A lot of people in the US argue that the poor don’t deserve anything, any lack of money is a moral failing, and they don’t deserve any kind of help.

A bit of a reduction. It's not that being poor is a moral failing, but there is a mindset that if you don't have a job, it's your fault, and that if you have a job but are still poor, you're probably wasting money on drugs or something. It's not so much "they're poor because they're a bad person so I shouldn't help them" as "if I help them then they won't help themselves." Which is an easy position to hold if you don't consider how little the low-hanging jobs can pay, how much rent costs, how much food costs when you can't home-cook it, and how hard it is to get a job when you don't have a number, address, shower, or clean clothes.

And then there's a second group that thinks "Well, we have systems in place. There are homeless shelters somewhere, so they should be going there instead of begging on the streets." And they can be right, but you should probably do some research on said homeless shelters before you take that stance, in case it's too far away to walk, understaffed/underfunded, or poorly managed.

It's easy to think the poor don't need your help if you don't think on it too much, and to be fair, not everyone has the bandwidth and energy to be thinking on that. But at the end of the day, we have poor people, so those with means should be doing what they can to help.