My point is that benefits give you, say, 65k a year in benefits... when you start working at a 20k a year job, you lose 40k in benefits.
https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...
> 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.
If you scratch out the word "lazy" and instead have me say that the government is handing out benefits that create a perverse incentive to stay unemployed/underemployed because it's literally a cut in pay to get a job for a large number of people.
> 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.”
These people are trapped in a place where working for $20k a year isn't worth losing $40k a year in benefits (or more)