“Doesn’t Remotely Comport With The Evidence”: Why The GOP’s War Against Welfare Programs Is Both Cruel And Pointless
Why do people work?
That question is at the center of the conservative case against anti-poverty programs. Republicans like Rand Paul conclude that policies like disability insurance or the Earned Income Tax Credit take away a key motivation — putting food on the table — that propels people to look for work. Thus these policies must be reducing labor supply and economic growth.
Liberals often don’t confront this point head-on, arguing instead that it’s unjust for people to starve because they’re out of work. It’s an inevitability, given that conventional understandings of market capitalism require around one out of 20 people to be unemployed at all times.
This is a good point, but the conservative argument is worth confronting on the merits. While there is an inherent trade-off between work and economic output, the story is not so simple as conservatives make out. Austerity — which often requires cutting anti-poverty programs — also kills labor supply.
For an example of the conservative position, let’s go to Daniel Mitchell, who wrote up some new findings from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
The mid-1990s welfare reform apparently helped labor supply by pushing recipients to get a job. Disability programs, by contrast, strongly discourage productive behavior, while wage subsidies such as the earned-income credit ostensibly encourage work but also can discourage workforce participation for secondary earners in a household. [The Federalist]
There is some surface plausibility to this argument. Social Security reduced poverty among the elderly by 71 percent, but in so doing probably also reduced the number of old people working. On some margin, there is a trade-off between work and poverty reduction, because a lot of jobs suck and people will quit them if they can.
However, it leaves a great deal out. Most critically, it doesn’t consider the business cycle. At the bottom of the Great Recession, for instance, the ratio of job seekers to job openings was nearly seven to one. That means it was mechanically impossible for six out of seven unemployed people to get jobs then. In order for “pro-work” welfare reform to have a prayer of working, the jobs you’re pushing people into actually have to exist.
In other words, when there is a recession, fiscal and monetary stimulus is the way to preserve labor supply, and austerity is the way to destroy it. But if you refuse to accept the logic of aggregate demand, as Mitchell did back in the very pit of the Great Recession, you’re stuck arguing that soup kitchens caused the Great Depression.
The international context presents an even more obvious problem. The conservative account of anti-poverty programs straightforwardly implies that the larger the welfare state, the lower the labor force participation rate (that is, the fraction of people who are working or actively looking for a job). If people don’t have to work due to generous government benefits, then they won’t work.
This doesn’t remotely comport with the evidence. In point of fact, by developed world standards, the U.S. welfare state is extremely stingy and our labor force participation rate is quite low. Take Sweden, for instance. It boasts the welfare benefits of Ayn Rand’s deepest nightmares: universal health and dental insurance, 480 days of paid parental leave per child, a monthly child benefit of about $120 up through age 16, two weeks sick leave, government pension at age 65, and so on.
Overall, if we look just at market incomes, then Sweden has about the same market poverty rate as the U.S. — but its welfare benefits cut the actual poverty rate down to half that of the U.S. That’s the scale of transfers we’re talking about, and other Nordic nations do even better. Yet Sweden’s labor force participation rate was 64.1 percent as of two years ago, more than a percentage point better than the U.S. rate, which has been hovering below 63 percent for the last couple years.
Again, at some point there has to be a trade-off between work and output. In decades previous, the U.S. beat European nations in labor force participation, because those nations chose relatively more free time as they became richer, instead of maniacally ratcheting up GDP for its own sake.
But correct macroeconomic policy also matters a great deal. If there is a catastrophic collapse in aggregate demand that is not fixed for years and years, that’s also going to burn up labor supply — in a way that is both cruel and pointless.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 28, 2015
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Most of the discussion around this issue is from campaign rhetoric. There are many who believe people in need are lazy. That is far from true, as the fastest rising population of homeless people in the US are working mothers. The homeless families we help (as a volunteer board member) work, some with more than one job, but their hours were cut, they lost one job, they had a healthcare or transportation crisis, etc. and lost their home.
There are many who believe people in need are drug addicts and alcoholics. In FL, before their drug testing program for welfare participants was ruled unconstitutional, some interest data was retrieved. The people on welfare were less likely than the general population to be on drugs.
There are many who believe people in need are gaming the system, when the data on fraud shows it exist, but is not very prevalent.
There are many who believe the people in need are less pious. When we started a faith community volunteer effort to help our homeless families, we made the faith community sign a statement that they would not proselytize. We realized we did not need it, as it became apparent, who was witnessing to whom? Often, their faith was all our families had, so they witnessed in reverse to our volunteers by their undying faith.
There is a study out that shows in our land of haves and have nots, the variance became more dramatic around the time of the Reagan tax cuts, where the Trickle Down economics was shown not to work and income became more widely disparate. So, when people say the War on Poverty failed, they look past this key variable. And, yes it could be improved, but especially with the older populations, the War on Poverty has been very successful as the percentage numbers greatly declined due Social Security improvements, Medicare and Medicaid.
I am glad the GOP is talking about income inequality, because it is important, but we need to look at actions. Getting rid of the ACA, for example, would be terribly harmful to those in need. States that have not expanded Medicaid under the ACA are harming people in need. Not embracing solar energy is harmful to rural areas, as the rampant double digit percentage job growth is occurring in more rural settings. And, we need to invest in our infrastructure which is falling apart – road, bridges, power and internet grids, deeper ports, old manufacturing sites which could be repurposed, etc. are job creators and straight out of our historical American playbook per Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum in “That Used to be Us: How America fell behind in the world it created and how it can come back.”
The Friedman/ Mandelbaum book flies directly in the face of those who want to drown government in the bathtub. Our history is one of combined public/ private/ government investment in infrastructure. To ignore that history to make campaign points may play well, but is detrimental to our country and people.
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