What does poorer than most people mean? Dual income middle-age people in mid/late career? So we're saying, "Enjoy all this welfare that'll leave you lower middle class forever with very little effort on your part or bust your hump for decades to maybe have a nicer place and car?" No wonder those people are just taking the easy way out.

Reminds me of the time I lived in a "gentifying" neighborhood in Chicago. Half the block was young professionals and the other half unemployed/unemployable people who seemed to have an endless party lifestyle of little to no responsibility. I'd be pulling up from work stressed and beaten up and they'd be partying in their yards everyday. Their properties not too different from mine, but rentals as opposed to condos. They had decent enough cars and lifestyles (always had nice shoes and phones) and from the few I befriended were almost 100% on welfare or had jobs that were adult daycare jobs programs and closer to 75% welfare. Hell, we had a bunch in public housing where city workers came by and mowed their lawns and shoveled their snow for them. It was bizarre. Society treated them like children and, of course, they welcomed it and refused to grow up.

Welfare makes for perverse incentives. This is something liberals have trouble admitting because they don't have a moral position out of it. Cut welfare and going against the welfare state is not something liberals want to do, regardless of real world outcomes. Meanwhile Chicago is seeing real population losses as businesses and those with options move away from the crime (leisure party/drug/gang lifestles leads to serious crime) and high taxes. For the record, my property taxes went up 30% this year and this is just one of the promised tax hikes on the way.

When social safety nets become too cushy, people just opt out of work and causes a great deal of social harm. I wouldn't dismiss it as nothing as it has real consequences. Not the least of it being a more competitive society produces more innovations and raises the quality of life of everyone. All the nordic people I know buy US products and learn English and consume US media and US innovations, including medical, almost constantly.

Nordic "law of Jante"[1] is great from the artist-bohemian "fuck you" lifestyle, but when it comes to economies and innovations its so anti-achievement and anti-exceptional that its closer to something like a Harrison Bergeron-esque dystopia. These are nations with unusually high rates of depression, anti-depressant use, and suicides. Obviously, self-reporting "happiness" is meaningless if everyone is offing themselves or eating four prozacs a day to make it through the work day. Seems to me, that forced equality doesn't really work and will introduce novel problems of its own, often worse than the problems its trying to fix.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

The ten rules state:

You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything.