That poverty is bad is kind of a tautological statement. Poverty is like a gradient, and at one end of the gradient it becomes difficult to live well, which is bad. There is no real specific hard line income level at which one is suddenly in poverty, despite attempts to define such a hard line.

Poverty is location dependent and is not simply a measure of income. The same level of income that is inadequate for someone living in Manhattan could be just enough for someone living in Oklahoma and yet feel extremely rich for someone in Bolivia.

Some people may be able to compensate for poverty depending on their social context, but poverty's effect on social context is undeniably negative. Specifically in the context of the first world, our cost of living is high, and most adults in the first world don't have the social or physical resources to be independent of wage labor, creating a cycle which feeds back on itself as people spend less time on social labor and more time on wage labor, thus further reducing the social resources available to those around them.

Whichever way one attempts to defeat society's ills, it's undeniable that a significant hurdle to success is presented by poverty, and many problems are even caused directly by poverty. Attempts to ignore poverty have failed, so we should address it directly.