A congressional subcommittee laboring through forests of welfare statistics paused last week to report some disconcerting facts: a family of four in New York City, alert to their opportunities under welfare, Medicaid and a handful of other social-benefit programs, can harvest a yearly income of $8,959, an untaxed sum that is the equivalent of $11,500 in taxable wages. Such hypothetical rewards, in other words, operate as a real incentive not to work for a living. Indeed, the system makes it positively unprofitable to take a job, since that would result in massive disqualifications.
Thus a theoretical...
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