It's not the premise - although there are a lot of lazy people in the world (I'm one of them without hesitation or denials).
This is the brunt of it: It's not worth it to work when the benefits of being unemployed is more than a "low paying" job. Those low paying jobs aren't worth more (Flipping burgers can only generate so much money - same for stocking shelves and other low experience jobs).
Raises or not the fact remains its better to be unemployed than having a number of jobs. The fact that people choose to remain on benefits instead of working is only tangentially related to "laziness".
If I can be unemployed and get 50k/year in unemployment, health care, free phones, living assistance, food stamps, etc... or I can do a minimum wage job and make 30k and lose all the benefits?
The math is simple... it's more "profitable" to be unemployed for most people.
My original post may be phrased wrongly - people seem to be hung up on the world "lazy". It could be phrased differently but the fact remains that the US "benefits" system is broken and is a large part of the problem. We need help but we shouldn't have such large portions of the population enslaved to "handouts" with a massive benefits wall in the way of personal freedom.
https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...
> The ‘Welfare Cliff’: How The Benefit Scale Discourages Work
> ...
> The dramatic rise in welfare spending has created a “welfare cliff.” As more people have become eligible for increasingly larger benefits, the “penalty” for working—lost benefits due to increased income—has steepened and been described by analysts as the “welfare cliff.” This has been especially true for workers near the poverty line who are eligible for multiple programs (e.g., food stamps, Medicaid, the EITC, TANF, and subsidized public housing), as workers reach a point where every additional dollar earned can result in a more than 50 percent reduction in benefits.
> ...
> For example, the CBO study found that households with incomes just above the poverty line—or between $23,000 and $29,000 for a family of four in 2012—stand to lose 60 cents of every additional dollar to either taxes or lost federal benefits. In the face of such a high penalty, many low-income people choose either not to work or, as CBO finds, “put in fewer hours or be less productive.”