There is a bitter fight brewing in Congress over work requirements for welfare recipients.
President Biden labeled “wacko” the Republican proposal in the debt ceiling bill to require able-bodied childless beneficiaries to either work, obtain job training, or do volunteer work. Our great uniter claimed, “Republicans are cutting benefits for folks they don’t seem to care much about.”
The welfare industry chimed in, saying poor people have no transportation options and job training was not available in some areas. Welfare recipients will be thrown into abject poverty if required to work, because apparently, they are incapable of self-sufficiency.
Reform advocates countered that not working is a choice and most people, including low-income people, have more satisfying lives when working and providing for their families.
So which side is correct? They can’t both be, and the answer is important to get right for the future of our nation.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could run an experiment, mandating work requirements in welfare programs to see what happens? Good news – that’s already been done.
In the 1990s, the Newt Gingrich-led Congress passed, and President Clinton, after extensive urging, signed a comprehensive welfare reform bill. The law required able-bodied adults to work or be in a job training program to receive benefits. It also placed lifetime limits on welfare.
By the 1990s, the War on Poverty had been waged for three decades. Many Americans were becoming disillusioned as they saw that poverty was winning.
LBJ’s welfare programs to wipe out poverty had been horrendously expensive and yet poverty levels hadn’t been dented. Instead, millions of low-income Americans had adopted welfare as a way of life, to be passed on through generations.
When the reforms were implemented, welfare recipients weren’t cast into the streets, as Senator Ted Kennedy had predicted. In fact, it was a stunning policy success. Welfare caseloads declined by 60 percent. 70 percent of those leaving began working.
There’s more. Government savings were $100 billion in today’s dollars. Best of all, the child poverty rate plummeted every year from 1994 to 2000. For people leaving the welfare plantation, income increases soon easily exceeded welfare benefits. Moreover, people with jobs enjoyed healthier lives, better marriages, and vastly improved financial futures than those stuck on welfare.
So, welfare reformers declared victory and moved on, unfortunately leaving the same entrenched bureaucracy as before to manage the system. Before long, clients were again being evaluated for program eligibility, not work readiness. Workarounds were offered for those who preferred not to work.
As the bureaucracy oozed back into control, work mandates weakened. Many states quietly removed them altogether, as Arizona did for its Medicaid program.
With the onset of the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration took the opportunity to eviscerate work requirements altogether in federal welfare programs. Thankfully, grocery clerks, truck drivers and cops stayed on the job, but not teachers or welfare recipients.
Now that the pandemic has officially ended, work requirements still have not been reinstated as promised. In fact, Biden refuses to consider such a proposal in the debt ceiling negotiations.
The ending of the pandemic and work requirements have been a boon for the welfare industry. In response to COVID, Congress also increased the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) benefit amount and banned states from removing people who were no longer eligible from the Medicaid roles.
As a result, welfare has become more pervasive than ever. 40 million people are now receiving food stamps, even though it’s common knowledge that taxpayers are funding a lot of chips and soda. Medicaid enrollment has soared to 85 million, now that it has been expanded to include working age men above the poverty line.
There are up to 4 million employable adults not working while 10 million job openings are available. This is a great opportunity to get more Americans back to work, yet Democrats seem more interested in keeping Americans dependent on government than in reducing poverty.
We should absolutely have a working safety net, but not a welfare system that keeps Americans mired in poverty. Why not learn from our own history and return again to prioritizing work over welfare?
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
Suddenly America is facing a severe structural labor shortage. We all feel it, whether we’re trying for reservations at a restaurant that has reduced hours, seeking handyman help, or just trying to get somebody to answer the dang phone.
Nurses and teachers are in short supply. Employers report at least two job openings for each job seeker. Beyond personal inconvenience, when workers produce fewer services and goods for dollars to chase, prices go up and inflation results.
You can partly blame it on COVID. Politicians shut down much of the economy, then shoved trillions of dollars in “COVID relief funds” to those forced not to work.
Unfortunately, the spigot was never fully closed, and many Americans found that sleeping in agreed with them. Europe, Canada, and Japan all rebounded while the U.S. was left with about one million fewer workers.
Adding to the problem, the youth anti-work movement continues to grow. Work is for suckers and victims. Social media outlets praise workers for quitting their jobs. Others are lionized for being “quiet quitters,” idlers who do the least work possible while still collecting a paycheck.
The inspiration for the anti-work cult traces back to the Marxist anti-capitalist movement, a long-time foe of the American work tradition. Their thesis is that capitalist employment is exploitive and therefore, not working is virtuous.
It coincidentally turns out that, for many Americans, government policy has significantly disincentivized work. And for these people, working harder is no longer the way to get ahead.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm and John Early explain how this effect is commonly underestimated because of the way income is reported by the federal government. The Census Bureau, inexplicably, does not treat most transfer payments as income.
That’s important because government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of households, income-wise, ballooned by 269% between 1967 and 2017 while the middle 20% realized only a 154% increase in their after tax income.
The results were staggering. In 2017, the bottom 20% of households had $6,941 in “income” and only 36% of working age people actually worked. However, after the transfer payments and taxes are included, as they should be, their total income was $48,806.
The second to the bottom quintile had 85% employment and an average total income of $50,492, actually less than a $2,000 difference from the lowest group. The middle quintile was 92% employed and earned $66,453, but after taxes and transfers that shrank to $61,350, merely 26% more than the bottom quintile.
But wait, there’s more. Family units are smaller in the lowest quintile than the others. Per capita, the adjusted net income was actually $33,653 in the lowest quintile, $29,497 in the next lowest, and $32,754 in the middle.
Sorry for all the numbers, but they tell an important story. For 60% of Americans, working much harder and even earning more money produced a negligible net benefit. Means-tested government programs were just as lucrative. It’s not hard to understand why the percentage of working age people in the lowest quintile who were employed fell from 68% in 1967 to 36% in 2017.
Policymakers seem to believe that incentives don’t matter, but they do. People who choose not to work and live off the labor of others earn some understandable resentment, but they’re not acting irrationally under the circumstance. The heart of the problem is their enablers in Big Government who, for their own political purposes, created this perverse system.
It’s often forgotten that in the 1990s, governments established work requirements for many means-tested benefits. “Workfare” was a generational policy success. In spite of hysterical warnings that “children would starve in the streets,” poverty rates dropped as employment increased.
Unfortunately, the advocates for workfare declared victory and moved on. But welfare bureaucrats stayed put, patiently reestablishing their vision of welfare without requirements. So now poverty is supported rather than reduced. And Arizona was among the states that quietly removed the work requirements for Medicaid and other welfare programs.
But government handouts that replace labor don’t work. They erode self-reliance, worker pride, and self-sufficiency. They threaten our shared prosperity. And most of all, they undermine American values.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a landmark report in which he contended that the rising number of black families headed by unmarried mothers would reduce the prospects for Blacks to rise out of poverty, in spite of that era’s landmark civil rights legislation.
Moynihan was furiously denounced for his efforts. But he was proven right, and he would be even more correct making the same observations today.
It’s been a tough half century for families. Although Moynihan focused his concerns on Blacks, family breakdown correlates as much with income level as it does with race.
Because there are more low-income Blacks, more black children are raised by single mothers, but the overall percentage of births to unmarried women has gone from 5% in 1960 to 40% today. In 1970, 84% of U.S. children spent their entire childhood with both biological parents. Today, about half do.
Partly because of the withering criticisms directed at Moynihan, the chattering classes have mostly avoided the issue of family deterioration, at least until recently. But the consequences have been enormous.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty analyzed the causes of income disparity and concluded that “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.”
In fact, there is scant evidence that race or racial discrimination causes the multiple economic and societal problems associated with family breakdown. Government spending doesn’t seem to have any effect, nor even does education explain the income gap. It’s family status itself.
So, what caused families, long our core civic institution and the means for passing on our values, to falter? There’s no easy answer, of course, but scholars note a sea change in our views of almost everything that began about the middle of the last century.
Especially in developed countries, people became more anti-authoritarian and more critical of traditional rules and roles. Views about sex outside of marriage, divorce, cohabitation, and single parenthood significantly changed.
It wasn’t all bad. Many of the changes extended civil rights and created a fairer society. But some of the “progress” has been tough on the kids.
For example, it’s not judgmental, just descriptive, to note that the increase in cohabitation has resulted in more unstable family structures.
Even with children, cohabiting couples break up faster and more often than married couples. Unmarried fathers are even less likely than divorced dads to form lasting bonds with their children. What may appear to be simply a matter of documentation can have a profound impact on the well-being of children.
Changing mores regarding sex before marriage has resulted in millions of young women bearing children for which they have made no financial or other preparations.
It’s not judging. It is the essence of caring for each of us to do a better job of informing these potential mothers of the catastrophic lifelong consequences of their casual decisions, both on themselves and the new life they are bringing into the world. We should also do a better job of making unwed fathers, many of whom openly boast about the children they are not raising, accountable for the consequences of their actions.
As Ronald Reagan might say, government is not the solution to this problem. It is the problem. There’s no question that the Great Society welfare rules, requiring recipients to be unmarried and unemployed to qualify for benefits, led to countless women making the sensible decision to “marry the government” rather than the uneducated, undependable father.
Government has also mortally harmed families by taking over many of their traditional functions, especially care of the young and the aged. Families traditionally stayed together to assure that those unable to provide for themselves would be sustained.
Today, it is assumed that the elderly are entitled to be cared for by the government. Some adults are known to simply walk away from their families because they don’t see the need.
We need sound strong families for all Americans, not only the wealthy and privileged. It would help if government did less harm. But we need to do a better job of protecting and prioritizing our families, respecting the outsized role they play in making our country strong and our lives worthwhile.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
On Fox News recently, the leader of an “anti-work subreddit” with over 100,000 followers, caused a stir by claiming that “laziness” was a virtuous lifestyle choice, which should be freely available. She depicted work as a form of oppression that the woke are justified in resisting in principle. The guest was a part-time dog walker who hoped to someday “teach philosophy.”
Shrug this off at your peril. Like many other threads now coursing their way through our culture (CRT, BLM, MMT, etc.), anti-work has deep roots in Marxist ideology.
In “The Abolition of Work,” Marxist author Bob Black decades ago argued that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs, the “source of most of the misery in the world.” “No one should ever work.”
Instead, they should indulge in voluntary free play. Only thus could they avoid the subordination and degradation of the workplace. Nietzsche argued that work “uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes away from reflection, brooding, dreaming…”
It’s not just goofy dog walkers or cranky proto-communists in the anti-work bandwagon today. Relief measures implemented when our response to COVID dried up the jobs markets are no longer necessary, yet a great many Americans are simply disdaining a lifestyle that includes working. 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November alone. There are currently 12 million jobs available. Services are becoming harder to obtain, and empty shelves are popping up.
But work from the beginning has been a cornerstone of American culture. America and Canada were settled by Europeans who came to stay and create a better life. Land and other resources were plentiful here, but labor was scarce. So work was necessary to survive and prosper.
In Europe, idleness was admired. Gentlemen were hereditary landowners who believed work was a humiliating sign of failure, best left to the masses.
In America, by contrast, work was honored and rewarded. Common people could become landowners simply by “working” the land. Small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans, workers…all were the backbone of the economy.
DeTocqueville in the 1830s noted the astonishing industriousness of Americans. “An honest day’s work for a day’s pay” was the prevailing code of conduct.
With a productive private sector and a modest, non-intrusive government, America prospered unimaginably, transforming itself from just another British colony to a worldwide beacon of opportunity and prosperity.
But work provided more than material comforts. It endowed each worker with dignity, a sense of self-worth and personal agency. Each citizen could take justifiable pride in providing for and protecting their family.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many Americans dreaded material poverty less than the loss of dignity from not working. Written materials from that time confirm that severe economic hardship was considered temporary and survivable, but loss of dignity crippled the human spirit.
We now know that both economic prosperity and dignity eventually survived. But today the connection between work and dignity seems to be diminished. Dignity itself seems to have fallen out of style. Our leaders emphasize made-up rights, inequality, and income guarantees, but dignity is mostly ignored.
In the 1990s, the Contract with America implicitly established the notion that the Great Society welfare programs of 30 years previous had been a colossal failure. By disconnecting beneficiaries from work, they had consigned generations of Americans to lives of dependency and poverty of spirit.
The reforms enacted by the states consisted mostly of work requirements for able-bodied adults on welfare. Despite their success, over time the requirements have gradually been eroded by the hostile bureaucracy that administers welfare programs.
Now Democrats, once the party of work and workers, are seeking to eliminate work requirements altogether. Work is seen as an injustice that particularly minorities and poor people shouldn’t have to endure.
Unless workers work, there are no goods and services produced and the standard of living falls for all. A society where citizens vie to avoid work and live off the productivity of others, and where politicians scramble to accommodate them, is in danger. Ahead lies chronic economic weakness and vulnerability to tyranny.
The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) accepted Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s petition to defend previous President Donald Trump’s updates to a rule limiting green cards and citizenship to those who haven’t and won’t become dependent on welfare programs. Brnovich announced this update in a press release Friday.
“When other federal officials won’t defend the law, I will,” asserted Brnovich. “The Public Charge Rule is a commonsense policy based on a real inconvenient truth. Overrunning our welfare programs right now would be like pulling back the last safety net for Americans who need it most.”
Congress first enacted the “Public Charge Rule” in 1882: a concept that officials could deny immigrants entrance, visas, and even citizenship if officials deemed they were likely to become a “public charge.” The definition of “public charge” varied over the years. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defined “public charge” as illegal immigrants who received one year’s worth of welfare benefits in the aggregate within a three-year period. Under that definition, two benefits received in one month counted as two months.
According to the latest available data analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies, about 55 percent of noncitizens relied on welfare in 2018. Noncitizens in their study included both green card holders and illegal immigrants. While the law does prohibit illegal immigrants from receiving welfare benefits, noncitizens may receive benefits on behalf of any children they have born in the U.S.
In April, SCOTUS rejected a previous petition from 14 states attempting to revive Trump-era litigation that the Biden Administration halted. Texas led the charge on that petition. The states claimed that dropping the Trump rule would force them to provide millions of dollars of government benefits to illegal immigrants.
SCOTUS determined that states would have to work through lower courts before they’d take up the case, if at all.
Their recent acceptance means that Arizona and 12 other states – Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia – may be eligible to defend the rule even though the Biden Administration has decided against doing so.
SCOTUS will not be deciding on the legality of the rule, and oral arguments haven’t been scheduled.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
