Penguin Logic

 The bill for Congress's attack on the welfare state is slowly coming due. Millions of people have already lost food assistance over the last year due to new SNAP "work requirements" enacted under Trump's reconciliation bill. Next week, on October 1, the federal government will cut its contribution to the administrative costs of the program, shifting more of the responsibility to states—changes that many observers fear could force still more people off the benefit rolls. 

At the start of next year, new "work requirements" also go into effect for Medicaid. Congress already allowed expanded ACA subsidies to lapse. J.D. Vance—a man who embodies the Straussian dictum that a lie repeated often enough will be perceived as true—brags that he just eliminated 750,000 cases from the ACA rolls for reasons of "fraud" (read the room, bro—do you think taking more people off health benefits is anyone's idea of a top priority right now?)

As for the child tax credit, a previous Congress already allowed its expanded version to expire, leading to a reported major uptick in child poverty. Trump's Big Not-So-Beautiful reconciliation bill last summer removed many families with mixed immigration status from the benefit rolls, pushing potentially millions of U.S. citizen children into poverty if they are born to noncitizens. The same law also eliminated food assistance for many categories of lawful immigrants, including asylees, parolees, refugees, etc. 

Why exactly is Congress opening this full-bore attack on the social safety net? Previous generations of hard-hearted politicians have at least felt the need to explain such changes to us. These ones were just imposed as part of a sweeping Republican budget package, seemingly without much public debate. It's like this generation of politicians just expected us to know that Republicans are going to Republican, and they forgot that they are supposed to have an ideological justification for all this. 

I suppose if they were forced to dredge up old arguments from the 1990s, they would say that safety net programs are bad—or need to be reformed with new "work requirements"—because they weaken a sense of parental responsibility and rob people of the "dignity of work." 

Robert Tressell had a rather apt response to that. In his Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, he describes how local bigwigs would do anything for the poor and unemployed except pay a slightly higher tax rate for poor relief. "It would never do to do that," he writes; "It might pauperize the parents and destroy parental responsibility. They evidently thought that it would be better to destroy the health or even the lives of the 'dear little children' than to pauperize the parents or undermine parental responsibility."

That seems to be our own Congress's attitude as well. Better for children to go hungry and lose health care than to relieve their parents of some of the burden that God and Nature's law has laid on their shoulders. 

Of course, people can still work, even if they have transfer payments to fall back on. People are free to supplement their income and raise their standard of living through taking home a wage. The objection to safety net programs, then, appears to be that they might prevent people from taking some of the jobs in our economy that are so miserable and poorly-compensated that people will only take them if the only alternative they face is death by starvation or by the denial of life-saving health care. 

The true objection to safety net programs, then, appears to be that they allow the poor meaningful freedom of choice and some modicum of bargaining power on the labor market. They rescue people from wage slavery, in other words, and that must not be allowed. By the "dignity of work," then, they really mean the dignity of slavery.

Tressell had an observation to make about this alleged "dignity" of wage slavery too. Speaking of his working class protagonists, he writes at one point: 

"Extraordinary as it may appear, none of them took any pride in their work: they did not 'love' it. They had no conception of that lofty ideal of 'work for work’s sake', which is so popular with the people who do nothing. [...] How extraordinary this must appear to those idealists who believe in 'work for work’s sake', but who themselves do nothing but devour or use and enjoy or waste the things that are produced by the labour of those others who are not themselves permitted to enjoy a fair share of the good things they help to create?"

This brings us to the fact that the Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill" last summer—even as it was very careful to remind the poor of their duty to labor for starvation wages for the benefit of others—also did everything in its power to ensure the uninterrupted flow of passive income to the wealthy (the bill's cuts to safety net programs were, of course, paired with another round of tax subsidies to the rich). 

This was another massive overhaul of public policy that the Republicans seemingly forgot they were supposed to explain to anyone. They thought "doesn't everyone know that this is just what we do when we have power?" They seem not to have noticed that people might at least be owed an explanation as to why the entire $7 trillion federal budget was being redesigned so as to take resources from the mouths of the poor and transferred directly to the waiting gullets of the already rich. 

But if the backers of the Big Not-So-Beautiful Bill had to explain the matter, I suppose they would offer a version for the same one that one of the wealthiest penguins offers in Anatole France's Penguin Island: "For my part I am ready to give up all that I possess in the interest of my brother Penguins, and if it were necessary I would even cheerfully part with my shirt. All the elders of the people are ready, like me, to sacrifice their goods, and no one can doubt their absolute devotion to their country and their creed. 

"We have, then, only to consider the public interest and to do what it requires. Now, Father, what it requires, what it demands, is not to ask much from those who possess much, for then the rich would be less rich and the poor still poorer. The poor live on the wealth of the rich and that is the reason why that wealth is sacred. Do not touch it, to do so would be an uncalled for evil."

Such is the penguin argument for why we cannot tax the rich. As an alternative, the wealthy penguin offers a regressive consumption tax: "The signs of opulence are deceitful. What is certain is that everyone eats and drinks. Tax people according to what they consume. That would be wisdom and it would be justice." The Republicans seem to embrace this principle as well, since Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy have been paired with revenue-generating tariffs on basic consumer goods across the country, ensuring more of the tax burden will fall on the poorest. 

Is this just? Is this wise? Surely, it must be, writes France—for "in fifteen hundred years the best of the Penguins will not speak otherwise."

And so it goes on, France adds. "Although children died in marvellous abundance and plagues and famines came with perfect regularity to devastate entire villages, new Penguins, in continually greater numbers, contributed by their private misery to the public prosperity."