[lostcolony]

Yep. Politicians for years have made it super hard to get benefits, and now decry people not wanting to work. There's a huge gap between "eligible for all benefits" and "makes enough to offset the loss of benefits", and no clear way to cross over short of getting paid $20+ an hour. Trying to make benefits reduce proportional to income would work, but requires a lot of bookkeeping and proof (and, of course, some political will), so that's unlikely to get traction...and raising the minimum wage to the amount necessary so that any job will take one over the gap is -also- politically undoable.

So, yeah. Lots of safety nets, all of which require you to live in extreme poverty to qualify for, and which still don't equate to a reasonable standard of living.

[seoaeu]

The problem is more that there's a whole bunch of different programs that don't make sense together. The "right" thing to do would be to combine all of them and make it so that you lose say 35¢ of benefits per extra $1 of income, so that even after tax it's still always better to earn more. Unfortunately, everyone is afraid that any attempt to overhaul the welfare system would be co-opted by those looking to gut it instead. So we're stuck with a broken system

[DarylZero]

Just make all the benefits universal, so they never go down no matter your income. This is the right solution mathematically. Politically though it's divisive because it also makes the programs harder to repeal in the future.

[imtringued]

All you need is progressive income taxes and taxing welfare benefits as income. Make it so welfare dollars bump your income tax bracket faster than income from a job.