By Oren Cass
Friday, March 05, 2021
In the New York
Times on Tuesday, I made
the case for paying a generous new family benefit to households that have
earned income of their own. A single mother with two young children, who had
worked part-time at the minimum wage the prior year, could receive $800 in cash
each month — nearly $10,000 annually. Little did I know, this “monstrous”
idea is akin to vicious child abuse and marks me as “a profoundly
evil man” for distinguishing between working families and the non-working
poor. With alarming speed, an insistence that all families receive
no-strings-attached cash has become table stakes in the Left’s bizarro
discourse. As with social issues, where positions held by Barack Obama now
constitute unconscionable bigotry, long-running and bipartisan views about
fighting poverty lie suddenly beyond the pale.
At Jacobin,
Matt Bruenig titled his
response, “Oren Cass Is Insisting That Starving Some Kids Is Important for
Society” and warned that I think families “need some tough love (hunger and
homelessness).” Substack blogger Will Wilkinson titled his response
to the proposal “Against Child Hostages” and featured a photo of a child
cowering in a corner from a chain-wielding hand. The caption: “Don’t hit me Mr.
Cass! Mommy is picking up a shift at Chili’s, I promise!” How recent is this
attitude? When I spoke alongside Wilkinson at a Kennedy
School panel on “big economic ideas [to] solve economic inequality” in
2018, his “big idea” was . . . zoning reform.
The problem, you see, is that my proposal for a Family
Income Supplemental Credit (Fisc) does not go as far as Senator Mitt
Romney’s Family
Security Act, which would offer nearly universal payments — thus including
families disconnected from work entirely. The Fisc caps a family’s annual
benefit at its prior year’s earnings, so no earned income would mean no
benefit, though the existing safety net would remain intact. Still, the Fisc is
more generous for lower-income households than what Senators Marco Rubio and
Mike Lee have proposed,
which is in turn more generous than anything else seriously considered in
recent memory on the right-of-center. It is also more generous than anything
Hillary Clinton ever proposed, or Barack Obama, or . . . one gets the picture.
This question — whether cash benefits should go to
households regardless of work — promises to be a central debate in the coming
years. To be clear, the question is not whether
to help those who cannot support themselves; it is how to do so. If this week’s efforts are any indication, the debate
is one the Left has positioned itself to lose catastrophically. They are
staking themselves to commitments that are empirically wrong and politically
foolish.
One is that we should make no distinction between
households that are attempting to support themselves through work and those
that are not — apparently even the category of “non-working poor” is an
offensive one. The subtext evinces an
attitude that connection to the labor force isn’t all that important anyway.
This thinking may earn nods of approval in some affluent circles, but it is
understandably unpopular with the vast majority of Americans who are working to
support themselves and take pride in that effort. It is also toxic to
struggling families, for whom having a job remains quite important to prospects
of future success.
Another unwise commitment is the premise that children
are adorable free agents who should receive payments because they cannot work
themselves — little
disabled people whose support is fundamentally an obligation of the state
rather than of their parents. The problem with this thinking becomes
immediately obvious when trying to craft a “child allowance,” which cannot be
paid to the children . . . because they are not little disabled people; they
are children. While this facet of life makes many progressives uncomfortable,
the unavoidable reality remains that people are not atomized individuals whose
every need the state can meet; the institution of the family is indispensable,
and the bonds and obligations between its members should be protected and
reinforced, not lamented or ignored.
This is a major fault line between Left and Right, and
has been for centuries. As Yuval Levin characterizes the conservative view in The Great Debate, “the facts of human
birth and death and the social institutions built around them link individuals,
families, and communities inexorably, and to pretend otherwise (let alone to
sever their links) would be disastrous for political life.” For liberals, by
contrast, “The independence of individuals from their neighbors is a function
of the independence of generations from their predecessors; this independence
in the first generation is the essence of the theory of Enlightenment
liberalism, which applies its timeless principles to all subsequent generations
as well.”
Obviously, the dispute will not be resolved here, or
perhaps ever. The immediate point is that the present-day Left’s refusal to
acknowledge the unique status of the family is a mistake and leaves it making
arguments that not only fail to persuade anyone, but also run counter to the
beliefs and values of many whom they claim to be speaking for.
One more conceptual commitment of note: The Left took
particular issue with my observation that: “Money itself does little to address
many of poverty’s root causes, like addiction and abuse; unmanaged chronic- and
mental-health conditions; family instability; poor financial planning;
inability to find, hold or succeed in a job; and so forth. Effective
anti-poverty policy provides resources in ways that also help resolve such
problems and push the recipient toward resolving them himself.”
Annie Lowrey, author of Give
People Money, says: “This is getting it exactly backwards. Poverty
causes these things, or makes them worse. Money gives you the resources and
stability to tackle what life throws at you.” But as her book makes clear, this
is not necessarily true. In my review of the
book, I note:
She introduces readers to Carolyn
Silvius, homeless because living with her kids was “too burdensome for them and
[they] thought she might get better social support if she were in a shelter;”
and to Sandy Bishop, who suffered from arthritis, fibromyalgia, asthma,
diabetes, and attention-deficit disorder but never received disability
benefits, repeatedly lost her food stamps, and wound up homeless as well,
despite sending a daughter to college and receiving two modest inheritances
along the way. Perhaps poverty is not just a matter of consumption.
What I’ve found most striking about the self-righteous
anger directed at this observation is the depth of the misunderstanding
surrounding it. For instance, “financial planning” is indeed a vital and often
lacking skill for households mired in poverty. But the concept was downright
funny to people such as New America’s Kevin Carey, who thinks the term refers
to “get[ting]
the 401k auto-debit right,” and day-care advocate Elliot Haspel, who calls
it “the
Avocado Toast theory of poverty.”
An especially
stunning example is public-health writer Zach Siegel, who argued that “we
know contingency management, which gives people [money], actually does treat
addiction.” He links to this New
Republic article on an interesting program that treats substance abuse
by giving participants financial rewards for passing drug tests. In other
words, the entire premise of the program is that people should not be given money unconditionally but
rather its conditionality can help people to address their underlying problems.
This isn’t a subtle or confusing element of the story — the article is
headlined, “What If We Pay People to Stop Using Drugs?”
More generally, the Left’s position here that an
affliction such as serious mental illness (responsible for an enormous
share of homelessness) is somehow caused
by financial conditions or can be treated with cash is so bizarre that it
suggests these aren’t really arguments at all; they’re just frustrated shouts.
Which perhaps helps to explain why so much of the debate
seems predicated on willfully misrepresenting actual arguments. Matt Bruenig,
two weeks after I
explained to him that I would preserve and even strengthen the existing
safety net, nonetheless reprinted in Jacobin
the lie that I wanted to starve kids. Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, wrote that I think “the
‘non-working poor’ do not deserve a safety net.” The Niskanen Center’s Matt
Yglesias says, “The real
position appears to actually be that poverty per se isn’t bad.”
Jonathan Chait, writing
at New York magazine, says I believe
not only that “the threat of starvation and homelessness is necessary to force
low-income parents into the workforce,” but also that “all parents, including
single parents, should be encouraged to maximize their work hours.” That’s not
even sensible policy analysis, which would more reasonably note that the Fisc
proposal would allow single parents to work less. The
proposal says this explicitly:
The proposed structure does have
the potential to reduce work effort for families that might choose to spend
fewer hours in the labor force — whether the middle-income household that
decides it can now make do without a second earner, or the single mother who
finds it possible to go part-time and spend more afternoons with her kids. We
see this as a benefit — the importance of work is in the role it assigns people
as productive contributors, the habits and social interaction it promotes, and
the opportunity for upward mobility it provides. This does not mean that more
work is always better or that the two full-time earners or the single mother
working double shifts are the desirable outcomes for public policy to promote.
While the “starvation” rhetoric must largely be for
effect, people do seem genuinely unfamiliar with the contours of the American
safety net, on which we spend more
than $1 trillion each year. Wilkinson says this “‘existing safety net’
barely exists at all,” echoing the Gravel Institute’s claim
that “there is no “existing safety net.’” Of course, this safety net has many
problems that both Left and Right correctly highlight, in both design and
administration. We should seek constructive dialogue on how to improve it. That
will be difficult, though, with one side pretending that the safety net doesn’t
really exist and (somewhat paradoxically) that the other side wants to take it
away.
There’s some irony in elements of the Left leading the libertarian charge against government involvement in the lives of the poor, preferring to write a check and walk away, while elements of the Right focus on the affirmative role government can play through programs not for people whose challenges go beyond their bank balance. But it’s to be expected, as progressivism seals itself into a very educated, Very Online bubble, and a more multi-ethnic, working-class conservatism reconsiders the role of public policy in advancing the common good.
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