John Walters is a political columnist for VTDigger.
First in Washington, then in Montpelier, an entirely predictable thing happened in late March. When expanded unemployment benefits were made part of the $2 trillion federal stimulus bill, opponents of the plan raised the specter of workers leaving their jobs merely to collect overly generous benefits.
It’s nonsense, but it’s part of a decades-long tradition in American public life: Assuming that the poor and working poor are inherently lazy.
During the stimulus bill debate, three Republican senators objected to a provision that would add $600 per week for four months to unemployment benefits. Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said the bill could provide a “strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work” because some people could theoretically make more by being unemployed.
Yuh-huh. Don’t know how those employees would manage to get themselves laid off, but whatever.
The situation is a little different in Vermont, where people who leave a job for reasons related to coronavirus may qualify. And those familiar objections were raised. Austin Davis, lobbyist for the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, said member businesses feared that the sweetened UI would tempt workers to quit.
“We are now trying to figure out how we navigate an environment in which people get paid more to stay home than they do to go to work,” said Bram Kleppner, CEO of Danforth Pewter. He said that “a number of workers” have opted to stay home and collect unemployment.
OK, well, there are a few problems with that line of reasoning. First, if workers don’t feel safe on the job, then maybe they should stay away, especially if they have family members at heightened risk. The four months of expanded benefits would allow that worker to make a sensible choice to stay home for (hopefully) the duration of the pandemic.
Second, the economy is imploding all around us. Joblessness is shooting through the roof. In this environment, are workers going to casually forgo employment for the sake of four months of benefits? By the time they re-enter the workforce, unemployment is likely to be sky-high.
Finally, if Kleppner’s biggest problem is hiring new workers, then he is truly a blessed man.
But the notion that generous benefits will turn hard workers into couch potatoes has been a thread in our politics since the Great Depression, when the Works Progress Administation was the butt of jokes about men leaning on shovels all day long.
A few lowlights along this sad, dusty trail: In the 2012 presidential campaign, former House speaker Newt Gingrich branded President Obama the “food stamp President” and alleged that people were using food stamps for all kinds of inappropriate expenses, up to and including travel to Hawaii. For which he received a “FALSE” rating from PolitiFact.
In the 1990s, then-President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform plan was entirely based on the unproven theory that welfare was making Americans lazy — a theme made popular by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. During his presidential campaign in 1976, Reagan struck a conservative chord with his tales of Chicago’s Welfare Queen, who supposedly racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars from various federal programs and had the audacity to drive a Cadillac.
The real-life Welfare Queen was named Linda Taylor. She was a habitual liar and repeat criminal, not a run-of-the-mill welfare recipient. She was, indeed, tried and convicted for welfare fraud — for taking a total of $8,000.
In the early 1960s, magazines like Reader’s Digest, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post published breathless pieces about widespread welfare fraud, such as the Post’s 1960 article “Are We Paying an Illegitimacy Bonus?” It alleged that poor women were breeding like rabbits so they could collect more money. As if you could give birth with a flick of the wrist.
Before the Welfare Queen there was the Lady in Mink, whose saga was recounted by press critic A.J. Liebling in an essay called “Mink Wrapped in Horsefeathers,” first published in The New Yorker (and reprinted in his masterful essay collection “The Press”). In 1947, the Lady in Mink became the poster child for welfare abuse in New York City, trumpeted endlessly by the press. She was collecting benefits while owning a mink coat! Egad!
Turned out, the coat in question had a torn lining, looked distinctly mangy, and was worth a fraction of its original price. Even so, the Lady in Mink remained a symbol of all that was wrong with city benefit programs. The original impetus for the press coverage was a state investigation of the city programs, which found a total of 42 questionable cases. Considering the city had an average daily caseload of 263,000, that’s a remarkably small total.
That’s exactly what usually happens when a public benefit program is financially audited: The findings of waste, fraud and abuse are minimal. The Welfare Queen may have lied herself into thousands in benefits, but a 1978 audit of the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare found that a mere 1 percent of its budget was lost to fraud and abuse. That’s better than the vast majority of businesses.
And I’ll bet you a shiny new quarter that the number of people who voluntarily leave their jobs just to collect UI is vanishingly small. But this theme has ingrained itself deep into our minds. Questions are inevitably raised about the proclivities, character and intentions of the poor and the working class.
“The theme of the undeserving poor recurs as often as Groundhog Sees His Shadow,” wrote Liebling in 1947. That sentence continues to ring true today.