What Welfare Really Buys

shadmarsh made a comment to which I started a reply, but it seemed to me that my reply had enough meat on it to warrant a post. So:

shad said, (ironically, of course) “Why do we pay taxes so lazy poor single mothers can collect food stamps and have more poor children?”

We frequently hear an only slightly different version of this, for serious, from conservatives. However: I looked it up once time, and the amount of taxes US taxpayers pay for those things that can be classified as welfare (AFDC, etc.) is really, really small! As near as I could tell, it was in the neighborhood of 5% of your tax bill, but let’s go high and say it’s a tenth of your federal tax dollar. (Look at this chart and notice how small some of those aid programs are… HUD gets less lucre than the spies do.) Last year I paid in a bit less than $6k in federal taxes, so a fifth of that is a thousand and change. All those laaazy welfare queens cost me a thousand or so out of pocket last year!

So let’s throw them aaallll off the rolls next year!

Conservative sources insist that half of our federal tax dollars go to welfare and/or entitlement programs, but much of that figure includes Social Security and other benefits paid to middle class or even upper class Americans, as opposed to food stamps and other programs aimed at or below the poverty line. The fiscal conservatives would, naturally, like to abolish all that (except what goes into their own pockets). Know what? I’ll go ahead and do it their way. So I’ll say maybe all this welfare cost me $3000 out of pocket last year. What about state and local welfare programs? Fine, say it cost me $5000. I’m using that figure to forestall the inevitable objection that I’m lowballing how much the welfare leeches are picking my pocket. Okay?

Now what?

I’m fortunate. I work for the Post Office and have a strong union protecting me. If I were like a lot of American workers, I’d have no union and my employer could do anything: fire me at will, loot my pension… tell me to work harder and take a pay cut, because there’s an unemployed person now off the welfare rolls who’d do my job for half what I get…

So let’s say I’m punching a clock at $20 an hour, grossing $40,000 a year, and my boss tells me either I agree to do the job for $17 an hour or lose it to a new hire who’d happily do it for $15 and clean the toilets too. Based on a 40-hour week, this new regime will cost me $120 a week before taxes, or $6000 a year (based on 50 weeks of work). Or maybe the plant gets padlocked and I lose all my income. There is nothing extreme about this scenario. How to prevent this?

Welfare, that’s how! We can now see that unemployment, food stamps, rental assistance, and other social welfare programs are a good investment for the average working taxpayer, because they guard the worker’s job from the ravages of the “dismal science,” in which job seekers undercut each other into starvation. My central point is this:

It’s cheaper for most taxpayers to pay for all those welfare programs than it is to compete against impoverished, desperate jobseekers.

Potentially a lot cheaper.

Conservatives know this: and though they never admit it, practically every GOP domestic policy position can be understood as intended to keep wages low. (I owe this useful observation to Conceptual Guerrilla and perhaps a few others). Conservatives speak of labor unions making the US “less competitive” by contributing to “high labor costs,” and do all in their power to undermine unions (the only systematic organizing structure available to workers) while empowering corporations (the systematic organizing structure of capital and management). We see employees subjected to drug testing which can cost them jobs: but where is the CEO who must prove that he isn’t being influenced by illegal drugs when he green-lights dangerous corner-cutting on an oil drilling rig? Medical insurance is so structured as to tether the employee to a job instead of bargaining and perhaps leaving for a better deal. Onerous educational debts make workers think twice about risky career decisions. Low minimum wages and weak enforcement of safety rules, overtime rules, organizing rules… Everywhere the American worker looks, there are fences and walls intended to keep her in one place as the company sees fit, or easy to fire as the company sees fit, and always at a disadvantage. Fences and walls built for purpose, by conservative politicians at the beck and call of wealthy businesses, to keep the workers in their place…

Other policies, such as tax breaks for moving jobs overseas, letting corporations bring in cheaper workers with H-1B visas while cynically claiming that no US citizens can be found to fill the jobs, and helping foreign governments crack down on labor organizers, also fit the idea that conservatives are married to an anti-worker cheap labor agenda.

And they certainly don’t want the worker to realize that the unemployed, the poor, the downtrodden, yes, even the illegal immigrant! are the worker’s natural ally: an ally bought cheaply with welfare, brought into fellowship as a union worker… or lost very dearly as a low-wage competitor.

P.S. Why don’t we hear more talk of “deadwood at the top” hurting US competitiveness through “high management costs”?