think you're on the right side of the game.
@#23 ... Paste-eating MAGAts are responsible for making measles great again. ...
While I would not phrase it as that, I cannot disagree.