Are generous welfare benefits keeping Americans from working for a living? The argument that welfare displaces work isn’t new, of course. It was a favorite of President Ronald Reagan. Cato itself did a major study in 1995 making essentially the same point. “Welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job, and the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years,” they write. The authors compare a nonworking family that gets a full suite of benefits to a working family that gets no benefits and conclude, not surprisingly, that the nonworking family would be better off.
Obviously, welfare is keeping people from working. Why would someone want to work at an entry-level job when they could simply register for welfare and collect more money from the government than they would actually working? Cuts have to be made on these programs because it's not right for a working person to make less money than a welfare recipient. Like I said before, welfare programs were created to help people, not to live off of them. Clearly, this is an incentive to not work for a living.