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If you are permanently unemployed, you don't pay taxes, you get subsidies for food, for rent, for health care, for heating, and for a plethora of other services, if you know how to game the system properly. You may be on "disability", and if you're smart about it, you probably work a little bit off the books, cash-only.

There's a whole system of perverse incentives and interacting welfare programs that produce income cliffs where it is suboptimal to work more and have greater income, because that small increase in wages results in a much larger loss of services.

These are often not kids of the lower-classes, who are more likely to end up on the streets caught up in crime than in their bedroom playing video games. It's the middle or even upper middle class children often doing this, not just for economic reasons.

It is discussed in this article:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...