An old friend called to wish me a happy birthday. The
conversation began with some rehashing of old times before it veered into the
politics of welfare recipients and the mass deportation of immigrants, as
conversations so often do in these days of authoritarian rule and its white-hot
hatred of “the Other.”
“Who is going to do the jobs that immigrants are doing? Who
is going to perform the back breaking grunt work and the tedious, mind-numbing
jobs that Americans refuse because there is something better out there for
them?” I asked.
“When Americans get hungry enough, they will take those
jobs,” he said.
His remark left me speechless. He expressed a desire for his
fellow Americans to experience such levels of hunger that they would be
compelled to accept low-pay and often back-breaking jobs they have declined for
decades.
On one hand, my friend claimed that Americans would take the
low-paying and often thankless jobs that immigrant now perform when they face
desperation, but then, he complained that poor people are poor because they are
lazy.
What is wrong here? The problem concerns the need of the
authoritarian mind to punish our most vulnerable, and I see this hunger in all
my authoritarian-minded friends, acquaintances, and online discussion partners.
It is a feature of many social media posts. When they heap their social and
political opinions on me, I see that no cruelty is too severe against
brown-skins, transgenders, homosexuals, immigrants, atheists, liberals, civil
service employees, and non-Christians. Those people against whom they bend
their rage are to be purged from “their” culture, and eliminated with cruelty,
rounded up like cattle and sent to foreign hellholes or deprived of all civil
rights and censored. Respect is reserved for those sufficiently deprived of
melanin. Those authoritarians express outrage ranging from outright bigotry to
cold, calculated contempt when discussing their plans for The Other.
They tell me that the poor are lazy. The homeless are
voluntary. Why are my taxes paying people to not work? They ask. And in each of
their statements decrying the poor, they regurgitate the lies and innuendos
that still haunt us from the 1980s. Their vision of the government-assisted
poor is straight out of the Ronald Reagan’s hasty generalization in his
promotion of the “welfare queen” as the typical welfare recipient.
Since the Reagan administration, wealth disparities have
grown dramatically, income-tax rates for top earners have fallen, and overseas
manufacturing and automation have reduced the availability of blue-collar jobs.
The one thing all my circle of authoritarian ideologues
share is a vision of the government-assisted poor as welfare queens when, in
the real world nearly every American adult has relied on a major government
program. Rich and middle-class families draw on the same number of government
benefits as the average poor family 1
·
We provide more for those who need it the
least, creating a welfare state for the upper income bracket.2
·
The four-hundred richest Americans are
taxed at the lowest rate—23 percent.3
• The
US spends more than twice as much on the upper class as on national defense.4
We spend it on benefits like the mortgage interest deduction which benefits the
upper-income class. In 2013, 73 percent of the program benefited the wealthiest
20 percent of Americans.5
I call that “Wealthfare.”
WEALTHFARE
People who used non-cash government benefits, like tax
breaks, were unlikely to see themselves as beneficiaries of a government
presence in their lives.6 We see a similar dynamic at work when the
beneficiaries of wealthfare—the 10-to-20 percenters—swear by how their hard
labor created their success. It calls to mind the old joke about the person who
was born on 3rdbase and thought he hit a triple.
For example, the federal government spent more than $193
billion on tax subsidies for homeowners, while only $53 billion went into
direct housing assistance for low-income families.7 Low-income
earners were born at the batter’s box and facing Roger Clemens on the pitcher’s
mound.
Homeowners claim the mortgage interest deduction on first
and second homes and they may do so for the length of the mortgage—while the
lifetime limit for cash welfare to the poor is five years.8 Yet, I
have heard, frequently and loudly, that those who receive cash benefits have no
incentive to work. That is class warfare at its finest. Wealthy Americans enjoy
a wealthfare state that is surpassed only by that provided for the corporate
state.
PLUNDERBUND
Some facts:
No number better captures the decline of the Unties States
into a new state of feudalism and oligarchic rule like: CEO pay rose 940
percent between 1978 and 2018. Worker pay rose only 12 percent.9
Rents increased 45 percent. Healthcare cost increased 101 percent between 1984
and 2018. 10 That increase in rent came, in part, from landlords
raising rent when states increased the minimum wage. Landlords also raised
rents after the COVID-19 rescue packages, but commentators preferred to blame
rent increases on inflation.11
Now, in mid-2025, the Trump “Big Beautiful Bill” requires
that the poor again sacrifice so that the wealthy can enjoy even more riches
and power.
Is class warfare an incidental result of the American
system, or is it a engineered? That’s a question each person must answer for
themselves. We can only hope they base their answers on the evidence, and not
on their emotional triggers.
#
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Suzanne Mettler, The Government-Citizen Disconnect
(2018) Quoted in Matthew Desmond, Poverty, in America (Crown Publishing,
2023) 92. “96 percent of American adults have relied on n a major government
program”
2 John Guyton, et al., “Tax Evasion at the Top of the Income
Distribution: Theory and Evidence,” National Bureau of Economic Research,
Working Paper 28542, March 2021, Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 121.
3 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of
Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York
Norton, 2019, 13-16: Internal Revenue Service, IRS Provides Tax Inflation
Adjustments for Tax Year 2020, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the
Treasury, 2019.), Quoted in Desmond, Poverty 2023), 95
4 Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Major
tax Expenditures in 2019 (Washington, D.C., Congress of the United States,
2021). The FY 2023 military and national defense budget is expected to exceed
$838 billion. Congressional Budget Office, “Congressional Budget Office Cost
Estimate: HR 7900, National Defense Authorization Act for Fisccal year 2023, At
a Glance.” July 6, 2022. Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023), 93.
5 Ben Casselman, “The Tax Deduction Economists Hate”,:
FiveThirtyEight, April 3, 1015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/.
Quoted in Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America:
Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S Poverty. (Ben Bella Books, 2021) 55
6. Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows:
Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy (2008) Quoted in Desmond, Poverty
(2023) 95
7. Matthew Desmond, “House Rules.” The New York Times
Magazine 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap.
8. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America (2023)
9. Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO Compensation Has
Grown 940% Since 1978,” Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/.
10. Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in
America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S Poverty. (Ben Bella Books,
2021) 6-7
See also: Sumit Agarwal, Brent Ambrose, and Moussa Diop, “Do Wage
Increases Benefit Intended Households? Evidence from the Performance of
Residential Leases,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 19-28,
Julu 2019. See also Atsushi Yamagishi, Minimum Wages and Housing Rents: Theory
and Evidence,” Regional Science And Urban Economics 87 (2021): 1-13. On
the history of landlords raising rents following wage increases, see Blackmar, Manhattan
for Rent; Mumford, City in History. Quoted in Desmond, Poverty
(2023) 79.
#
