Hate it when I see poor people with big tv’s. The people stocking up for a lean winter is a different kind of issue. A proper investment of that money is basically useless to them for years.
The problem might be one of education, in that one of the reasons those poor people don’t spend the money wisely is because they have no idea that’s even possible. With no idea how investments work, they see the stock market like it’s a craps table with rules that change all the time.
Even if they, like me, know enough to know that there are services that do understand the market, that won’t help them (or me) with the month-to-month costs of living. So, again, one of the best tools for making money or *growing* money is rendered useless.

A similar look at the problem from a different perspective:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Tl;Dr: I don’t have a real argument, per se, except that one of the best things public schools could teach in this country would be proper finance/investment from middle school on. Those would probably be the most important lessons of a student’s life.