Work VS Welfare

[SubGod22]

The Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013

The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work. Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour. If Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work, they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work. Moreover, states should consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements.

Welfare pays more than minimum wage

The finds come 17 years after the Clinton administration, with bipartisan support from Congress, passed landmark welfare reform legislation that was supposed to move Americans away from entitlements and into the workforce.However, “welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job,” the study authors said. “And the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years.”Among the other findings is that welfare in 13 states pays more than $15 an hour, compared with the federal hourly minimum wage of $7.25.The disparity was even higher in nine states in which welfare pays more than the average first-year teacher’s salary and in the six most-generous states, which pay more than the entry-level salary for a computer programmer.

[RoyalShock]

Wow.

[Capitol Shock II]

Sounds like a great deal!

[ABC]

On a very closely related topic:

From Charles Murray's excellent book "Coming Apart", a section entitled "The Unbelievable Rise in Physical Disability":

The norm has softened. Consider first the strange case of workers who have convinced the government that they are unable to work. The percentage of workers who actually are physically or emotionally unable to work for reasons beyond their control has necessarily gone down since 1960. Medical care now cures or alleviates many ailments that would have prevented a person from working in 1960. Technology has produced compensation for physical handicaps and intellectual limitations. Many backbreaking manual jobs in 1960 are now done by sitting at the controls of a Bobcat. Yet the percentage of people qualifying for federal disability benefits because they are unable to work rose from .7% of the labor force in 1960 to 5.3% in 2010.

This rising trend line is not produced by changes in the legal definition of physical disability or the pool of people who qualify for benefits. Both have ben tweaked but not substantially changed since 1960. Increases in substance abuse don’t explain it (substance abuse is not a qualifying disability.) Maybe some of the growth in the 1960s can be explained by disabled people fist learning about the program. But the rest of the trend line reflects in part an increase in the number of people seeking to get benefits who aren’t really unable to work – an increase in Americans for whom the founding virtue
of industriousness is not a big deal anymore.

[wu_shizzle]

Disability is a way to maintain or grow funding while hiding unemployment numbers. It's the perfect scam for big gov't types.

Even NPR acknowledges it with devastating charts and graphs: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/