Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Because a work requirement is a lot of bureaucracy that it is best to do without. If people have very transient jobs, then their eligibility is off-and-on.The Left is actually very much opposed to Manchin's idea to have a work requirement on these new or expanded entitlement spending plans. "Working families" is just a marketing term. In reality, giving people more entitlements will discourage people from working, as they get money anyway. Plus, in some states/counties paying rent is still optional.
There is a reason that post offices use a flat rate for anything that is not very heavy. In the 1830's, inventor Charles Babbage got involved with investigations on how to make postal service more efficient. At the time, postal rates were by distance and weight, even for the lightest bits of mail. He discovered that doing the calculations necessary to get a rate had added quite a lot to postal rates, so he proposed skipping that and having a flat rate for the lighter sorts of mail. That led to the 4-penny post in 1839 and the 1-penny post in 1840, with postage stamps as a convenient form of prepayment.
Right-wingers claim that they dislike bureaucracy. Yet they seem fond of bureaucracy here.
In addition to unnecessary costs and inconveniences for both government and citizen, there are other reasons why means-testing or work-requirement can be detrimental. Some people have been forced to take a financial loss — with transit and baby-sitting costs exceeding wages, not to mention the wastage of time — to fulfill a work requirement. Means testing introduces the possibility of "cliffs." For example, if a $200 credit is available only for those earning less than $1000, a worker making $999 should turn down any raise of less than $200. Even if these cliffs are designed with a better slope, a person with TWO subsidies can still fall prey to a steep cliff.
What are the disadvantages of giving a credit to someone who "doesn't need it"? Very little, in fact! Conceptually the extra government outgo is recovered with higher income taxes. A person getting a $200 subsidy he doesn't need may, in effect, reimburse that unneeded money via his income tax. This has no bureaucratic cost, obviously: the detailed numbers in the tax tables were due to change anyway. (Yes, some folks with the ABILITY to pay but without the NEED — e.g. childless people on a subsidy for child-care — may lose a little, while middle-classers with children get a slight benefit. "The Horror! The Horror!")
It does seem odd that the QOP, who "hate red-tape," are eager to means-test, while progressives, who supposedly care only for the poor, are happy to help the middle-class. This is partly due to the left being fans of smart government, while the QOP has had a "Sabotage government! Starve the Beast!" agenda for decades. But another reason is that many on the right have an aversion to any hand-out that doesn't obviously benefit them personally. There are some on the right who would literally rather their own children go hungry, than see school food subsidies that help children in a different ethnic group.