If you want off bad enough you (General You) can get off... I come from a very repressed area, where we lost almost all of our major industries within 2 years... Many of us faced job losses and cuts, yet most of us found a way to survive without welfare..
Sure if you look at straight dollars it's "hard" to get off, because you may make less money, have to move, have to live in a teeny house with no luxuries...
But those are choices, choices to stay on the system rather than do everything you can to get off.... Choices to not accept work that does not meet your criteria rather than work at menial jobs, multiple if necessary until a better comes along... And if you give it your all, work hard and keep pounding the pavement that better job will come along and someone will notice your effort
You're assuming that these people want "luxuries" and already live in a large house. If they started out with nothing, and are barely scraping by in the first place, the choice between taking a part-time, minimum wage job that doesn't pay the rent on your tiny apartment, or staying on the system and being able to buy food...?
I think NicoleJ has a valid point. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think she's saying that helping people off of the system is the ONLY solution. Only that it's a part of the solution. It's like the animal shelter crowding problem - we can't solve it ONLY by spay/neuter, or ONLY by adopting. But many solutions working together to solve a complex problem with many facets and many causes.
And you can't realistically compare your experience in your town with someone else's experience in a different town/state/country in a different time period. Any more than I, in Los Angeles, can complain that people in Detroit just aren't looking hard enough for jobs. Sometimes jobs just DON'T exist - or not enough of them.
My family lived in the Silicon Valley during the dot-com crash. My brother, who was in high school, and his friends couldn't find any part-time jobs. Not even at McDonalds - all of those jobs were filled by out of work software engineers. Believe me, they looked, but the unemployment rate at that time was astronomical. And there were far more out of work engineers than there were cashier jobs at McDonalds. The highways at rush hour looked like post-apocalyptic - no cars at all.
My dad was lucky enough to have a network of friends who helped him get another job - at a 50% pay cut. Fine, you do what you have to. They ended up having to leave the Bay Area. Again, you do what you have to. But they were LUCKY. They had a house they could sell (albeit at a loss.) They had enough savings to enable them to live in the red for years, they had supportive friends and family, and they didn't have any medical or other emergencies.
Had they not had these things, who knows what would have happened. Someone living paycheck to paycheck at that time would have been devastated. If you're already near the bottom and something like that happens, it's not so easy to recover.
Ok, I'm done ranting.
Anyone read Nickel & Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich? A journalist tried an experiment, starting with nothing to see where she could get with the proverbial hard work in several US cities. It's a pretty eye-opening book.