IlyaKEightSix is right, the right place for government is maximising opportunity, and patching people up when the process goes bad for the bottom 10% or so.
Social tensions which affect both rich & poor arise when people come to believe that there is no way within "the system" to move their lives forward. Look at the places with high unemployment and you see trouble, big time. China is on average much poorer than the Palestinian authority area, but has rather less violence, because there is 'progress'.
The key bad term is correlation of wealth between generations. In the USA this is amongst the highest in the developed world, and not even good for a developing country. Israel by one measure is close to the opposite extreme, if you take Israeli citizens, and serious social strife within that group is predictably rare, but if you take the area under it's guns the correlation shoots up hard, as does the level of violence.
The emotive term 'handouts' is often used by the right, even though they fail to spot that most people pay the majority of their earnings in some form of tax in almost every country. Thus spending on education is more usefully viewed as investment with highly uncertain returns.
For no good reason, most of the American right follow the teachings of the paedophiles in the Catholic church, and oppose birth control of all kinds, except that used by themselves of course. As has been shown depressingly often, early children of poor parents are on average less economically useful, and the mothers are much less likely to return to the workforce in any significant way.
I started from a school where in my cohort, you were more likely to die before leaving than go to university, and where a decent % did time in prison before I graduated. We only had a computer because we 'acquired' it because my gang realised it was a way out of this shit.
That's left me with some useful life skills, (and a bit of attitude), but the important group isn't people like me, I could have earned more through drugs, but the middle 80% who were let down by the system, and still are.
The the rich/right talk of 'opportunities' they typically underestimate the size of the problem, and think a few pretty text books and the occasional visit from a celebrity sportsman will deliver equal opportunities. They fail to spot that state schools are often staffed by people simply unfit for teaching, or any other purpose, that careers education is a joke.
Also, people from poorer backgrounds have different risk aversion functions, quite rationally so, and advice that doesn't address this will go very wrong.
But the big killer problem is white middle class women.
They infest the education and training process, and warp it for their own ends and 'sisters'.
Almost everywhere, it is working class boys who under-perform and fail to move themselves forward more than girls. In the USA it is various types of "coloured" boys, in Britain it is white boys who under achieve. Yet educational resources for middle class white girls are vastly higher in proportion to issues, and as above telling the dears to go on the pill isn't politically acceptable, even though it's cheap and extremely effective.
There is also the dickshit idea that parents should have 'choice'.
This idea comes from people like me, who know how to make good decisions, but by definition parents of poor children are not good at this sort of choice. Look at the rate of religious observance in such people, and ask yourself if a person who thinks your life will be sorted out by a beardie man in a cloud but who can't even read the Bible, can judge whether skills in physics are likely to be more useful than progeamming ?
