> "1850 - 1950 US"
The poorest in a population are not the well-educated self-made wealthy, they are the uneducated, unemployed, enslaved, disempowered, disabled, homeless, widowed, sick, isolated, and those whose lives are affected by the suffering of deaths and the work of caring for those people. During the time period you picked it seems there was a non-trivial amount of government spending specifically educating the people, employing the unemployed, funding the disabled and widowed and elderly, avoiding sickness and death, feeding the hungry, improving pay for the employed, and more, e.g.
The 1865 abolishing of slavery in the USA meaning all employers had to pay workers.
The 1874 Michigan supreme court ruling that local governments had the legal right to fund high schools with tax money.
By 1896 40% of all federal government spending was through the Bureau of Pensions to 750,000 civil war veterans and 222,000 widows and other dependents.
The High School Movement[1] from 1910 to 1940 where 18% of American 15 year-olds were in high school at the start of that and 9% graduated at age 18, to 73% enrolled and the median youth had a high school diploma at the end.
The first statewide minimum wage in 1912 in Minnesota.
A colossal increase in federal government spending, starting with $15 Billion total in all the years from 1850 - 1900[2] increasing to $18 Billion in the year 1918, to $92 Billion in the year 1945, with growing billions and tens of billions in the intermediate years, including employing 22% - 24% of all American men as soldiers in WWII.
The 1933 New Deal creation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, funding soup kitchens, relief payments, and work projects.
The 1933 and 1935 New Deal creation of Civilian Conservation Corps and Civil Works Administration, hiring millions of unemployed workers.
The 1935 creation of Social Security (reducing poverty among the elderly).
The first Federal minimum wage in 1938.
Infant mortality dropped from ~197 per 1000 live births in 1850 to 100 in 1915 and <30 in 1950 due to milk Pasteurization pushed by the US public health service under Roosevelt.
Jersey City got fed up of ~100 - 150 people dying of Typhoid fever every year around 1900 and sued the Jersey City Water Supply Company over bacterial contamination in the water. That lead to them developing chlorination. Hooray the free market at last! Oh they were initially paid millions to build the reservoir and pipeline which contaminated and killing people. Oh when they developed chlorination it was because it was cheap. And when they spent all of 99 days on it, they put it straight in the water supply of 200,000 people with no large scale testing or approval, no consent and no warning.[4]
Two World Wars which laid waste to the manufacturing competition and left the USA as a large manufacturer.
The US government funding 6 Penicillin production plants under the War Production Board in 1943.
Not to mention income tax introduced in 1913 and the top rate for the highest earners rising from 7% to 67% at the start of WWI, and rising to 62% after the Depression, and peaking at 94% in 1945 with a historically low cutoff threshold, for one specific way money was redistributed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_school_movement
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...
[3] https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/government-spending-...
[4] https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/distillations-pod/jer...
