When Work Is Punished – Why The Poor Stay Poor

The dismal reality in America that we first exposed over 18 months ago is that 'work is punished'. Simply put, for increasingly more Americans it is now more lucrative – in the form of actual disposable income – to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. As the following brief clip exposes, supposedly well-intentioned welfare programs drastically decrease benefits at certain income thresholds – which in effect can make a breadwinner and his/her family worse off when they start earning more. Sound absurd? That's because it is.

As we noted in detail previously,

This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantitied, and explained by Alexander, "the single mom is better off earnings gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045."