>People who have unemployment don't want to work because they'll loose unemployment
It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that a non-trivial percentage of people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and only then pursue work opportunities.
And in traditional fashion many people (mostly just one group, lets be honest..) throw out the baby with the bathwater on social safety nets. Because some people exploit it, the people who need it get damned.
It seems weird to be criticizing a group for identifying a problem that actually exists (welfare traps / phase out cliffs / perverse incentives) while proposing a solution to it that would actually work better (NIT/UBI). There are proponents of a negative income tax on both sides, e.g. conservative economist Milton Friedman.
I'm definitely not criticizing people for proposing an alternative. However, literally all of the .. group of people i know who might by lumped in that statement offer no alternative. Or rather, the alternative is a complete lack of social safety nets.
If you propose an alternative you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I find a good way to get out of this tribalist mindset is to realize that the stereotypical member of a given party that believes all of the party's official positions is not a real person who actually exists. (Politicians and political operatives sometimes pretend to be but even they're not in reality.)
Some of the people who vote for Republicans oppose taxes. Just the existence of taxes at all. "Taxation is theft." If you want to help people, don't pay taxes to the government, give that money to a charity.
Others think that the US should have the strongest military in the world. An obviously incompatible idea, right? Good luck crowdfunding your fleet of aircraft carriers. But they're in the same party.
It's not an inconsistency because they're not the same people, even if they both vote for Republicans. The Republican party platform itself is incoherent. So is the Democratic party platform. They're not logically consistent sets of policies, they're just coalitions that evolved to gather enough votes to control the government half of the time.
But here's the secret. Nobody cares about things nobody wants. Both parties aren't just automatically the opposite of one another. It isn't that one of them is in opposition to Kill All Humans and the other one is in favor of that. For one of the parties to advance something, it has to be because there are enough people who think we should do that to make it worth a party's time to try to get those votes.
So screw the tribes. Convince the whole public that good ideas are good ideas and bad ideas are bad ideas. When there is consensus in the public there will be consensus in the parties.
If the party who already agrees with a good idea is in control at a given time then you take the win, but if you can't convince most of the country then it just gets reversed in a couple years and we can do better than that.
It's not all people do this or all people do that. It 100% happens that a non-trivial percentage of people on government benefits (unemployment, etc.) choose to stay on these benefits for their entire duration and only then pursue work opportunities.