A Large Postulate

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday looking into just how disastrous Trump's budget cuts to the food stamp program have been for poor families over the past year. 

When Trump's "big beautiful bill" passed last summer through the reconciliation process, it cut tens of billions of dollars from the program and introduced a range of new criteria designed to restrict people's eligibility. 

One of these came, predictably, in the form of a new "work requirement"—that great hobbyhorse of conservatives and pinch-penny Benthamites from the days of the Victorians on. 

The Times article aptly illustrates the most common problem with such requirements: even when people are willing to work, they may not be able to find a job. 

And then—thanks to the "reform" of the program—they are out of luck twice over. They can't find a job and they lose their nutritional support from the government. 

So the program ends up helping people more who need less help, and punishing most those who need the most assistance. 

And meanwhile, our Trumpian politicians who have imposed this policy go merrily on enriching themselves at the taxpayer's expense. 

The rich get richer. And for those who have not—even what little they have is taken from them. 

The Times tells one of their stories: 

Mandee Wyrick, a single mother to two teenagers, said her household’s monthly benefits had decreased by a third, or around $250. She became ineligible for SNAP last month because she no longer meets those work requirements. Ms. Myrick, who used to do contract work for homeless advocacy organizations in Oregon before she moved, has tried in vain to find a new job, applying to anything that would allow her to continue to home-school her 14-year-old son.

Back in the Victorian era—in the age of the new poor law and the Benthamite reforms—Thomas Carlyle had a question about "work requirements" on this sort that remains valid to this day:

"Can the poor man that is willing to work, always find work, and live by his work?" he asked. "Legislation presupposes the answer—to be in the affirmative. A large postulate, which should have been made a proposition of; which should have been demonstrated, made indubitable to all persons! [...] Nay, what will a wise Legislature say, if it turn out he cannot find it?"

Indeed. Congress too last summer seems to have presupposed the answer. They took it for granted that there are jobs available if the poor look for them—and that they must not be doing so currently through laziness. 

It seems not to have occurred to them that people might be perfectly willing to work—but unable to find an opportunity. In which case, a "work requirement" becomes impossible to satisfy—as Ms. Wyrick's experience demonstrates. 

She has "tried in vain to find a new job," the Times reports—and so now, she is deprived both of the income from work and—precisely for that reason, of the income from government support.

Our budget slashers seem not to have troubled themselves with the question of what happens if the poor person "cannot find" work, as Carlyle puts it. 

Perhaps they did not think of it. Or perhaps they never cared.