The rise and fall of guaranteed income
President Clinton and the “undeserving” poor
Many scholars Remapping Debate spoke with pointed to the 1996 reforms of the welfare system by President Clinton as the fullest realization of the idea that society did not owe an obligation to those citizens who were physically able to be employed but were not. The reforms replaced the previously existing Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which had relatively weak work requirements, with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, which has very strict work requirements.
In a 1995 letter to Congressional leaders pushing the reform, Clinton said nothing about the obstacles that might prevent individuals from obtaining jobs. Instead, he placed great emphasis on his belief that every individual has an obligation to work:
Finally, welfare reform must be about responsibility. Individuals have a responsibility to work in return for the help they receive. The days of something for nothing are over. It is time to make welfare a second chance, and responsibility a way of life.
Market worship
Alice O’Connor, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), said that the rise of a market-centric world view has displaced other values in America to such an extent that it is now often accepted that the broader society has an obligation not to give assistance to the poor or disadvantaged.
“The idea is that there are these market forces out there that, if left alone, will produce the best outcomes,” she said. “Everything you do that interferes with those forces is considered a distortion, so an obligation develops to get out of [the market’s] way.”
Fred Block, professor of sociology at the University California, Davis explained that, when applied to policies intended to aid the poor, the logic that there is an obligation not to interfere with the market gave rise to an idea called the “perversity thesis,” which states that by giving benefits to the poor, the government is interfering with the “market signals” that are telling them to work.
“The underlying logic is that if we interfere with those signals [by giving people benefits],” Block said, “they will stop being able to operate as people should in a market society, which is by listening to and responding to the signals of the market.”
That perspective was a cornerstone of President Reagan’s thinking about welfare. “It is a fact of American life that many Federal programs, while attempting to help the poor, have made them more dependent on the government,” Reagan said. The solution, he said, was to remove the distorting effects of government intervention on market signals by “making work and self-sufficiency more attractive than welfare.”
Six years later, President Clinton had adopted the same rhetoric when advocating welfare reform. “We cannot permit millions and millions and millions of American children to be trapped in a cycle of dependency…with parents who are trapped in a system that doesn’t develop their human capacity to live up to the fullest of their God-given abilities,” he said. In that speech, Clinton makes it clear that removing the “obstacles” to self-sufficiency was an obligation, a duty that “we owe…to the next generation.”
“So now instead of saying, ‘We have an obligation to support the poor,’ we’re saying, ‘We have an obligation to let the poor take care of themselves,’” Block said. “That’s about as different as it gets.”
The “you didn’t build that” controversy
Marisa Chappell, a professor of history at Oregon State University, agreed that “market thinking” tends to eliminate history and social context from the question of what obligations people have to one another, and added that this lack of context permeates the prevailing sense of “who deserves what” when applied to the rich as well as the poor.
“In the same way that the poor are thought of as being responsible for their economic problems, the rich are understood as being completely responsible for their wealth,” Chappell said. “The sense that their success depends in part on the broader society” — a sense, she said, that was much more resonant in the 1960s and 1970s — “is gone.”
A consequence of market thinking, she went on, is that those who are successful are not thought of as owing anything to the broader society. Chappell pointed to the controversy that ensued last summer when, in a campaign speech, President Obama suggested that successful individuals would not have succeeded without the broader social goods they have benefited from, and that, therefore, they may owe something back to society.
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” Obama had said. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Republicans quickly seized on Obama’s comments, criticizing the President for suggesting that successful individuals did not deserve all of the credit for the success. A week after Obama’s speech, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney excoriated Obama:
To say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motors, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John[’s] Pizza …To say something like that, it’s not just foolishness. It’s insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America.