Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching.
A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.
I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead instead?
> I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though.
I think you could make an argument that it should be. Getting people to break the law in a lot of small ways seems like it would be a good way to stop them from following the law to really stupid conclusions.
You should probably remove the welfare cliff to, but having a standing policy of "break stupid laws" seems like a tenable position for a society to take.
It seems like you are getting down-voted, but I think you are probably right.
One concern I have is that publicly announcing ways to break the law might result in the government cracking down on those particular ways. You could make a case for telling people how to break laws which don't really matter either way, and let them figure out how to break laws that are stupid and matter though.
Another, less pressing, concern I have is that if taken to its limit, no laws will matter anymore. I would hope human kindness would keep people from murdering and stealing from each other for the fun of it, but I'd expect some Tragedies of The Commons to occur. This could still be worth it though. I'm in a fortunate enough position to not really understand how limiting the stupid laws are, but I do understand that laws are hard to repeal.
This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!
I don't know how welfare fraud is investigated, but she probably has a near-zero risk of ever being audited for taxes. Again, welfare cliffs suck. EITC was supposed to replace them, but nothing else got rolled back because people were already dependent on those programs for jobs and benefits.
If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the terrible incentives that are a problem with the system" instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in this terribly incentivised system".
A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.