See this is where I’m jamming. People don’t need to be “incentivised” to find work. They seek it on their own. This has been proven in multiple studies. Politicians saying they need “incentives” have just found a weaselly way to say being hard up should be punished.

EDIT:

• Finnish UBI experiment gave a bunch of citizens a living wage per month with no obligation to seek employment. They found recipients worked essentially the same number of days as the control group. Employment rates between both groups were virtually identical

• Research by Marinescu, Jones, and Harvey (2018) analyzed decades of data from Alaska’s unconditional yearly cash dividend. They found that guaranteed cash payments had zero negative effect on overall employment.

• Randomised controlled trials in Kenya and other developing nations conducted by MIT and Harvard evaluated cash transfer programs across multiple countries. The cross-country synthesis published by the World Bank and NBER found no systematic evidence that unconditional cash transfers reduce work effort or increase leisure time.

And then you get the sociologists involved and again and again they find that people seek work regardless of financial coercion or benefit cutoffs, Covid was the big whopper, a lot of people - especially in the US, granted - were receiving more “support payments” than their actual wages. They still went into work when possible. Likewise, country after country found that when they cancelled off teh support payments started during lockodwn, the employment rate did not increase in any meaningful manner

so threatening people with low money “get a job” is just…cruelty based on nothing but bias.