What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor

[maestrob]

June 13, 2021
By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist

I’m not going to pretend that I know how to interpret the jobs and inflation data of the past few months. My view is that this is still an economy warped by the pandemic, and that the dynamics are so strange and so unstable that it will be some time before we know its true state. But the reaction to the early numbers and anecdotes has revealed something deeper and more constant in our politics.

The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.

Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”

But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.

As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatosto, Ari Glogower and Darrick Hamilton for the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.

“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and $1.1 trillion supporting Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Beyond writing that the plan “would require new sources of revenue, additional borrowing or trade-offs with other government funding priorities,” Hamilton and his co-authors don’t say how they’d pay for it, and in our conversation, Hamilton was cagey. “There are many ways in which it can be paid for and deficit spending itself is not bad unless there are certain conditions,” he said. I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”

But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

It is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement, impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its elimination.

Nor would these costs be merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.

Hamilton, to his credit, was honest about these trade-offs. “Progressives don’t like to talk about this,” he told me. “They want this kumbaya moment. They want to say equity is great for everyone when it’s not. We need to shift our values. The capitalist class stands to lose from this policy, that’s unambiguous. They will have better resourced workers they can’t exploit through wages. Their consumer products and services would be more expensive.”

For the most part, America finds the money to pay for the things it values. In recent decades, and despite deep gridlock in Washington, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East and tax cuts for the wealthy. We have also spent trillions of dollars on health insurance subsidies and coronavirus relief. It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.

“Ultimately, it’s about us as a society saying these privileges and luxuries and comforts that folks in the middle class — or however we describe these economic classes — have, how much are they worth to us?” Jamila Michener, co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, told me. “And are they worth certain levels of deprivation or suffering or even just inequality among people who are living often very different lives from us? That’s a question we often don’t even ask ourselves.”

But we should.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opin ... e=Homepage

[Rach3]

GOP says “ Let Them Eat Cake “ ( or only have a car worth less than $5000 ).

WAPO, 6/18
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... ance-usda/

States around the country are attempting to make it harder for needy families to access federal food-assistance programs.

Republican lawmakers in Ohio, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana and others have proposed more restrictive policies to qualify for food assistance, cutting off benefits to those who have saved a little money or who drive a halfway decent car, or adding paperwork requirements to document tiny changes in income and efforts to find work.

The moves come even as more than 20 million adults reported their households sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the week ending June 7, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Federal food assistance for low-income Americans was expanded during the pandemic, with broad bipartisan support for removing barriers to programs such as SNAP (food stamps), WIC (for mothers and young children) and the benefit-card program that took the place of free and reduced-price school meals when schools were not in session.

But even as the Biden administration and the Agriculture Department, which administers these food-assistance programs, discuss extending additional benefits beyond the pandemic and recession, Republican-controlled state legislatures are balking.

Republicans in Congress and in these states point to a steadily improving economy and the $5 trillion in federal stimulus that has already been spent supporting families and companies during the crisis.

“There are many unfilled job openings out there, and to the extent that any program holds people back from seeking employment, that’s something states want to counteract,” said Angela Rachidi, a Rowe scholar in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “There is evidence to suggest that SNAP reduces employment. And during the pandemic [the USDA] allowed flexibility in long-standing integrity measures, so it’s perfectly appropriate for states to reintroduce those now.”

USDA extends universal free lunch through next school year, bringing relief to millions of food-insecure families
Eight states, from Alaska to Wisconsin, have allowed their states’ covid-19 disaster emergency orders to expire, cutting off aid programs even before the federal cutoff. Other states have introduced legislation to make these assistance benefits harder to get.

Republicans nationwide have been criticizing unemployment insurance and benefits such as SNAP, saying they are causing labor market difficulties and providing an incentive for Americans to stay home and avoid returning to work.
The idea is, by removing the safety net, people would be more eager to fill jobs in industries that are facing worker shortages. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell mentioned on Wednesday during a news conference that the expiration of federal unemployment benefits over the summer months is expected to push more workers back into the labor force.

Some state legislators are also concerned about the integrity of the programs, pointing to widespread misuse and fraud, said Ellen Vollinger, legal director of Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit organization working to eradicate poverty-related hunger and undernutrition.

Vollinger, however, said that a move to an electronic transfer system, like a debit card, has given the USDA a strong data tool to spot red flags and that widespread fraud has never been documented. Meanwhile, she said, reducing benefits “is not smart economics.”

“We’ve heard it from both Powell and [Treasury Secretary Janet L.] Yellen, that in order to have a robust and equitable recovery there will be a need for a continued fiscal stimulus, and one piece of that is to have additional SNAP benefits,” Vollinger said. She says that beyond worsening food insecurity, states like Ohio will deprive themselves of a “countercyclical tool” to help boost their economies. According to a USDA study, benefits to the local economy extend beyond the initial money provided to recipients.

Biden administration reverses Trump decision, will provide $1 billion a month more in emergency food assistance.

In the Ohio state budget, Republicans inserted last-minute changes to SNAP. They now require recipients to report any shifts in income over $500 within 30 days and document child-support agreements. The law also now requires new reviews of assets, meaning those with as much as $2,250 in checking or savings accounts or those who own cars worth more than $4,650 could lose benefits. The changes were drawn from a bill sponsored by state Sen. Tim Schaffer (R-Lancaster).

“There is never a wrong time to fight back against fraud, especially within our public benefits systems. Fraud and waste are never acceptable,” Schaffer wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “No one loses benefits that needs help and there is no change in the eligibility criteria. The goal of this legislation is to simply weed out the fraud and waste within the State of Ohio’s public benefit systems. In doing so, more funding and resources will be available to Ohioans who truly need this assistance the most.”

Hope Lane-Gavin, public policy and external affairs associate at the Center for Community Solutions, a nonprofit think tank in Cleveland, said that Schaffer has been working toward preventing fraud in public benefits for some time. Her organization did not anticipate the asset and income limits and child-support requirements in the state budget bill. She said excluding low-income Americans with cars valued at over $5,000 is wrongheaded, because cars are essential tools for re-employment and upward mobility.

“We were taken off guard, we did not expect this in the middle of a pandemic,” she said. She pointed out that some states, including Virginia, don’t count cars when they look at those qualifying for food assistance.

Ohio is just one of the states trying to limit access to the federal safety net.

In Arizona, lawmakers have introduced a bill to reduce SNAP enrollment by restricting household income levels, mandating child support and requiring more paperwork to repeatedly document eligibility for the program or face losing benefits.

In Missouri, lawmakers would newly require SNAP recipients to prove they have asked for child support to get or keep benefits — which can in some cases put mothers in close contact with former abusers, advocates said. A separate bill would impose work requirements for SNAP participants.

This spring, Arkansas lawmakers enacted a law that prevents the state from giving unemployed workers extra time on SNAP, a flexibility the USDA gave to states because of the pandemic. Another newly enacted law will require additional eligibility verifications and extra paperwork for Medicaid and SNAP recipients.

In both Montana and Mississippi, lawmakers introduced bills adding paperwork requirements making it difficult to apply for or stay on food assistance.

As hunger increased, SNAP benefits surged, new data shows.
The federal SNAP program, which serves an average of 40.3 million people per month, is often misunderstood by state legislatures, according to Ed Bolen, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“Some states jump in and offer state bills that require the agency to do something. It’s often not from a place of understanding, more cookie-cutter or template bills that don’t really address specific needs, but they can sound like they are dealing with program integrity,” Bolen says, adding that frequently boilerplate language for these state bills is drawn from right-wing advocacy groups such as the Foundation of Government Accountability or American Legislative Exchange Council.

Requiring participants to report every tiny change in income, Bolen said, has been shown to be “useless work — and a lot of it — a death by a thousand paper cuts,” and work requirements have been proven mostly to dramatically cut participation in the program.

Noreen Springstead, executive director of WhyHunger, a national nonprofit organization working to end hunger, said the pandemic has illuminated that food banks and food charities can meet people’s immediate food needs, but that they are not a longer-term solution to widespread hunger.

“Increases in SNAP, bolstering WIC and Pandemic EBT actually worked; people feel more settled,” she said. “Yet here we are trying to divide people yet again. We blame low-wage workers when we never talk about low-wage employers.”

[jserraglio]

Reactionary capitalism is the counterpart in Western democracies to fascism and communism in the rest of the world, each of the three being pernicious in its own way.

In the U.S.A., the growth of the Koch Network explains a lot about how GOPers today are different from Goldwaterites & Reaganites of a couple generations ago. Extremist free-market libertarians have taken over the once Grand Old Party.


Figure 1 A Variety of Koch Network Components Emerged Over Time


note: I believe 2004 resource rhares in this chart should read 2014 resource shares. Not even the Koch Bros billions could transform GOP resources this dramatically in just two years!

[Rach3]

From WAPO's Coronavirus Newsletter tonight:

"Republicans are attempting to limit those who qualify for food assistance, which had been expanded to help more Americans during the pandemic. The effort to reduce the federal safety net is underway in several states, including Arkansas, Missouri and Ohio; there, for instance, Republicans added criteria to the state budget that could prevent people who own a car worth more than $4,650 or who have $2,250 in a bank account from receiving SNAP benefits.

As the economy climbs out of last year’s pandemic crater, the wealthiest are already off to the races: An avalanche of luxury spending has begun. Club memberships, hotel stays and amusement park trips are among the spending categories where the rise has accelerated the most. Just ask the travel agent who's booking $20,000 cruise trips to the Bahamas."

[jserraglio]

"Republicans are attempting to limit those who qualify for food assistance, which had been expanded to help more Americans during the pandemic. The effort to reduce the federal safety net is underway in several states, including Arkansas, Missouri and Ohio; there, for instance, Republicans added criteria to the state budget that could prevent people who own a car worth more than $4,650 or who have $2,250 in a bank account from receiving SNAP benefits.

Reactionary capitalists. On principle, this over-the-hill gang will forgo all Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare benefits, plus their tax shelters. Such government welfare programs must be privatized and/or ended.

[maestrob]

Such government welfare programs must be privatized and/or ended.

They tried three times with Obamacare, but that didn't work out, did it?

How many times did Republicans try to undo Social Security in the 1930's, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court? Not to mention Ronald Reagan's campaign (He even recorded an entire LP!) against "socialized medicine" when Medicare was being debated?

They have fought these improvements in our society for a century, and have consistently campaigned to cut back these programs (Remember $10/mo. food stamps in the 1990's?) once they've been implemented, yet folks keep voting them in.

If they had their way, we would be a third world country now.

So now you have to sell your car if it's worth over $5,000 in order to qualify for benefits? Maybe they'd prefer you to use a bicycle to get to work.

I really don't understand their implacable impulse to humiliate people. I really don't.

[barney]

I really don't understand their implacable impulse to humiliate people. I really don't.

It's truly bizarre. If humanity involves compassion, empathy and caring (which I hope it does), these Republicans are sub-humans - at least in this area. Our Liberal Government in Australia has the same punitive attitude - poverty is a crime and must be punished. All Liberals know the poor are malevolent spongers looking to rip everyone else off and must be kept down by hook or crook. One of our Australian posters is Exhibit A.

[jserraglio]

I really don't understand their implacable impulse to humiliate people. I really don't.

It's truly bizarre. If humanity involves compassion, empathy and caring (which I hope it does), these Republicans are sub-humans - at least in this area. Our Liberal Government in Australia has the same punitive attitude - poverty is a crime and must be punished. All Liberals know the poor are malevolent spongers looking to rip everyone else off and must be kept down by hook or crook. One of our Australian posters is Exhibit A.

Despite what rabid reactionary capitalists like Belle claim, or rigid libertarians like Rand Paul maintain, grassroots Tea Partiers and Trumpists by a large margin support social welfare gov’t programs for themselves but seek to restrict or deny them to others. Trump knew that and was careful not to advocate privatizing Social Security, like Koch Network darling Paul Ryan.

Sociologists like Theda Skocpol who regularly conduct field interviews with ultra-right GOPers, as opposed to simply polling them, report that these very conservative folks do not see their position as inconsistent: They are hard-working contributors to the system, they say, and thus deserve their benefits; whereas others, in particular immigrants and people of color, they claim, are undeserving moochers who haven’t worked hard enough to earn these benefits.

[maestrob]

I really don't understand their implacable impulse to humiliate people. I really don't.

It's truly bizarre. If humanity involves compassion, empathy and caring (which I hope it does), these Republicans are sub-humans - at least in this area. Our Liberal Government in Australia has the same punitive attitude - poverty is a crime and must be punished. All Liberals know the poor are malevolent spongers looking to rip everyone else off and must be kept down by hook or crook. One of our Australian posters is Exhibit A.

Despite what rabid reactionary capitalists like Belle claim, or rigid ideologues like Mitch and Rand maintain, grassroots Tea Partiers and Trumpists by a large margin support social welfare gov’t programs for themselves but seek to restrict or deny them to others? Why?

Sociologists like Theda Skocpol who regularly conduct field interviews with ultra-right GOPers, as opposed to simply polling them, report that these very conservative folks do not see their position as inconsistent: They are hard-working contributors to the system, they say, and thus deserve their benefits; whereas others, in particular immigrants and people of color, they claim, are undeserving moochers who haven’t worked hard enough to earn these benefits.

"Moochers, " eh?

11 million workers in meat packing plants, restaurants, cleaning our offices & hotels and in the fields picking our crops for conglomerates surely pay more than a few dollars in taxes that they'll never see returned to them.

[jserraglio]

In the Q-niverse, with its subtext of ethnic & racial nationalism, these are regarded as the undeserving poor. Many of which have neither papers nor English. Illegal immigrants, they believe, take our jobs and live high off the hog at the expense of the rest of us hard-working Americans. That infuriates them.

I see this political line pushed here by Belle—who has been guilty early and often of taunting the U.S. about its immigrant influx.

[maestrob]

In the Q-niverse, with its subtext of ethnic & racial nationalism, these are regarded as the undeserving poor. Many of which have neither papers nor English. Illegal immigrants, they believe, take our jobs and live high off the hog at the expense of the rest of us hard-working Americans. That infuriates them.

I see this political line pushed here by Belle—who has been guilty early and often of taunting the U.S. about its immigrant influx.

Sure.

As we've discussed before, 11 million "undocumented' amounts to roughly 1/3 of 1% of our total population, but who's counting, when a "border crisis" plays so well politically?

[jserraglio]

In the Q-niverse, with its subtext of ethnic & racial nationalism, these are regarded as the undeserving poor. Many of which have neither papers nor English. Illegal immigrants, they believe, take our jobs and live high off the hog at the expense of the rest of us hard-working Americans. That infuriates them.

I see this political line pushed here by Belle—who has been guilty early and often of taunting the U.S. about its immigrant influx.

Sure.

As we've discussed before, 11 million "undocumented' amounts to roughly 1/3 of 1% of our total population, but who's counting, when a "border crisis" plays so well politically?

I agree, but also feel there are ethno-racial anxieties at play beneath the politics. Freud might have called it the Othello-complex.

[maestrob]

Slaves built the White House, Chinese immigrants built our cross-country railroads, but so what, right?

[jserraglio]

Slaves built the White House, Chinese immigrants built our cross-country railroads, but so what, right?

”Democracy, shamocracy!!!!!! What about some animals being more equal THEN others??????”