The Weekly Sift

Should the point of liberal programs be to help the poor? Or to change the economy so that people don’t become poor?

In Thursday’s Washington Post, Catherine Rampell pointed out a subtle but important distinction that liberals should never lose sight of: Elizabeth Warren’s free-college and student-debt-relief plans, Rampell claimed, are “liberal but not progressive”, because “they give bigger benefits to higher-income families than to lower-income ones that actually need the help.” Rampell would rather see money targeted more directly at college-eligible low-income students.

This is a longstanding argument in liberal circles. On the one hand we have universal programs like Social Security, and on the other hand are targeted programs like food stamps. In an economic sense, targeted programs are more efficient at helping the poor — doing more with less. But that efficiency comes with some non-economic costs: increased red tape (you have to prove you qualify) and greater stigma for the recipients.

A universal entitlement is conceptually simpler: If you go to college, we’ll help you pay for it. But it costs more, because (as Rampell points out), we’ll be helping Bill Gates’ kids too. And since everything has to be paid for somehow, the universal program is more invasive to the pre-program economy. You have to tax more so that you can spend more.

A related (but not quite identical) distinction applies to our motives for having a program to begin with: Targeted programs have an air of charity about them. They don’t argue with the underlying structure of the economy, they just try to change the results. Do some people not make enough money to eat properly? Very well, then, we’ll give them food. We’ll leave alone whatever it is about the economy that creates unemployment or produces jobs that pay below-subsistence wages. We’ll just fix the food part.

Universal programs tend to be motivated more by notions of social justice: It isn’t just the outcome that’s wrong, it’s the fundamental structure of things. Yes, a targeted program would be a lighter-handed tweak of the underlying economy. But if the underlying economy is fundamentally unjust, why is a lighter hand good?

Rights. The reason it’s important to understand this distinction is that it’s easy for charitable and targeted-program attitudes to sneak their assumptions into a discussion. “Efficiency” always sounds good. But as soon as you start arguing about efficiency, you’ve bought the assumption that smaller changes are better. And often you’ve also bought an additional assumption about the program’s proper goal.

A universal program establishes a basic right, and re-defines the economy to fulfill it. Re-defining the economy is, in large part, the purpose of the program. The point of making public colleges free isn’t just to help the poor pay for education. The point is that public colleges ought to be free. A society in which public colleges are free is a more just society.

The same ideas apply across the board. One failing of our healthcare system is that too many people get priced out it, with corresponding effects on their ability to survive and thrive. ObamaCare targets people in danger of being priced out and subsidizes their health insurance, so it helps resolve that particular failing (or would if it were properly funded and overseen by an administration that believes in its purpose). But ObamaCare does not establish health care as a basic right.

The point of Medicare for All or some other universal-healthcare plan isn’t just to help the people who are being priced out of healthcare. The point is to make healthcare a basic right. That requires more government spending and taxing than even a fully funded ObamaCare. In that sense, it’s a “less efficient” use of the government’s fiscal powers, a heavy-handed reorganization rather than a light-handed tweak. If you believe that the current economy — where many people who work fulltime still can’t afford to take care of themselves or their children — is fundamentally just, then this heavy-handedness must seem outrageous.

But if you believe that the current economy is unjust, then changing it is a virtue, not a vice. There are efficiency/inefficiency arguments to be made at a number of levels, but the more important point is this: A society in which healthcare is a basic right is a more just society than the one we have now. The problem isn’t just that the current economy produces some downtrodden people who need charitable help from the rest of us, which we choose to channel through government. It’s that everyone should have a basic right to healthcare, and right now they don’t.

Vulnerability. Whether a plan gets framed as a basic right or as charity channeled through the government makes a huge difference in the politics. Most voters see charity-justified, means-tested programs as something the government does for “them”, not for “us”. Such generosity is fine as long as “we” are feeling prosperous and “they” seem deserving. But either of those factors can change, or can be changed through political rhetoric.

Means-tested programs are always open to forms of attack that universal programs are immune to: denigration and demonization of the beneficiaries. “Those people” don’t deserve our help because they are lazy or immoral or have made bad life choices. And usually, there’s no obvious place to draw the line: Are the best-off recipients truly in need, or are they just scamming us? Wherever the cut-off is, why shouldn’t it be lower?

If you think about it — and we seldom do — plenty of Social Security recipients fit the same profile as the demonized beneficiaries of means-tested programs: They’re healthy and could get jobs, but don’t want to. The reason conservative politicians don’t rail about their laziness and sense of entitlement is that Social Security is an “us”, not a “them”. They’d be demonizing their own voters, not some isolated scapegoat class.

But if Social Security ever became means-tested — as conservatives and a few efficiency-minded liberals often propose; I mean, what’s the point of sending government checks to Warren Buffett? — we’d soon see the same kinds of rhetoric and tactics: outrage at people who spend their benefits on luxuries, tightening requirements so that fewer and fewer people qualify (“I want to help the truly needy, but …”), and making the experience degrading and dis-spiriting with drug tests, long lines to file your annual re-applications, paternalistic restrictions on how you spend the money, and so on.

The rhetoric just writes itself: Picture all those lazy, able-bodied 60-somethings living on the beach in Florida, spending your tax dollars instead of working. They didn’t save when they were younger, and now they expect the government to make up the difference! Doesn’t that boil your blood?

Local services. You can see the same logic play out locally. In some cities everybody uses public transit. (I’ve taken the BART during rush hour in San Francisco. There were a lot of three-piece suits in the car.) Correspondingly, the service is good in those cities, because transit-riders are an “us”, not a “them”. But in cities (or even neighborhoods within cities) where only the poor use public transit, bus-riders are a “them” and you can forget about rail. In those places, buses are crowded and dirty; schedules are sparse and inconvenient.

Ditto for public schools. In towns where kids of all economic classes go to the same schools, standards are high and it’s not hard to pass a funding increase. But in towns where the public schools are for the poor, and the wealthy all send their kids to private schools, public education is a charity. What do “those people” expect the rest of “us” to provide for them?

Expect worse outcomes yet if Betsy DeVos ever gets her way and public schools are phased out entirely, in favor of private schools that accept government vouchers. The system will quickly devolve into two tiers: Schools that you can pay for solely with a voucher, and schools where the voucher only covers part of the cost. The voucher-only schools will be for the poor, and the vouchers will gradually shrink down to charity levels: Do “those kids” really need music or foreign languages? Are they capable of appreciating literature or higher mathematics? Why should we pay for more than just keeping them under control all day?

Of course, we’d never ask those questions about “our” kids. But “their” kids?

Back to Warren’s proposal. What Senator Warren proposed last week was a program to end tuition-and-fee costs for undergraduates at all public colleges and universities, and to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt. (There are a few means-tested pieces in her program, the biggest being that you’re only eligible for the full $50K if your annual family income is $100K or less, with the benefit phasing out by the time you hit $250K.)

It’s expensive. It costs $1.25 trillion over ten years. She plans to pay for it with an idea that will make plutocrats rage: a wealth tax on households with $50 million or more in assets.

So, no doubt about it, it’s a heavy-handed intervention in the economy. Rampell’s efficiency argument is correct: We could spend and tax a lot less if we carefully targeted the benefits on students who won’t be able to go to college otherwise, and calibrated the size of the benefit to correspond to their precise needs. That would achieve the effect of helping poor kids and working-class kids go to college with minimal changes to the rest of the economy. If you think the rest of the economy is just, that makes perfect sense.

But Warren’s plan does something that no efficiently targeted and calibrated plan can ever do: The option to go to college becomes a basic right. Whose kids are the beneficiaries? Everybody’s. It’s something that we are joining together to do for ourselves, not for some downtrodden “them”. The affected students are not recipients of our charity who constantly have to prove that they come from the deserving poor rather than the undeserving poor.

Socialism? South American Archbishop Dom Helder Camara once said: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hardly anybody is really a communist any more, if they ever were. Our era’s scare-word is socialism, but it means roughly what the archbishop was talking about: building a society where a certain level of dignity and opportunity is a basic right, and does not require that you meet the standards of some paternal benefactor, who can withdraw patronage if you begin to appear undeserving.

I don’t just want to maintain the well-behaved poor at some subsistence level, while the productive power of the Earth and of our complex society accumulates in a few hands. I want our collective inheritance — the planet and the productive legacy of past generations — to work for all of us. If that earns me the title of socialist, well then, so be it.

[If you want to hear more about this point of view, check out a sermon I’ve done at several churches “Who Owns the World?“]