Comment by galdosdi

> There's no good reason anyone would intentionally want to keep the poor poor,

This seems naive to the point of being bizarre. Employers of lower skill and lower margin labor can get it cheaper if their prospective employees are more desperate and thus have less bargaining power. Low wages are the gift that keeps on giving because it keeps your prospective workers from saving enough to weather the risk of negotiating harder, quitting to look for better pay, etc.

If you look at places that have policies that seem to keep the poor down vs places less so, there's at least some clear correlation in terms of who the major employers with more influence in the state are -- those who rely more heavily on cheaper labor with lower profit margins, vs those who are much less exposed to that due to having higher profit margins or less of their costs come from commodity labor.

Just think about what the biggest businesses might be in say, Oklahoma versus New Jersey.

Another way to bring this point home, compare a middle class family in say, Mexico or India, to say, California or New York. Inequality is higher so the cost of basic labor is cheaper, which translates to people with the same middle class job in a place like Mexico or India being able to easily afford a lot more of the sorts of labor intensive services only wealthier people would have in much of the US, like a live in maid/cook, taking a long taxi trip to and from work 5 days a week, etc, stuff that a middle class person in the US would need to ration a lot more even if they do take some ubers here and there and eat out here and then.