Here’s the latest in the ongoing series of articles on the working poor, in this case, from the New York Times: “Working, but Needing Public Assistance Anyway.” I hardly need to tell you what the article is about: it features single moms working at minimum wage jobs, who despite working full-time, are nonetheless recipients of federal aid, in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, child care subsidy or other government programs. This is, really, nothing new — and ought to be a positive development, to the extent that this is a result of developing phase-outs for government benefits that enable the poor to support themselves to as great a degree as possible, while recognizing that, with their particular skill level and the state of the economy, they aren’t able to be wholly self-sufficient. This is certainly far preferable to families living on welfare and refusing to seek work because getting a job, any job, removes welfare benefits that are more valuable than the paycheck they get.
The very concept of the working poor isn’t new. Perhaps in the past they weren’t eligible for government benefits, but that doesn’t speak to the lack of neediness of these families — just to the extent that the government wasn’t as willing to improve their material well-being. After all, food stamps and Medicaid (as well as Section 8 housing, low-income heating assistance, and other in-kind benefits for the working poor) weren’t implemented because suddenly the financial situation of the working poor took a turn for the worse, but because our expectations grew — it is no longer acceptable for the poor to live in tenements or sharecropper shacks without running water or heat, for waifs to beg on streetcorners or work in factories, and, of course, as modern medicine came into being, we expect the poor to have access to medical care as well.
So what is new? Based on a mythical history in which, prior to — when? 1980? — workers were always able to support their families, even at minimum wage or unskilled jobs, even if a single mom is the only wage-earner and has child-care costs, to boot, progressives are now promoting the idea that employers have the moral, if not legal, responsibility, for all their employees, to provide wages high enough to meet all the needs (2015 definition) of their employees and their families — and, what’s more, regardless of family size or number of wage earners.
Here’s the Times:
Nearly three-quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker, according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for employers of low-wage workers, from giants like McDonald’s and Walmart to mom-and-pop businesses.
The article then goes on to describe plans to “punish” or shame employers for employing workers who collect Medicaid or other government benefits.
Funny, one could turn it around, and say that minimum wage employers are helping out the taxpayers, by providing jobs that lessen the amount of taxpayer subsidy required for unskilled workers with children. But I think this idea that employers are “freeloaders” for paying low wages speaks to the fundamental mindset of progressives: that employers, as a collective whole, are somehow a class apart from the rest of America, and collectively have a responsibility to provide sufficient jobs at sufficient pay rates for all potential workers, and any missing job or too-low pay is branded as a willful rejection of this responsibility.
And, what’s more, employers have no control over what benefits the government decides to provide for low-wage workers, nor can they restrict their hiring to childless workers, or control how many kids they have. (I suppose penalties for welfare-using workers would be a strong incentive to hire retirees who are automatically eligible for Social Security and Medicare.) And, heck, let’s disregard McDonalds: what about the mom and pop business, just barely staying in business, which could hire more low-wage workers or fewer high-wage workers. Are those workers who lose their jobs, or never get one offered in the first place, really better off with no wages and being fully depending on the government?
Which is, once again, an illustration of the failure of progressives to understand the way the economy, employment, and the world around them works.
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