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I personally prefer the less-colloquial term "the poor," or at the very least "those people." I also prefer them to remain altruistically and emphatically oriented, it makes them more sheep like and exploitable. When you don't care about being run over (gently of course, they need to get run over again next week) it's just making it easy for us rich to get richer.
Of course, as far as I can tell, this isn't actually saying the poor are either of these things, but rather those who are rich, but not super-rich, are.