Republicans Want Poor People to Suffer

GOP policy on poverty is driven by sadism

This week the federal government, in defiance of the law and court orders, has delayed and cut SNAP payments, threatening 42 million Americans with food insecurity and hunger. To celebrate this entirely voluntary Trump exercise in misery and carnage, Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt popped up on his hind legs to spew racist lies about the program, insisting that people were “selling their benefits” and using the program to “get their nails done” and “get their weaves and their hair.”

Nail salons do not except SNAP, ffs—but Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson nodded along ghoulishly, and then insisted that the real problem with the program was not that it was being illegally gutted, but that too many people relied on it.

Schmitt and Johnson were particularly incensed by Johnson’s Missouri GOP colleague Josh Hawley, who has been trying to fund SNAP because, even though he is a fascist insurrectionist piece of shit, he still believes that “our kids deserve to eat.” That makes him an outlier among Republicans, though, who mostly shrug at the idea that kids are starving, but get really upset at the idea that some poor person, somewhere, is using benefits for something they consider profligate.

Ronald Reagan infamously attacked “welare queens,”—Black women who were supposedly taking advantage of food and poverty assistance programs to make a fortune. This myth isn’t really based on facts, but on a moral intuition. That intuition is that aid programs should be judged failures if any poor person, anywhere, gets a dime more than they are entitled to, with the not very buried understanding being that poor people are not entitled to anything.

If it wasn’t clear, this is a terrible way to assess the success of an antipoverty program. You should assess antipoverty programs by whether or not they reduce poverty. And on that metric SNAP is very successful. More, programs which put fewer restrictions on aid are also, and arguably even more, successful.

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SNAP works

Per a good explainer at Johns Hopkins, SNAP is appropriated by the federal government and administered by the states; recipients must be below 130% of the poverty line. SNAP benefits can’t be spent on tobacco, alcohol, nonfood items, or restaurants; it’s mostly restricted to grocery store items. 39% of SNAP recipients are children and 20% are elderly; 10% are people with disabilities. The benefits are only $187 per month , and administrative costs are low.

Food insecurity is correlated with mental illness and depression, especially in adolescents. It also weakens immune systems, which increases the likelihood that people will contract illnesses and end up in emergency rooms. And of course when you lose aid for food, you have to spend more money on food—which means without SNAP more people will be unable to afford rent and will end up homeless.

Starving millions of people is not some sort of cheat key for massive federal savings. On the contrary, if people don’t eat, they become sick, can’t work, and enter a downward spiral that puts massive strain on healthcare and social systems. Pushing people to starvation often results in a spike in crime; it can even lead to food riots if the crisis is great enough—and slashing aid to 42 million people is going to be quite a crisis.

Again, the Newsmax theory is that all of this is necessary to prevent people misusing the system by buying things other than food. Not only can people not buy anything other than food with SNAP, but there’s a ton of evidence that literally just giving people money to spend however they want is a hugely successful way to combat poverty.

Give poor people money

Though the political class—and especially Republicans—have largely memory-holed this, a few years ago we did a massive natural experiment in giving poor people money. During the pandemic, Congress expanded a benefit known as the Child Tax Credit. Essentially, the US started to give low-income families $2000-$3600 per child per year for children five or younger and $2000-$3000 for kids 6-17. The benefits were delivered as monthly payments, so between July and December of 2021, families received $250-$300 a month per child.

Around 61.2 million children received benefits. The first month of payments in July lifted 3 million children out of poverty, cutting the child poverty rate by about 26%. After six months, the program had reduced child poverty in the US by 30%. That means almost one in three poor children in the US in July 2021 were no longer in poverty by December.

Former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin helped Republicans kill the expanded child tax credit because he worried that parents would use the money on drugs. This is the Newsmax logic; if anyone anywhere is misusing federal funds, that offsets the benefits of 3 million children a month being lifted out of poverty. Stopping one evil welfare queen is worth starving any number of children. Science.

Not surprisingly, Manchin was not just an evil piece of shit; he was also wrong. The vast majority of families who received child tax credit payments—91%—used the funds to pay for food, clothing, school supplies, utility bills, or rent. Some also used them for vehicle payments (19%)—often a vital necessity to get to work. They also used them for childcare (16%), or to pay down debts (17%).

Critics of the program worried that it would cause parents to leave the labor force. This is an odd concern, since a parent leaving the labor force to better care for their children is not a bad outcome! IN fact, though, the actual period of the ECTC saw a 1.7 percent increase in employment across the economy among parents and non-parents. This reflected general economic expansion and stimulus; the ECTC did not cause some sort of massive exit from the workforce. Many parents who received the tax credit said it helped them with child-care and transportation, allowing them to work more or to hold down jobs. In some cases it allowed them to return to school and become qualified for higher paying work.

These findings are consistent with other cash universal basic income initiative, including a recent basic income program for artists in Ireland, and a $1000 a month program giving cash to people in Illinois and Texas. In these studies, people again used the additional money to meet basic needs; housing, food, transportation, savings. They also used the payments to handle emergencies—to pay for funerals when a family member died, for example, or to enter drug treatment. Recipient’s quality of life improved significantly, which meant they were able to give more to their families and communities. The Irish arts study in particular found that the pilot program cost 72 million euros and generated 80 million in benefits—more than paying for itself.

The entitlement of the rich is the immiseration of the poor

The results of these programs are quite straightforward and even intuitive. If you give poor children money they stop being as poor. If you give people food they are less hungry. Cash payments allow people to meet their basic needs, pursue their dreams, and participate in society in beneficial ways. This isn’t rocket science. Are people like Ron Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Joe Manchin, and Rob Schmitt really too stupid to follow elemental logic? What’s wrong with them?

I think the problem is not of the intellect, but of the heart. Schmitt et. al. do not care about the overwhelming evidence that the poor and society as a whole benefit from aid because they do not in fact want children to escape poverty. They don’t want adults to escape poverty either. They see the poor as entitled villains. And they see them as entitled villains because they believe that poor people are entitled to nothing—not food, not joy, not life.

In Entitled, feminist philosopher Kate Manne argues that misogyny isn’t really about hate, but about entitlement; men believe they are entitled to women’s deference, women’s bodies, women’s service. Men feel that they are entitled to the feeling of superiority they get from knowing that women are less important and less powerful than they.

I think this is how prejudice works in relation to the poor too. Ron Johnson, for example, has used his position to feed at the public trough to the tune of millions. But rich men are entitled to all the money they can guzzle. Nor is that all; the rich believe they deserve not just all the money, but all the deference, all the power, and all the status. That status is only worthwhile if it allows them to look down at others—especially poor and nonwhite people (and especially poor and nowhite women, given Schmitt’s obsession with nail salons and weaves.)

Being rich is fun because you have lots of stuff. But an important part of the pleasure is not just enjoying what you have but enjoying what others do not have. Policing the purchases of the poor is part of the entitlement of the wealthy. Trump can have a gold plated bathroom because that’s the kind of thing he deserves. Trump and his minions can also shame and police poor people for buying soda, or getting their nails done, because, again, those are the perks of being wealthy.

Power is entitlement—and part of entitlement is the sadistic pleasure of immiserating women, Black people, immigrants, the poor. As Adam Serwer says, the cruelty is the point. Nor is the cruelty for the rich alone; middle class people, and even other working people can join in if they’re willing to hate their neighbors.

Republicans (and Joe Manchin) don’t attack SNAP and UBI because the programs are failures. They attack them because the programs are successful, and conservatives hate the idea that some poor person somewhere may be experiencing autonomy, freedom, or joy.

We could eliminate poverty and hunger if we wanted to. Republicans and conservatives have made it very clear for a long time that they do not to. They feel bigger, stronger, better, happier, more entitled when children are hungry.