The conservative brain is defective. It engages in low effort thinking. It sees that folk make poor decisions and thinks the answer is for the poor to suffer for that, that suffering will make them better. This is how they create the feeling that they deserve what they have, that the fact that they have something is because they are good. They have every right to look down on others. But there is no doubt at all that the price of bad decisions is real. What is sick is that the conservative mind wants the poor to suffer because they feel they deserve it. But its not that they deserve it. It is just the inevitable result of bad decisions. The liberal hope is that the damaged can be fixed, that education, care, support, opportunity, etc will give the damaged an opportunity to reverse the state of mind that produces bad decisions. People who love themselves don't make so many bad decisions and that's all this really is. The people of hope, the people destroyed, and the people who want the destroyed to suffer for it.
But to hope is not enough. One must know how to help. We all hate ourselves and that is the source of our problem. The liberal wants to help without knowing his own suffering and the conservative doesn't want to touch anything that reminds him of his inner condition, so no real help ever happens.
The enemy is self hate and it is that that must be faced and repaired. That can be done in two ways, via therapy of religious faith, spirituality and via achievement of any kind.
We can attend to the damage that has been done while building a new person over the damaged one. It's in the Bible. You teach a man to fish. You teach a person how to make a hook a line and a pole and then you take him fishing. When the fish are caught and the family fed, the soul is freed.
People make bad decisions because they want to destroy themselves because they feel they deserve it. They have been exposed to conservative mentality and have internalized it. The work to be done is to help people achieve. Create opportunities where people can do something that brings reward, it matters little what, only that they do not feel it is a gift that they had to earn it, and start small but never give up. Nobody values what is given for free, but to help we who have will have to put in more than we get back in the beginning with anybody who has been defeated by self hate.
If the government is to help then the government must create work of some kind for those who are capable of doing something. The government could do something even like what is done at the Grameen Bank.