The discourse surrounding the welfare state in the US and the Western world writ large has undoubtedly shifted rightward since the 1980s. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is the myth of welfare dependency. My goal here is to critically examine the concept of welfare dependency itself and challenge its characterization as a real issue. The purpose is not to deny that welfare fraud exists or that stealing is good, but rather that government intervention to protect people and grow the economy is justified, even if it costs more, and that right-wing arguments on the topic are fundamentally flawed.

Welfare queens. Leeches. Lazy. Those are all terms low-income recipients of government money are often called simply for doing what they must to support their families. This isn’t even something exclusive to the right, either. Polling shows that nearly a third of Democrats believe that the government doesn’t have the tools to address poverty, and a full two-thirds think that general economic growth is more effective at reducing poverty than increased welfare benefits.

This is simply wrong. It’s understandable but still wrong. But it’s not enough just to say something or say someone is wrong, so I’m going to break down a variety of common myths about welfare and government support and set the record straight. 

But we can’t talk about the myths of welfare benefits without talking about what really got the whole anti-welfare machine going- the concept of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economics, or supply-side economics as it is technically known, is, by definition, the expansion of the economy through the reduction of taxes and regulation to encourage savings and private sector investment. 

Sounds great on the surface, right? Around 1980, a charismatic actor and future Central American weapons dealer from California thought the same way. With the help of people like Ronald Reagan, the American people were made to think that supply-side economics vs the traditional Keynesian economic theory (where government spending is used as a catalyst for increasing aggregate demand ) was some “great debate” among economists. In reality, a survey of the nearly 18,000 members of the American Economic Association found only 12 that believed in trickle-down theory.

Obviously, anything this unanimously ridiculed is unlikely to succeed, and it didn’t. Between 1981 (when Reagan took office) and 1989 (when he left), the value of American debt as a percentage of GDP rose from 31% to a whopping 50%, instantly erasing two decades of steady debt reduction.

The effects of the Reagan administration weren’t just macroeconomic either. During the aforementioned eight-year period, Americans’ personal finances also began to deteriorate. While in the immediate postwar decades, growth in income and standards of living was enjoyed pretty equally by all classes, after the implementation of supply-side economics, this trend was reversed. In 1989, Americans in the 20th income percentile were making less than they were in 1973. The 95th percentile? Nearly 125% of what they did sixteen years earlier.

Now that we have the root issue out of the way, we can move on to the individual problems. The first right-wing myth is that welfare disincentivizes full-time employment. On the surface, this makes sense. Who would want to work when you can get paid to do nothing? But it’s simply untrue. There’s a variety of reasons people use welfare, but most of them boil down to one thing- jobs don’t pay enough anymore. 

The economy has rejected most welfare recipients, not the reverse. In a modernizing economy, people increasingly need advanced skills training to get ahead, and we don’t provide them with it. There are a couple of things we can do to meaningfully reduce the number of welfare recipients and kick people out onto the street.

The good news is that we have a variety of tools we can use to achieve this. The first is keeping the tax burden low on poorer individuals. We have already done something to help with this, and it’s called the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). It was passed under the Ford Administration, and even arch-conservatives such as Ronald Reagan referred to it as one of the best anti-poverty measures ever enacted. So how does it work? Well, working families (emphasis on both of those parts) are eligible for a refundable tax credit, usually increasing in accordance with the number of dependents and scaling based on income. 

The second major reason people stay on welfare is the absurd system of providing government healthcare assistance only to the poorest of the poor. In a country like the United States, healthcare costs make up 18% of total gross domestic product. Because of this, many welfare recipients refuse to seek employment because they would lose their healthcare coverage. 

The third reason why people don’t work is also related to means-testing and cut-offs- a lack of childcare. According to UNICEF, the United States actually ranks dead last in childcare access and second to last overall. Because of this, a large number of welfare recipients (disproportionately women) are simply unable to work because of the responsibility that is caring for their children.

As with any other situation where millions find themselves unable to work, we should ask ourselves what can be done about this. The easiest solution, and the one that would promote economic growth, is to make childcare free or subsidized for the majority of people who need it. In addition to allowing more parents to work (and get off welfare), it would provide good-paying jobs and create upward mobility for educators.

Another right-wing argument about welfare is that recipients will have children simply to get more money from the government. At the beginning of the 1990s (during the Third Way Era), many Democrats thought the people saying this had a point.

In 1992, Governor James Florio of New Jersey signed the Family Development Program into law. The legislation contained a variety of provisions, but the most notable one was the implementation of a “child cap”- cutting parents off from receiving additional benefits for each new child they had. 

The results were not what Florio intended. A study by Rutgers University found the reduction in new births to mothers on welfare to be 0.2%, well within the margin of error. As it turns out, the vast majority of working mothers don’t want to go through the process of giving birth and raising a child for an extra $100 per month. 

Still, Republicans have accidentally stumbled into a point here, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The lack of support for young families and parents is a big issue, but the solution isn’t just to cut benefits. In addition to the aforementioned EITC, the government can also expand the Child Tax Credit to cover more lower-income families. When we previously expanded it in the aftermath of COVID, child poverty dropped to the lowest level on record , and food insecurity was reduced to extremely low levels. The credit expired in 2022, but we can easily expand it again.

The final myth I would like to bust is that devolving welfare spending to states, as the vaunted 1996 welfare reform bill did, is a good thing for society. The theory goes something like this: by block granting welfare funding to the states, we could encourage state innovation and a better response to local needs. The reality, as usual, is quite different.

In practice, block grants add a new layer of government bureaucracy. Funds devolved to states are no longer classified as mandatory spending, meaning that Congress would have to authorize annual increases in welfare spending. If they didn’t do that, as happens quite often, states would be left to pick up the slack. The problem here, of course, is that a large number of states are simply incapable of funding adequate benefit levels. Because of this, many states have then cut benefits to inadequate levels.

A solution to this is simply to create a national universal basic income where people are given unconditional cash transfers to stimulate the economy and pull them out of poverty. UBI, as it is known, is proven to work and can be a simple solution to a number of societal ills.

In conclusion, not only are right-wing myths about welfare wrong, they are extremely dangerous. The average welfare recipient isn’t some lazy bum on the street but a hard-working man or woman with a family to support. We can never be a moral and successful society until the stain of poverty is forever removed from the United States of America.