how did we get to this point where we (once again - judging from the Victorian literature) decide that poverty was a matter of inevitability and moral failings?

Because it makes it possible to claim that having more money is a sign of moral (and any other kind of) superiority.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

dickensian was the word that kept forming in my mind...

it's called 'lifting them out of poverty' cuz the alternatives obviously suck more.

~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.