The Means Test

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein show starts with a familiar conundrum—the same one we were talking about on this blog just a week ago: namely, why is it that many of the same people who ostensibly stand to benefit most from a progressive economic program are voting against it? 

Why, for instance, have many potential beneficiaries of social programs helped elect a Republican who proceeded to cut food stamps and medicaid—as part of his big budget disaster last summer? Klein's guest on the episode, Annie Lowrey, short-hands this as the "what's the matter with Kansas?" problem. 

As Klein summarizes it at the very start of the episode: "One of the big problems in left-wing politics is that the very people who Democrats, liberals and socialists think should be the most excited about the big, new government programs intended to help them are often the least excited — and are often voting for the party that wants to cut government."

This is the same stumper the lawyer Fulvius is talking about, in Arthur Koestler's historical novel The Gladiators (Koestler obviously had the then-recent defeat of working class politics in France and Germany fresh in mind), when he proposes penning a treatise "On the causes which induce man to act [...] contrary to his own interests when associated in groups or crowds." 

Usually the attempts to answer this question just hover around two familiar poles: right-wingers say that working class people are actually right to identify themselves more strongly with some cultural or religious or national project, and that progressive or socialist policies wouldn't actually help them in the long run anyway. 

Leftists, meanwhile, respond that these voters just need to achieve class consciousness and stop falling for attempts on the part of the capitalist elite to pit them against each other along false racial, cultural, or national lines—since these are nothing more than cynical bids to divide and conquer (see Brecht's "Song of the Stormtrooper" for this take, e.g.)

Lowrey and Klein suggest a third possibility, however—namely, that the people who would theoretically stand to benefit most from government programs in fact have an almost uniformly negative experience with these programs—and that is by design. Because these programs have been set up in a deliberately humiliating and punitive and degrading way. 

Thus, the people who might most need safety net programs also have good reason to hate them in their existing form. 

Obviously, the answer then is to improve or redesign these programs—not to cut or abolish them. If people resent these programs in part because they are too restrictive and punitive, the answer is not to further restrict them and punish their beneficiaries, as Republicans often propose to do (and as Trump has in fact done in his second term). 

But it makes sense—to Lowrey and Klein's point—that people's interactions with these programs aren't exactly prone to inspire loyalty or a strong desire to defend them at the polls. 

The root of the problem is that we have not framed food and medical benefits in this country as universal entitlements—which the entire public would step up to defend (as they do routinely when it comes to those few benefits which are universal)—but rather as conditional and temporary forms of relief to people who fall into a category of the deserving poor. 

And buried within that very concept of the "deserving poor" is a contradiction—or at the very least a tension—which tends to catch people in a double-bind. On the one hand, the applicant for relief must prove they they are poor enough to need help; on the other hand, they must establish that they are working, or are trying to work and be self-sufficient. 

Thus, the "means test" aspect of poor relief punishes people if they are too successful at getting ahead. People may finally succeed in securing the job they want, only to see their benefits immediately yanked away as a consequence (this is one of the specters under which the characters labor in Walter Greenwood's great social protest novel, Love on the Dole). 

On the other hand, people who do pass the means test and establish successfully that they have no alternative source of support are often attacked as moochers who are refusing to stand on their own feet because they want to rely on the dole. 

So, you can't win either way. 

As the political philosopher Brian Barry argued long ago, the logical solution is that we really shouldn't have means testing at all, but universal benefits that everyone would have a stake in defending—and which would come with no humiliating or degrading stigma attached, precisely because everyone would get them. 

The goal of these programs would then be not to relieve poverty, which people have to prove to the satisfaction of some government administrator, but rather—as Barry argued—to prevent people from becoming poor in the first place. 

But of course, this raises the fear in many people's minds that such a program would foster "dependence" and weaken initiative. Many people might simply prefer to live on the universal dole and refuse to work. As Bill Clinton argues, in an old clip that they play in the Ezra Klein episode, unrestricted welfare threatens to rob people of "the dignity, the power and the ethic of work."

But as I've argued before, universal benefits don't actually eliminate the reason to work. Everyone still has an incentive to supplement their income and achieve a higher standard of living, even if they can fall back on some guaranteed subsistence floor if necessary. Unless, that is, the jobs on offer come on such terrible terms that people would prefer bare subsistence to taking them. 

So, what the people who oppose welfare on this basis are really confessing is that there are some types of jobs that are so degrading and miserable and poorly-compensated in our society that no one will take them unless starvation is literally the only alternative. 

And if that is the case—how much "dignity" and "power" is there in that kind of "work" after all? 

Rather than the "dignity of work"—these jobs sound more like wage slavery—of the kind Percy Bysshe Shelley described: 'Tis to work and have such pay / As just keeps life from day to day / In your limbs, as in a cell / For the tyrants' use to dwell[.]

If we did just move over to universal benefits—instead of the humiliating and administratively convoluted mixture we have now of means-testing plus work requirements—the "poorhouse Bastiles" of our day (to borrow Thomas Carlyle's aptly derisive term for the Victorian poor reforms that our own welfare reformers of today have so often recapitulated)—

If we made that much needed transition, I say, it would also eliminate that other bugaboo of our welfare critics: the welfare "cheat" or "fraud." No one can cheat their way into a benefit to which all are equally entitled anyway. 

Lowrey and Klein point out, in the episode, that fraud may indeed exist in rare instances under the current system. But "whose fraud we choose to care about is telling," as Klein puts it. He goes on to point to Senator Rick Scott, "who ran — I believe it was a for-profit hospital organization that had one of the largest fraud settlements with Medicare in history." 

Moreover, Klein continues, "Donald Trump pardoned — or commuted, I don’t remember, but did one of the two — somebody who had settled one of the largest fraud cases with Medicare more recently."

And here we see a perfect distillation of that inversion of moral logic under our current Trumpian GOP regime. Under this conception, poverty is treated as a crime (a recent New York Times article charts the career of a billionaire who has devoted his fortune to pushing Trump to criminalize homelessness)—whereas the elephantine corruption and peculations of our political leaders are seen as minor failings. 

As William Gaddis once sardonically wrote of the GOP's "Contract with America" in the 1990s—which Trump has in many ways revived—we are fast becoming an echo of Samuel Butler's satirical "Erewhon"—namely: a "marvelous land where [...] poverty and disease were criminal offenses and dishonesty and mendacity in high places treated as mere misfortunes."