> as explained by President Obama’s former chief economist Lawrence Summers, “government assistance programs” provide people with “an incentive, and the means, not to work.”

In the interest of pre-empting one obvious way to interpret that quote, this has a lot to do with the way that social welfare programs tend to be structured, and not necessarily a lot to do with laziness.

To take one concrete anecdote, many years ago a bartender at a neighborhood bar I used to frequent had to quit because she got a promotion at her day job. She didn't want to. She was actually kind of pissed off about it. The problem was, the pay raise pushed her combined income just above the cutoff point for eligibility for the state's Medicaid program, but still got her nowhere near what it would have taken to get health care on the private market. So, in order to advance her career while also retaining access to health care, she had to quit her side gig.