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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @06:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the suppresion-of-the-proletariat dept.

Analysis of a study (PDF) carried by UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education shows that isn't the poor people won't work but the work they do can't sustain them. As a blog on WaPo puts it:

We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. [...] We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work.

The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.

This picture casts the culprit in a different light: Taxpayers are spending a lot of money subsidizing not people who won't work, but industries that don't pay their workers a living wage. Through these four programs alone [food stamps, Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, income supports through welfare], federal and state governments spend about $150 billion a year aiding working families, according to the analysis (the authors define people who are working here as those who worked at least 10 hours a week, at least half the year).

The workers relying the most on social programs: Fast Food (52%), Home Care (48%), Child Care (46%) and Part-time college students (25%).

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:22PM (#171041)

    Sure, some people will sit around on their ass and watch TV and do drugs all day, but likely they weren't contributing members of the job force anyway. Maybe there's someone else who actually wants to work who can take their place. Yeah, some people are just lazy, but there are already lazy people scamming the current system.

    It wasn't that long ago that we had a story about good social safety nets make people more likely [soylentnews.org] to want to work, so a basic income would actually reduce the number of people simply living off the basic income, provided there actually exist jobs for them to work.