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Is thé welfare population mostly those people? IIRC it’s mostly thé working poor.
The question of whether poor person bad behavior is encouraged by the welfare system actually mostly centers around the extent to which welfare eligibility rules drive down the marriage rate among the poor. We should probably fix that, but the fix doesn’t look like ‘just cut welfare spending’.
The "working poor" are mostly a myth. The vast majority of poor people don't work and aren't looking for work.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2021/
This statement seems somewhat misleading.
Your article states that, in year 2021, 38 million people lived below the official poverty line, and only 6.4 million (17 percent) of those were "working poor" (i. e., had spent at least 27 weeks either working or looking for work), leaving 83 percent of the poor as nonworking.
However, that denominator of 38 million includes children and retirees. According to the original Census dataset, the better denominator of people below the official poverty line and between ages 18 and 64 is 21 million people, leading to a "working poor" proportion of 30 percent. This new proportion of 70 percent nonworkers among poor people who are neither children nor retirees still possibly counts as a "vast majority", but it isn't quite as high as the original proportion.
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