LogFAQs > #962473400

BettyWhite posted...

As a person who grew up around a lot of welfare abuse, it's always been that the second you start working you lose food stamps, medicaid, housing assistance. So hustling under the table plus collecting welfare is the most advantageous position you can take. Especially when entry-level jobs essentially cause you to make less money and create more stress than the welfare/hustle combo.

I always thought you could just expand assistance and even incentivize working without the threat of losing your security. Only taking it away once you reach an actual comfortable income level.

There's no doubt that some exploitation of the welfare system does happen. No one can really deny that. The issue is that there's so much more to the unemployment spike during the pandemic than the government cutting people a check. The claim that welfare or UBI encourages laziness or raises unemployment rates is a completely baseless argument, and some research in Finland may suggest the opposite:

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income

But even they acknowledge it's a complex topic with many factors, and we can't draw any definitive conclusions about it. Nightingale just refuses to get into it any further because he knows the correlation between handouts and laziness doesn't stand up to even the tiniest bit of scrutiny.