The Debt Ceiling and The "Deserving" Poor
On our historical amnesia and the long legacy of Protestant work ethic
In writing and researching my book American Orphan, I have realized that within the history of orphanhood in America lie many other histories—the histories of childhood, motherhood, and the family; the history of immigration and religion; the history of slavery and civil rights; the history of Native sovereignty. The most consistent overlap and throughline, though, is the history of poverty and American attitudes toward it, which have not much changed since the colonial era.
This is because an orphan is not an orphan—because even though there have always been children in this country who have two dead parents, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about orphans is and always has been largely poor children. The vast majority of children in orphanages had living parents who were simply poor; the vast majority of children in foster care now are removed from their parents due to neglect, which is typically just a synonym for poverty.
And when it comes to poverty, our country has been having the same conversation—steeped in the same moral values—since the 1600s. It comes down to a division between the so-called “deserving” and “underserving” poor that has its roots in the Protestant work ethic, which tied work to eternal salvation. Historically speaking, poverty has always been seen as a moral failure in the U.S., but some poor people get an out. “Orphans”—poor, innocent children who are still potentially reformable and redeemable—are historically deserving of aid. So are the elderly, widows, and the disabled. These people “deserve” help from the public because they are deemed to be incapable of (or excused from) working. The “undeserving poor,” on the other hand, have always been people whom our country thinks should be able to work, but are too lazy to do so. “Able-bodied” men are the prime example. The “undeserving poor” should be punished for seeking aid and forced to work as part of an effort at moral reform.
This recurring moral conversation about poverty and work came to the fore again in recent weeks as the Republicans held the country hostage with their brinksmanship surrounding the debt ceiling, and as President Biden gave in to negotiating with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In demanding budget cuts, the Republicans predictably went after our (already limited, totally insufficient) social safety net, specifically the means-tested programs that are politically acceptable to chop down further, since Social Security and Medicare were taken off the table—SNAP and TANF. In the final bill that Biden signed and praised, both programs will be saddled with further work requirements, even though they already both have work requirements and even though those work requirements don’t work.
SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is essentially food stamps; TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is the replacement for so-called “welfare: that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996 after promising to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” The welfare program it replaced was what was once called Aid to Dependent Children and later called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program first enacted during the New Deal that provided poor single mothers (ideally widows, almost exclusively white) with cash assistance because they were “deserving.” The idea behind ADC was that poverty alone should not break up a (white) family, and that mothers should be able to care for their children at home instead of relying on orphanages, and indeed the program did make a difference in that regard for some families. But ADC/AFDC was already insufficient determined eligibility in a frankly racist manner. In remaking “welfare,” TANF provides even fewer families with much less money than ADC/ADFC (if you want a digestible run-down, Last Week Tonight did a great one a few months back), and comes with cumbersome and complicated work participation requirements.
The work requirements for SNAP—which again, already existed for “able-bodied” people 18 to 49 without dependents—now also apply to “able-bodied” people ages 50 to 54. Interestingly, the bill also expands the category of the “deserving” poor as it pertains to SNAP access: veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and people 18 to 24 who aged out of foster care (!) are exempt from work requirements. This give-and-take means that a 0.2% more people will actually be eligible for SNAP, per the Congressional Budget Office analysis; in the process, many older adults who cannot work will be at risk of further hunger. The TANF picture is more complicated but essentially comes down to increasing the percentage of families receiving TANF who must work in order to get their benefits.
These changes to SNAP and TANF in the debt ceiling agreement will not save money (they’ll actually cost $2 billion), and will not help poor people find work. But they will further punish the “undeserving” poor. As Gore Vidal said about “the United States of Amnesia,” “we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”