subsidizing poverty or promoting success?

I'm kind of conflicted about this program. What do you think?

NEW YORK (AP) - Poor residents will be rewarded for good behavior - like $300 for doing well on school tests, $150 for holding a job and $200 for visiting the doctor - under an experimental anti-poverty program that city officials detailed Monday.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg traveled to Mexico this spring to study the healthy lifestyle payments, also known as conditional cash transfers.

The theory behind cash rewards is that poor people are trapped in a cycle of repeated setbacks that keep them from climbing out of poverty.

First let me say that I think there is way too much abuse potential where cash give-aways are involved. That being said, if there are appropriate verifiers, it might have a chance of doing some good.

That it's private money is a good thing. If private citizens want to give money to hare-brained schemes that's their business.
That Bloomberg used Mexico as a model is disturbing. Why would you use a destitute third-world country's failure as a model to reduce poverty in the richest country in he world? And if Mexico's program is so successful, why are they all coming to America?

It is axiomatic that you subsidize those things you want more of, and punish those things you want less of. Example: we want less crime, so we punish criminals...this is unless they are Hispanic criminals, then we shower them with taxpayer funded fabulous cash and prizes. Shouldn't we be punishing poverty rather than rewarding it? Isn't economic success it's own reward? The vast welfare programs of the 70's taught us that paying people to be poor just perpetuates their poverty. I think that poverty should be painful and difficult, not made less so by taxpayer giveaways.

Then there was this part of the article...[emphasis mine]

But some critics have raised questions about cash reward programs, saying they promote the misguided idea that poor people could be successful if they just made better choices.

"It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behavior we could solve poverty in this country," said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

What an asinine statement! Personal behavior and choices are precisely the cause of poverty. But for mental retardation, there are exactly three choices you can make in America to avoid poverty:
1: finish high school
2: stay off drugs
3: keep your legs together if you're a girl and don't get anybody pregnant if you're a boy, until you are married. It goes without saying that you must get and keep a job. Even if it starts at minimum wage, if you work hard and prove your value to your boss, you won't be making minimum wage for more than 6 months..you'll be getting raises or changing jobs for a higher paying one.

Successfully deciding to do those three simple things will, 99% of the time, guarantee you to not be in poverty.

I disagree in principle with paying people to do what they should be doing anyway. But if it can be shown in like 5 years that people who got paid stayed out of poverty, then I'll change my tune. I'll still disagree in principle but I'll acknowledge that it works.