True confession: When I consider targeted anti-poverty programs, I want to know if the recipients are in their situation due to bad luck or due to bad decisions. My default is to see individual agency -- as opposed to luck, legacy or environment -- as the cause of poverty.
The benefit of universal programs is it short-circuits this line of thinking.
The moral thing to do is to recognize that "individual agency" isn't really a concrete thing insofar as everyone is greatly impacted by their environment and those around them. We must help all poor people - providing justice for the unlucky and a second chance for the unwise.
The soulless thing to do is recognize that the welfare state greatly helps the economy, so we should do it.
Using arguments about incentives or individual agency as justification against a welfare state can really only come from an ignorant perspective.
To be clear this is not the argument I use with people with strong conservative views, I just used it to display that there really should not be moral or ideological qualms about welfare.
Government is not a parent. It is not the government's job to make you a better person; it is *your* job to be a better person.
Moreover, you miss Matt's point that "living in poverty — and especially growing up in poverty — has really bad impacts, and providing assistance can deliver useful long-term benefits." How many of those people who make unwise decisions do so because they live in lead-tainted public housing (see, e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/the-poisoned-generation/527229/), with permanent effects? Food insecurity harms cognition (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775710001093); how many make poor decisions because they are hungry? In many cases, giving people money *can* lead to a better result.
The main point is that modern welfare policies (a) do not discourage work (see the article) and (b) are really not enough to live a comfortable life. There is plenty of incentive for people to find a job and contribute to society.
So nothing? You didn’t answer my question. You’re saying that they can’t live comfortably off welfare, which we know. Many people are still living in poverty and procreating. How do we address it.
I suspect your view that "individual agency isn't really a concrete thing" is politically dead in the water because it is not how most people see the situation.
And is it really your lived experience? Most people see firsthand that some folks make bad decisions and have bad outcomes, and extrapolate from that to get to "deserving vs undeserving poor" by pretty natural logic.
The main exceptions I see in my life are medical/mental health issues or cases where the parents were such a mess those kids never had a fair chance. But note that I'm already falling back into a frame of deserving/undeserving just writing that sentence...
Right - the real world is really messy. I view these things as headwinds and tailwinds - different people have different levels of success in life based on a lot of different factors, and it's messy to sort out what "deserving" means. But your odds are worse if your parents have less money or less education or fewer social connections, etc.
This is why I think Matt's on to something - make the programs more universal so the middle class gets them too and take contentious arguments about the morality of how the program affects our poorest citizens out of the picture.
I see anti-poverty programs as not equalizing instruments but insurance instruments. Equalizing instruments answer questions of worth and desert, while insurance instruments are questions of smoothing. There's a lot of variance in people's lives even in the same socioeconomic standing- let alone among socioeconomic standings - and that means a lot of variance in the choice that one has to make in a lifetime.
I don't think its wrong to judge people post-smoothing in the same way that we could judge how two businesses use their payout from a fire insurance claim (of course, we may morally disagree at which point should one be judged in the litany of decisions).
"My default is to see individual agency -- as opposed to luck, legacy or environment -- as the cause of poverty."
Not the 10s of millions of Americans with an IQ below 80? You can't join the military in any capacity with an IQ below 85. You don't think that plays a major role?
was typing something similar... I think liberals are much more inclined to see the poor as being the victims of poor circumstance, but conservatives see a bunch have made poor decisions & they don't want to pay for their mistakes.
I personally don't think poor decisions and poor circumstances are so cleanly separable--your decisions are wholly the result of prior circumstances (give or take a bit of randomness)
The first half I agree actually - they are not cleanly separable. But "wholly the result" is where you lose me. I mean, maybe in a deep philosophical "free will is an illusion" sense - but c'mon, you see people do stupid things and have bad outcomes. That is a real thing that happens.
Someone has liked my post and raised it from the dead in my inbox, so sorry for the very delayed response
But I do suppose I mean it in that deep sense. Do you think it's not true? That your decisions are *not* wholly the result of prior circumstances (give or take some fundamental physical randomness)?
Being unmarried, pregnant and underemployed might be a poor circumstance. When it happens more than once to the same person, it’s poor decision making. Same for crime.
I think its a little unfair to say that consistently bad "decisions" are the fault of the individual, when evidence around poverty, childhood circumstances, lead-exposure, homelessness etc. clearly show that in the aggregate people have a much more difficult time making good "decisions". Sure some do and some don't but you can't ignore that something is going on in the aggregate that says that despite their bad "decisions" the individual should still receive help.
I don’t think it’s unfair. If your argument is that we should reward negative behavior or ignore it, I can’t see society really going along with that. I’m a left winger and wouldn’t. “Well they don’t know any better” is just not the way to change minds.
I am not saying that the political case you make is about that, that would be a dead end. I am simply saying from a moral standpoint it seems that social science indicates we really should have much more compassion for such people. Politically I say wrap it in a universalist package and everyone is happy. I'll help the person making six figures if that means I get to help the person stuck in cycles of homelessness/unemployment etc. And as MY said, helping them probably leads to them and those around them (especially children) needing less help in the future.
This is a useful point to make because I think the sentiment is behind a lot of the skepticism of the welfare state. Maybe Yglesias will address it explicitly in a future post but I think he addressed it implicitly in this post.
So I think programs directed at the poor also short circuit this line of thinking. Or I take it that was Yglesias's argument. Instead of asking why people are in their circumstances (a largely unanswerable question or if you imagine it is answerable requires a massive bureaucracy), recognize that it is good for society as a whole to have fewer poor people. Poor people contribute lots of adverse effects on society as a whole and fail to contribute in ways that they obviously could if they weren't poor. So instead of thinking of welfare programs as a kind of charity, we should think of them as contributing to the overall good of society.
To me so much of the draw for universal v. Targeted programs is the reduction of administrative friction. Stimulus checks were popular because people like money, but also because they just sort of showed up without any huge lift by the recipient. Sure UI enhancement is technically a better solution, but the delivery method (state implemented distribution systems) were so broken that a ton of laid off Americans never received the UI that they were eligible for. The map with TANF penetration is striking and should really be a bigger part of the policy conversation
I think this is probably right. There's a (mis)conception that the delivery of Byzantine government benefits is woefully inefficient and rife with fraud, and therefore something like UBI (paired with single payer healthcare even) would solve both of those problems. For the reasons Matt mentions - targeted programs by and large work fairly well and UBI involves tradeoffs people aren't willing to make - I think targeted problems are the way to go.
I absolutely agree that perhaps in theory being more targeted is the more direct way of solving the problem, but frankly filtered through a political lens universalist programs seem much more popular, and frankly the US is plenty wealthy enough to move some money around. If democrats need to tell people making $150,000/year they get stuff too, so they get elected, then I am all for it.
I think you would quickly get into people saying that the CARES Act cash payments weren't targeted enough because they treated a person making $75,000 (or $150,000, if married) the same as a person making $20,000. In the context of permanent program that's probably right. If you did a monthly payment of $1,200 or whatever for everyone making $75,000/$150,000, that's essentially UBI which runs into the problems Matt mentioned.
That’s a really good point. It would also be a good idea to require states to update their social services infrastructure like UI computer systems, some of which still run on decades-old code, so that targeted assistance has less friction.
When I lived in Germany, I got kindergeld. Basically the same thing as what Matt is talking about. It was awesome. I only had two kids back then.
Now I have five kids, and four step kids. Yep, that’s nine kids.
I sure hope someone out there is having lots of boys, because only one of them is a son.
I have two sister-in-law’s who are 40. Both are trying in vitro to have kids. Neither is having any luck. Both spent much of their adult life saying they didn’t want kids. Or said it was too expensive.
Having lived in Europe for 12 years I saw a gamut of social welfare programs. Holland and Germany did it best. The UK did it the worst. Much of my ex wife’s family was permanently on the dole.
I’m actually a recovering conservative. I’ve come to really appreciate various welfare programs. Mainly because my wife in-laws are in the restaurant industry. Their coworkers and employees have become my social circle. Single moms, Hispanic immigrants (including undocumented). Good people. Many with problems. Single moms, drug problems. I’ve helped several of them negotiate the complicated bureaucracy of getting assistance. I bought presents for their kids, because I know they didn’t have a lot of money.
We should be doing more to help these people. And I say that as someone who makes a good living, winces when it comes to tax time.
Even without the "dysgenic" part of the Bell Curve argument, I worry that monthly cash payments in return for more children *could* increase the number of children in poverty given the incentive it creates. (I grew up among the rural poor, and I definitely knew people who would have two more kids for an extra $500/month.)
I'm on the side of Yang's UBI, which only gave cash to adults but continued to offer services to children - to avoid the incentive problems and the "agent" problem of giving money for kids to their parents.
Critics will say I'm just being mean to the poor and looking down on poor people. But I think that's a big part of what liberals miss about the conservative view - that many centrist/conservative people know poor folks who've gotten there through bad decision-making, and they don't want to support/reward them for that.
This is where I miss Scott Alexander, because I see the barrage of linked studies about the benefits of welfare and I think, "Okay, but would literally any of these replicate? Are there just as many other studies showing no benefits"?
Replacing patchwork programs with universalist direct cash programs that don't have weird disincentives is certainly a good idea. Is spending massively more on welfare a great idea? Surely we think that even if existing programs are strongly positive, each marginal dollar is likely to produce less marginal benefit.
On the other hand, the marginal costs are probably pretty low too. Deadweight loss from taxation is low, especially if it's a broadly-based tax that doesn't distort behavior. And obviously redistribution is utility-enhancing. Unless you have a bizarrely strong philosophical aversion to taxation, a bigger welfare state is a pretty obvious winner.
I think the argument that the sub $2/day population in the United States is living in condition comparable to deep poverty in the developing world doesn't make sense. All that pushback is correct. (The basic reason is that there's more "free stuff" available to poor people in the United States).
That said, deep poverty conditions in the USA are still really bad and it's unconscionable to have those kind of conditions persisting in the middle of a very wealthy society when we have very affordable fixes available.
Matt, to what extent do you think the focus on 'inequality' has caused this topic to drift a bit from the situation on the ground?
I've always felt that poverty should be the focus. There are more equal societies that are not great models for us (Yemen, Niger, Ukraine, plenty of others). It's not that inequality is entirely unimportant, but I fear it pulls the focus away from poverty and toward intra-elite debates.
Obviously, an anti-poverty push includes taxing the very wealthy, and there are inequality implications for that. It just seems that it drags us into an us vs. them fight, instead of the simple realization that we would like to live in a society with fewer instances of inter-generational poverty.
Summary of a lot of political dysfunction on the center-left is: "This idea we used to believe is now much more complicated due to [DEBATABLE ELITE POINT OF VIEW] and now we have to convolute our language and fight about rhetoric while doing very little to help everyone else (i.e. most people), who have very little idea what we're talking about."
All I want for Christmas is to replace the existing welfare state with a very generous negative income tax. Set it up so that someone with no income makes $40,000, phase it out over another $30,000, add in some child benefits and baby you got a welfare system going!
The lack of enthusiasm for EITC and Child Tax Credit among Progressives is astounding. From the media, you'd think Marco Rubio is the only supporter of higher Child Tax Credit.
Very interesting read. Scott Walker's "sales tax refund" framing actually seems to make sense to me. With the giant caveat that I don't actually know anything about the program other than what was in the article, it seems to me like the framing nicely sidesteps the 'handouts' problem where no-one wants to give anyone a handout and no-one actually wants to receive (what they perceive to be) a handout either. So, a rebate as framing makes a lot of sense from that perspective.
The other part here that I think is interesting is the focus on sales tax. If it had been an income tax rebate or a property tax rebate, it would have had to apply only to those people who actually paid those taxes (again, I'm just assuming a whole host of things here). Sales tax, however, is completely universal; everyone pays some amount of sales tax. Therefore, a rebate based on sales tax can also be universal in a way that a rebate based on other taxes presumably couldn't be.
I think it was very clever framing. But the point is it was completely arbitrary. All he did was send everyone $100! But then to make it politically correct in conservative terms he called it a "sales tax refund" rather than making it a giveaway to non-taxpayers.
I suppose in some technocratic utopia the USA should have a carbon tax, and then cash payments to people can be a "carbon tax refund" or something.
Social security and medicare also benefit from this approach since it is preached that the line items we see on our paystubs for those programs are our pre-payments for future benefits... maybe Al Gore would have made that actually true. I wonder if support would be more enduring if the tax funding was similarly called out and single people could imagine that they were pre-paying their future benefit?
I don’t think that’s a technocratic utopia at all but a common sense pro-business fiscally conservative idea. Why dismiss it out of hand without trying it?
Have economists ever calculated the increase in productivity if people, particularly young people and young parents, are relieved to a degree of the financial dangers of taking risks in their professional life, pursuing dreams, etc.? I would guess it would be substantial. Scandinavia should yield some evidence?
I consider myself a "small government social democrat" and I think that UBI paired with massive public sector reform is the future. I think that by and large a lot of the public sector administration is a make work project for the professional/managerial class that does nothing but add administrative friction to the delivery of services. I think we should cut most programs - unemployment insurance, disability payments, businesss grants, arts grants, etc and fire the workers. Instead just give everybody money every month. I believe this will promote human flourishing by enabling people to take risks - start companies, make art, etc.
I don't think this will ever happen. Sticker shock practically guarantees it but also because modern governments are built to be incrementalist machines. And that's a feature not a bug.
It’s so hard to not feel a massive level of resentment at all your natalist ideas. I don’t think they’re bad ideas but the selection of parents as in the deserving box and childless as undeserving feels awfully cruel.
And that it’s today’s children who are the future. They will support us. Fix our mistakes.
Single people should absolutely have to pay a premium, since it’s other people’s kids who will have to wipe their ass when they are sitting in a Nursery home.
There are plenty of adults who have the funds and resources for kids, but because they prefer a single/dink lifestyle don’t have them. I agree with your sentiments though.
Children may be more deserving, but that doesn't make pushing childless adults into homelessness (section 8) or hunger (SNAP) any less cruel. Turning welfare politics into deserving vs undeserving along a different axis is counterproductive at best.
I don't know how that doesn't seem cruel to condition inclusion in a broad safety net on your reproductive organs being functional. It's very easy to imagine being laid off longer than the meagre benefits and median savings levels last and I don't get what's undeserving about that. Most of us who have good careers are far closer to lucky than deserving.
Hey Andrew, another Andrew here to comment! By the looks of it, the benefits that Matt advocates for would, at best, partially subsidize the cost of children. The childless would continue to be able to live free, relatively wealthy, relatively comfortable lives. As well, your thinking on this feels unreasonably narrow. Anyone can be a parent, if not through anything else, then adoption. Though this may provide barriers to those who are lower income and infertile, those barriers already exist and are in fact partially addressed in these plans
I mean maybe it is, the topic is really quite raw for me as someone whose spouse is infertile. I think people pretty substantially underestimate the upfront costs of adoption, especially outside the foster system.
It seems to me that creating extra taxes to pay for extra benefits when we haven't even made sure that if you through no fault of your own lose your job you'll get food healthcare and housing help is pretty horrible.
I empathize with that, but I just read that 9% of women are infertile. That includes women who can get pregnant with help, sometimes just medication (clomid) helps. The number of people that can’t conceive ever is low, single digits low. We shouldn’t forgo something, because a few wouldn’t be able to participate. Plenty of college students have private loans that wouldn’t qualify for forgiveness and plenty of people know they aren’t going to live long enough to use social security or other programs for seniors. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have programs for eligible people.
I think because I'm writing somewhat emotionally my thinking is getting somewhat flattened on this. Like it's not a terrible idea but he yadda yaddas what seems like the really important part that we should patch up and strengthen programs so that everyone can be reasonably assured that they will be able to get a roof over their head, food on their table and healthcare if they need it.
Of course like all else equal supporting children is good, I'm a teacher I'm not anti-kid. From where I sit in Orlando Florida where the economy is still a crater deep in the ground and we don't have housing, healthcare, or jobs for the poor I don't know why we can't get anything that's just building basic needs for anyone instead of one super generous program for parents and a kick me sign for everyone else.
Oh dang, sorry to hit a raw nerve! Yeah, I must be honest, I have no idea how difficult the process is relating to adoption, and I'm not going to pretend to. I think your point is fair, and I would say I agree
Adoption is really hard. Speaking as someone who's seen some people go through the process. And that's adoption for people who are relatively affluent married couples -- I don't know that it's realistically possible for single people who aren't quite rich to adopt.
"the selection of parents as in the deserving box and childless as undeserving feels awfully cruel."
First, I'm sorry for your painful situation. We have a child-benefit program in Canada (the Canada Child Benefit), so I can talk a bit about it.
Child care is expensive, especially for a child who is pre-school age (because one worker can only look after a small number of toddlers). For a stay-at-home parent, that cost is forgone income.
Most Canadians will be parents at some point in their lives, so the CCB serves as a form of life-cycle consumption smoothing: we pay somewhat higher taxes before and after having children, and receive the CCB when we have children to help with the costs.
It's a popular program, it's redistributive (it phases out with income at a gradual rate, reducing marginal effective tax rates compared to its predecessor), and it's reduced child poverty by one third (300,000 children) since 2015.
Of course public programs shouldn't focus entirely on parents. But I think any opportunity to set up a popular, economically effective, and redistributive program shouldn't be passed up.
Maybe I'm being somewhat unreasonable but I admit it feels quite a bit different when you position it about childcare. If you told me the state was going to establish 15-20 rooms within schools for 0-6 year olds I'd be like that sounds like a great idea.
Cash assistance feels pretty rotten that is tied only to if you have kids when you can't even get people food housing and healthcare.
In Canada, the battle over cash transfers vs. public funding for paid child care was settled in the 2006 election - a memorable soundbite was that there was nothing stopping parents from spending the cash on "beer and popcorn." The Conservatives won a minority, scrapped the preceding government's agreement with the provinces to provide child care funding, and put cash transfers in place instead.
The advantage of cash transfers vs. funding for child care is that transfers benefit stay-at-home parents, who have heavy costs in the form of forgone employment income, while funding for paid child care does not. They're still a substantial minority, e.g. 25% of couples with children in Alberta have a stay-at-home parent.
You're applying a weird moral valence to a policy proposal that just observes that feeding, housing, and supervising children costs money, and that the current system where those costs fall so heavily on the parents of a particular child is arbitrary and leads to bad outcomes.
I think the race central or not issue is wrongly joined. Republics make "otherism" an issue all the time. The question for Democrats is how to meet it. I like the Stacy Abrams approach, "Don't let Republicans use race (otherness) as a way to divide us who want to level up society." I think the big novelty will be to talk a lot more about voter suppression, gerrymandering that make coalition building across race/class/ethnic/religions/gender lines more difficult.
To your other point, one thing to remember was the dramatic post war surge in crime due to lead in gasoline. That occurred at the same time as The Great Society programs of the 60s and people mistaken concluded that welfare was causing crime. I wonder how much further along we'd be in we didn't have the lead/crime issue?
I particularly appreciate your gimlet-eyed case for the efficacy of social assistance programs. But, um, can't help noting: there's only one "t" in "Bennet."
True confession: When I consider targeted anti-poverty programs, I want to know if the recipients are in their situation due to bad luck or due to bad decisions. My default is to see individual agency -- as opposed to luck, legacy or environment -- as the cause of poverty.
The benefit of universal programs is it short-circuits this line of thinking.
Another thing that short circuits this is to focus on children. No children are in bad circumstances because of their own bad decisions!
The moral thing to do is to recognize that "individual agency" isn't really a concrete thing insofar as everyone is greatly impacted by their environment and those around them. We must help all poor people - providing justice for the unlucky and a second chance for the unwise.
The soulless thing to do is recognize that the welfare state greatly helps the economy, so we should do it.
Using arguments about incentives or individual agency as justification against a welfare state can really only come from an ignorant perspective.
I would propose that resorting to calling those who disagree immoral and ignorant isn’t the best way to persuade
To be clear this is not the argument I use with people with strong conservative views, I just used it to display that there really should not be moral or ideological qualms about welfare.
"...that there really should not be moral or ideological qualms about welfare."
In your opinion.
So what do we do about addressing people who make unwise decisions? Just keep giving them money and expecting a different result?
Government is not a parent. It is not the government's job to make you a better person; it is *your* job to be a better person.
Moreover, you miss Matt's point that "living in poverty — and especially growing up in poverty — has really bad impacts, and providing assistance can deliver useful long-term benefits." How many of those people who make unwise decisions do so because they live in lead-tainted public housing (see, e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/the-poisoned-generation/527229/), with permanent effects? Food insecurity harms cognition (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775710001093); how many make poor decisions because they are hungry? In many cases, giving people money *can* lead to a better result.
A lot of people would argue it’s not government’s responsibility to take care of you either. Either you want government in your life or you don’t.
The main point is that modern welfare policies (a) do not discourage work (see the article) and (b) are really not enough to live a comfortable life. There is plenty of incentive for people to find a job and contribute to society.
So nothing? You didn’t answer my question. You’re saying that they can’t live comfortably off welfare, which we know. Many people are still living in poverty and procreating. How do we address it.
I suspect your view that "individual agency isn't really a concrete thing" is politically dead in the water because it is not how most people see the situation.
And is it really your lived experience? Most people see firsthand that some folks make bad decisions and have bad outcomes, and extrapolate from that to get to "deserving vs undeserving poor" by pretty natural logic.
The main exceptions I see in my life are medical/mental health issues or cases where the parents were such a mess those kids never had a fair chance. But note that I'm already falling back into a frame of deserving/undeserving just writing that sentence...
Right - the real world is really messy. I view these things as headwinds and tailwinds - different people have different levels of success in life based on a lot of different factors, and it's messy to sort out what "deserving" means. But your odds are worse if your parents have less money or less education or fewer social connections, etc.
This is why I think Matt's on to something - make the programs more universal so the middle class gets them too and take contentious arguments about the morality of how the program affects our poorest citizens out of the picture.
I see anti-poverty programs as not equalizing instruments but insurance instruments. Equalizing instruments answer questions of worth and desert, while insurance instruments are questions of smoothing. There's a lot of variance in people's lives even in the same socioeconomic standing- let alone among socioeconomic standings - and that means a lot of variance in the choice that one has to make in a lifetime.
I don't think its wrong to judge people post-smoothing in the same way that we could judge how two businesses use their payout from a fire insurance claim (of course, we may morally disagree at which point should one be judged in the litany of decisions).
"My default is to see individual agency -- as opposed to luck, legacy or environment -- as the cause of poverty."
Not the 10s of millions of Americans with an IQ below 80? You can't join the military in any capacity with an IQ below 85. You don't think that plays a major role?
was typing something similar... I think liberals are much more inclined to see the poor as being the victims of poor circumstance, but conservatives see a bunch have made poor decisions & they don't want to pay for their mistakes.
I personally don't think poor decisions and poor circumstances are so cleanly separable--your decisions are wholly the result of prior circumstances (give or take a bit of randomness)
The first half I agree actually - they are not cleanly separable. But "wholly the result" is where you lose me. I mean, maybe in a deep philosophical "free will is an illusion" sense - but c'mon, you see people do stupid things and have bad outcomes. That is a real thing that happens.
Someone has liked my post and raised it from the dead in my inbox, so sorry for the very delayed response
But I do suppose I mean it in that deep sense. Do you think it's not true? That your decisions are *not* wholly the result of prior circumstances (give or take some fundamental physical randomness)?
Being unmarried, pregnant and underemployed might be a poor circumstance. When it happens more than once to the same person, it’s poor decision making. Same for crime.
I think its a little unfair to say that consistently bad "decisions" are the fault of the individual, when evidence around poverty, childhood circumstances, lead-exposure, homelessness etc. clearly show that in the aggregate people have a much more difficult time making good "decisions". Sure some do and some don't but you can't ignore that something is going on in the aggregate that says that despite their bad "decisions" the individual should still receive help.
I don’t think it’s unfair. If your argument is that we should reward negative behavior or ignore it, I can’t see society really going along with that. I’m a left winger and wouldn’t. “Well they don’t know any better” is just not the way to change minds.
I am not saying that the political case you make is about that, that would be a dead end. I am simply saying from a moral standpoint it seems that social science indicates we really should have much more compassion for such people. Politically I say wrap it in a universalist package and everyone is happy. I'll help the person making six figures if that means I get to help the person stuck in cycles of homelessness/unemployment etc. And as MY said, helping them probably leads to them and those around them (especially children) needing less help in the future.
This is a useful point to make because I think the sentiment is behind a lot of the skepticism of the welfare state. Maybe Yglesias will address it explicitly in a future post but I think he addressed it implicitly in this post.
So I think programs directed at the poor also short circuit this line of thinking. Or I take it that was Yglesias's argument. Instead of asking why people are in their circumstances (a largely unanswerable question or if you imagine it is answerable requires a massive bureaucracy), recognize that it is good for society as a whole to have fewer poor people. Poor people contribute lots of adverse effects on society as a whole and fail to contribute in ways that they obviously could if they weren't poor. So instead of thinking of welfare programs as a kind of charity, we should think of them as contributing to the overall good of society.
To me so much of the draw for universal v. Targeted programs is the reduction of administrative friction. Stimulus checks were popular because people like money, but also because they just sort of showed up without any huge lift by the recipient. Sure UI enhancement is technically a better solution, but the delivery method (state implemented distribution systems) were so broken that a ton of laid off Americans never received the UI that they were eligible for. The map with TANF penetration is striking and should really be a bigger part of the policy conversation
The TANF stats are really and truly shocking. I had already known a lot of them but doing some research for this piece really took it home in my head. The participation rate in TANF is 25%! https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/100521/what_was_the_tanf_participation_rate_in_2016_0.pdf
I think this is probably right. There's a (mis)conception that the delivery of Byzantine government benefits is woefully inefficient and rife with fraud, and therefore something like UBI (paired with single payer healthcare even) would solve both of those problems. For the reasons Matt mentions - targeted programs by and large work fairly well and UBI involves tradeoffs people aren't willing to make - I think targeted problems are the way to go.
I absolutely agree that perhaps in theory being more targeted is the more direct way of solving the problem, but frankly filtered through a political lens universalist programs seem much more popular, and frankly the US is plenty wealthy enough to move some money around. If democrats need to tell people making $150,000/year they get stuff too, so they get elected, then I am all for it.
But the CARES act payments in a way *were* targeted right? Since they phased out at a certain income level.
You could just lower the phase-out threshold and make them happen monthly and *bam* phased-out cash-assistance welfare program with 100% penetration.
The big benefit is there is no signup process or other administrative friction - the gov just sends a check if it has your info on hand.
I think you would quickly get into people saying that the CARES Act cash payments weren't targeted enough because they treated a person making $75,000 (or $150,000, if married) the same as a person making $20,000. In the context of permanent program that's probably right. If you did a monthly payment of $1,200 or whatever for everyone making $75,000/$150,000, that's essentially UBI which runs into the problems Matt mentioned.
That’s a really good point. It would also be a good idea to require states to update their social services infrastructure like UI computer systems, some of which still run on decades-old code, so that targeted assistance has less friction.
When I lived in Germany, I got kindergeld. Basically the same thing as what Matt is talking about. It was awesome. I only had two kids back then.
Now I have five kids, and four step kids. Yep, that’s nine kids.
I sure hope someone out there is having lots of boys, because only one of them is a son.
I have two sister-in-law’s who are 40. Both are trying in vitro to have kids. Neither is having any luck. Both spent much of their adult life saying they didn’t want kids. Or said it was too expensive.
Having lived in Europe for 12 years I saw a gamut of social welfare programs. Holland and Germany did it best. The UK did it the worst. Much of my ex wife’s family was permanently on the dole.
I’m actually a recovering conservative. I’ve come to really appreciate various welfare programs. Mainly because my wife in-laws are in the restaurant industry. Their coworkers and employees have become my social circle. Single moms, Hispanic immigrants (including undocumented). Good people. Many with problems. Single moms, drug problems. I’ve helped several of them negotiate the complicated bureaucracy of getting assistance. I bought presents for their kids, because I know they didn’t have a lot of money.
We should be doing more to help these people. And I say that as someone who makes a good living, winces when it comes to tax time.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.
Even without the "dysgenic" part of the Bell Curve argument, I worry that monthly cash payments in return for more children *could* increase the number of children in poverty given the incentive it creates. (I grew up among the rural poor, and I definitely knew people who would have two more kids for an extra $500/month.)
I'm on the side of Yang's UBI, which only gave cash to adults but continued to offer services to children - to avoid the incentive problems and the "agent" problem of giving money for kids to their parents.
Critics will say I'm just being mean to the poor and looking down on poor people. But I think that's a big part of what liberals miss about the conservative view - that many centrist/conservative people know poor folks who've gotten there through bad decision-making, and they don't want to support/reward them for that.
This is where I miss Scott Alexander, because I see the barrage of linked studies about the benefits of welfare and I think, "Okay, but would literally any of these replicate? Are there just as many other studies showing no benefits"?
Replacing patchwork programs with universalist direct cash programs that don't have weird disincentives is certainly a good idea. Is spending massively more on welfare a great idea? Surely we think that even if existing programs are strongly positive, each marginal dollar is likely to produce less marginal benefit.
On the other hand, the marginal costs are probably pretty low too. Deadweight loss from taxation is low, especially if it's a broadly-based tax that doesn't distort behavior. And obviously redistribution is utility-enhancing. Unless you have a bizarrely strong philosophical aversion to taxation, a bigger welfare state is a pretty obvious winner.
Be the change you wish to see in the world!
I think he said he was going to start blogging again next month?
Great read! Hasn't there been a lot of pushback on the "Americans living on under $2 a day" research in regards to deep poverty?
I think the argument that the sub $2/day population in the United States is living in condition comparable to deep poverty in the developing world doesn't make sense. All that pushback is correct. (The basic reason is that there's more "free stuff" available to poor people in the United States).
That said, deep poverty conditions in the USA are still really bad and it's unconscionable to have those kind of conditions persisting in the middle of a very wealthy society when we have very affordable fixes available.
Matt, to what extent do you think the focus on 'inequality' has caused this topic to drift a bit from the situation on the ground?
I've always felt that poverty should be the focus. There are more equal societies that are not great models for us (Yemen, Niger, Ukraine, plenty of others). It's not that inequality is entirely unimportant, but I fear it pulls the focus away from poverty and toward intra-elite debates.
Obviously, an anti-poverty push includes taxing the very wealthy, and there are inequality implications for that. It just seems that it drags us into an us vs. them fight, instead of the simple realization that we would like to live in a society with fewer instances of inter-generational poverty.
Summary of a lot of political dysfunction on the center-left is: "This idea we used to believe is now much more complicated due to [DEBATABLE ELITE POINT OF VIEW] and now we have to convolute our language and fight about rhetoric while doing very little to help everyone else (i.e. most people), who have very little idea what we're talking about."
All I want for Christmas is to replace the existing welfare state with a very generous negative income tax. Set it up so that someone with no income makes $40,000, phase it out over another $30,000, add in some child benefits and baby you got a welfare system going!
Exactly. Plus it’s easy as hell and requires basically no bureaucracy.
The lack of enthusiasm for EITC and Child Tax Credit among Progressives is astounding. From the media, you'd think Marco Rubio is the only supporter of higher Child Tax Credit.
Very interesting read. Scott Walker's "sales tax refund" framing actually seems to make sense to me. With the giant caveat that I don't actually know anything about the program other than what was in the article, it seems to me like the framing nicely sidesteps the 'handouts' problem where no-one wants to give anyone a handout and no-one actually wants to receive (what they perceive to be) a handout either. So, a rebate as framing makes a lot of sense from that perspective.
The other part here that I think is interesting is the focus on sales tax. If it had been an income tax rebate or a property tax rebate, it would have had to apply only to those people who actually paid those taxes (again, I'm just assuming a whole host of things here). Sales tax, however, is completely universal; everyone pays some amount of sales tax. Therefore, a rebate based on sales tax can also be universal in a way that a rebate based on other taxes presumably couldn't be.
Anyway, I should stop making stuff up now.
I think it was very clever framing. But the point is it was completely arbitrary. All he did was send everyone $100! But then to make it politically correct in conservative terms he called it a "sales tax refund" rather than making it a giveaway to non-taxpayers.
I suppose in some technocratic utopia the USA should have a carbon tax, and then cash payments to people can be a "carbon tax refund" or something.
Social security and medicare also benefit from this approach since it is preached that the line items we see on our paystubs for those programs are our pre-payments for future benefits... maybe Al Gore would have made that actually true. I wonder if support would be more enduring if the tax funding was similarly called out and single people could imagine that they were pre-paying their future benefit?
I don’t think that’s a technocratic utopia at all but a common sense pro-business fiscally conservative idea. Why dismiss it out of hand without trying it?
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/how-should-government-return-carbon-taxes-households
Have economists ever calculated the increase in productivity if people, particularly young people and young parents, are relieved to a degree of the financial dangers of taking risks in their professional life, pursuing dreams, etc.? I would guess it would be substantial. Scandinavia should yield some evidence?
Great piece.
I'm Canadian, so my perspective may differ.
I consider myself a "small government social democrat" and I think that UBI paired with massive public sector reform is the future. I think that by and large a lot of the public sector administration is a make work project for the professional/managerial class that does nothing but add administrative friction to the delivery of services. I think we should cut most programs - unemployment insurance, disability payments, businesss grants, arts grants, etc and fire the workers. Instead just give everybody money every month. I believe this will promote human flourishing by enabling people to take risks - start companies, make art, etc.
I don't think this will ever happen. Sticker shock practically guarantees it but also because modern governments are built to be incrementalist machines. And that's a feature not a bug.
It’s so hard to not feel a massive level of resentment at all your natalist ideas. I don’t think they’re bad ideas but the selection of parents as in the deserving box and childless as undeserving feels awfully cruel.
It's that children are more "deserving" than adults.
And that it’s today’s children who are the future. They will support us. Fix our mistakes.
Single people should absolutely have to pay a premium, since it’s other people’s kids who will have to wipe their ass when they are sitting in a Nursery home.
BUT, aren't those adults who have children they can't support LESS deserving than the responsible adults who don't have kids?
I'm in favor of helping the children through direct services, but nervous about cash payments to those *parents*...
No
There are plenty of adults who have the funds and resources for kids, but because they prefer a single/dink lifestyle don’t have them. I agree with your sentiments though.
Who's going to keep working in the future to maintain the social security payments of the childless?
Children may be more deserving, but that doesn't make pushing childless adults into homelessness (section 8) or hunger (SNAP) any less cruel. Turning welfare politics into deserving vs undeserving along a different axis is counterproductive at best.
I don't know how that doesn't seem cruel to condition inclusion in a broad safety net on your reproductive organs being functional. It's very easy to imagine being laid off longer than the meagre benefits and median savings levels last and I don't get what's undeserving about that. Most of us who have good careers are far closer to lucky than deserving.
Hey Andrew, another Andrew here to comment! By the looks of it, the benefits that Matt advocates for would, at best, partially subsidize the cost of children. The childless would continue to be able to live free, relatively wealthy, relatively comfortable lives. As well, your thinking on this feels unreasonably narrow. Anyone can be a parent, if not through anything else, then adoption. Though this may provide barriers to those who are lower income and infertile, those barriers already exist and are in fact partially addressed in these plans
I mean maybe it is, the topic is really quite raw for me as someone whose spouse is infertile. I think people pretty substantially underestimate the upfront costs of adoption, especially outside the foster system.
It seems to me that creating extra taxes to pay for extra benefits when we haven't even made sure that if you through no fault of your own lose your job you'll get food healthcare and housing help is pretty horrible.
I empathize with that, but I just read that 9% of women are infertile. That includes women who can get pregnant with help, sometimes just medication (clomid) helps. The number of people that can’t conceive ever is low, single digits low. We shouldn’t forgo something, because a few wouldn’t be able to participate. Plenty of college students have private loans that wouldn’t qualify for forgiveness and plenty of people know they aren’t going to live long enough to use social security or other programs for seniors. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have programs for eligible people.
I think because I'm writing somewhat emotionally my thinking is getting somewhat flattened on this. Like it's not a terrible idea but he yadda yaddas what seems like the really important part that we should patch up and strengthen programs so that everyone can be reasonably assured that they will be able to get a roof over their head, food on their table and healthcare if they need it.
Of course like all else equal supporting children is good, I'm a teacher I'm not anti-kid. From where I sit in Orlando Florida where the economy is still a crater deep in the ground and we don't have housing, healthcare, or jobs for the poor I don't know why we can't get anything that's just building basic needs for anyone instead of one super generous program for parents and a kick me sign for everyone else.
Oh dang, sorry to hit a raw nerve! Yeah, I must be honest, I have no idea how difficult the process is relating to adoption, and I'm not going to pretend to. I think your point is fair, and I would say I agree
Adoption is really hard. Speaking as someone who's seen some people go through the process. And that's adoption for people who are relatively affluent married couples -- I don't know that it's realistically possible for single people who aren't quite rich to adopt.
"the selection of parents as in the deserving box and childless as undeserving feels awfully cruel."
First, I'm sorry for your painful situation. We have a child-benefit program in Canada (the Canada Child Benefit), so I can talk a bit about it.
Child care is expensive, especially for a child who is pre-school age (because one worker can only look after a small number of toddlers). For a stay-at-home parent, that cost is forgone income.
Most Canadians will be parents at some point in their lives, so the CCB serves as a form of life-cycle consumption smoothing: we pay somewhat higher taxes before and after having children, and receive the CCB when we have children to help with the costs.
It's a popular program, it's redistributive (it phases out with income at a gradual rate, reducing marginal effective tax rates compared to its predecessor), and it's reduced child poverty by one third (300,000 children) since 2015.
Of course public programs shouldn't focus entirely on parents. But I think any opportunity to set up a popular, economically effective, and redistributive program shouldn't be passed up.
Maybe I'm being somewhat unreasonable but I admit it feels quite a bit different when you position it about childcare. If you told me the state was going to establish 15-20 rooms within schools for 0-6 year olds I'd be like that sounds like a great idea.
Cash assistance feels pretty rotten that is tied only to if you have kids when you can't even get people food housing and healthcare.
In Canada, the battle over cash transfers vs. public funding for paid child care was settled in the 2006 election - a memorable soundbite was that there was nothing stopping parents from spending the cash on "beer and popcorn." The Conservatives won a minority, scrapped the preceding government's agreement with the provinces to provide child care funding, and put cash transfers in place instead.
The advantage of cash transfers vs. funding for child care is that transfers benefit stay-at-home parents, who have heavy costs in the form of forgone employment income, while funding for paid child care does not. They're still a substantial minority, e.g. 25% of couples with children in Alberta have a stay-at-home parent.
In Canada there's not a huge amount of government involvement in food and housing, but the advantages of public health insurance seem pretty obvious - you get massive efficiency gains from risk-pooling. (I was taken aback by just how close the Republicans came to scrapping Obamacare in 2017.) http://policyoptions.irpp.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/assets/po/sovereignty-in-turmoil/heath.pdf
You're applying a weird moral valence to a policy proposal that just observes that feeding, housing, and supervising children costs money, and that the current system where those costs fall so heavily on the parents of a particular child is arbitrary and leads to bad outcomes.
I think the race central or not issue is wrongly joined. Republics make "otherism" an issue all the time. The question for Democrats is how to meet it. I like the Stacy Abrams approach, "Don't let Republicans use race (otherness) as a way to divide us who want to level up society." I think the big novelty will be to talk a lot more about voter suppression, gerrymandering that make coalition building across race/class/ethnic/religions/gender lines more difficult.
"core potential workers"
Can you define that?
To your other point, one thing to remember was the dramatic post war surge in crime due to lead in gasoline. That occurred at the same time as The Great Society programs of the 60s and people mistaken concluded that welfare was causing crime. I wonder how much further along we'd be in we didn't have the lead/crime issue?
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
I particularly appreciate your gimlet-eyed case for the efficacy of social assistance programs. But, um, can't help noting: there's only one "t" in "Bennet."