Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, and two Trump administration colleagues recently published an op-ed in The New York Times justifying the GOP’s attempt to cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits by imposing draconian prove-you’re-working paperwork and hoop-jumping requirements on recipients. In their article titled “Trump Leadership: If You Want Welfare and Can Work, You Must,” they noted: “Our agencies are united in a very straightforward policy approach: Able-bodied adults receiving benefits must work.”
Which raises the question: “Why?”
Why is it that anybody working full-time in the richest country in the history of the world should need any sort of government assistance just to eat and stay healthy? Shouldn’t a full-time paycheck — any paycheck for any sort of work — pay enough that people can live a decent life?
As Senate majority leader John Thune said yesterday, “The best health care is a job…” What he failed to note was that that’s true of Denmark but not America.
What, after all, is the point of a minimum wage if not to make sure that people who are working don’t have to steal just to stay alive? Shouldn’t any reasonable capitalist society be organized in such a way that a single full-time worker can raise a family, put their kids through school, take an annual vacation, and have a reasonable retirement?
This is not a new or novel idea.
Among the developed world, the U.S. stands virtually alone in imposing punitive, bureaucratic work requirements for access to food, housing, and health care, all services that are treated as rights in most other wealthy nations.
Welfare in pretty much every other developed country in the world is limited to the disabled, sick, or caregivers because everybody who’s working is making enough to cover their basic living expenses. In Denmark, for example, McDonald’s workers earn $22/hour, in addition to getting six weeks of paid vacation, generous pension contributions, overtime pay, and paid sick leave. (And a Big Mac costs ~$5.75 there, compared to $5.69 here.)
This “if you work, you can live a good life” notion isn’t even a new or novel idea for the United States. Progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, a quarter-century before his distant cousin Franklin got a minimum wage passed into law, proposed the same in August, 1912, when he told an audience in Chicago:
“We stand for a living wage … [It] must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living — a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.”
We got close to this during the golden age of America’s middle class, created by FDR’s New Deal programs in the 1933-1980 era, when about a third of Americans had a good union job which formed the wage and benefit floors other employers had to compete with, causing two-thirds of Americans to be able to live a middle class life with a single paycheck.
I saw this myself. When I was five, my father sold Rexair vacuum cleaners and World Book Encyclopedias door-to-door. We lived in a garage converted to a one-bedroom house and every month visited what my brothers and I called the “cheese store” (the county-run surplus food facility) to get a free brick of American cheese, a big canvas bag of dried macaroni, and a box of powdered milk.
Then, the next year, dad got a job at a unionized tool-and-die shop. Within a year we’d bought a three-bedroom house in a new south Lansing suburb and dad had a brand-new car, the first that didn’t have holes in the floorboard. Every year we took a vacation, driving all over the country. We bought our first-ever TV that year, along with a living room full of furniture to sit on to watch it.
In other words, a good job and the Machinists Union lifted my family from poverty into the middle class. And we stayed there: in 2006, dad died in that same house he’d bought brand-new in 1957, which is now occupied by one of my nieces and her family.
By 1980, about a third of all American workers were represented by a union. Between that and the top 74% income tax bracket, America’s middle class grew faster than any had in world history.
Income and wealth were broadly distributed: the average CEO only took, at most, 30 times his employee’s salaries. The top tax rates made it a waste of time to try to take more out of the company, and stock distributions as compensation and corporate stock buybacks were functionally illegal then.
All that changed, of course, with the neoliberal Reagan Revolution of 1981, which led us to the mess we’re in today.
It’s a moral crime that anybody working full time in America must depend on the largess of government or philanthropy to live a decent life: a minimum wage should provide for a minimum standard of living, not a poverty-filled struggle.
A study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association found that states that raised their minimum wage into the $15/hour range (DC, Washington, California, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Illinois) had welfare participation rates that were about a third lower than states hanging onto the federal $7.25/hour minimum.
In other words, welfare benefits have become subsidies to cheap-labor employers; without those benefits, people couldn’t afford to work for crap wages and employers would be forced by the marketplace itself to pay their workers better.
Back in 2016, the Economic Policy Institute found that raising the minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.00 per hour back in the day in California decreased state public assistance payments by $2.7 billion. It only makes sense.
Thus, the entire GOP effort to impose draconian, paperwork-rich “work requirements” on Medicaid and SNAP recipients boils down to two things:
1. Cheap labor Republicans want us all to pay taxes to subsidize the lifestyles of people whose employers should be paying them enough to live a decent life.
2. They want to make it harder and harder for those people who are legitimately in poverty because of disability, age, or a lack of local work opportunities to get benefits so they can reduce federal outlays to fund tax cuts for billionaires.
In other words, it’s all about screwing working people to keep taxes low on billionaires and profits high in corporate America.
So, the next time some billionaire-funded Republican mouthpiece like Kennedy or Oz complains about “able-bodied people on welfare,” don’t just challenge the cruelty — challenge the con.
Ask them why they think the richest nation in the history of the world can’t afford to guarantee that a full-time job comes with a living wage.
Ask why they’re hell-bent on protecting low wages and corporate profits instead of working families.
And then ask the real question: Who benefits when work doesn’t pay — the struggling single mom trying to feed her kids, or the billionaire writing the checks to keep this scam going?