By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
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America
hasn’t always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the
brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and
fools. But I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like the collection
of petty grifters and miscreants surrounding Donald Trump. Price,
Pruitt, Zinke, Carson and now Ronny Jackson: At this point, our default
assumption should be that there’s something seriously wrong with anyone
this president wants on his team.
Still,
we need to keep our eye on the ball. The perks many Trump officials
demand — the gratuitous first-class travel, the double super-secret
soundproof phone booths, and so on — are outrageous, and they tell you a
lot about the kind of people they are. But what really matters are
their policy decisions. Ben Carson’s insistence on spending taxpayer
funds on a $31,000 dining set is ridiculous; his proposal to sharply raise housing costs for hundreds of thousands of needy American families, tripling rents for some of the poorest households, is vicious.
And
this viciousness is part of a broader pattern. Last year, Trump and his
allies in Congress devoted most of their efforts to coddling the rich;
this was obviously true of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but even the
assault on Obamacare was largely about securing hundreds of billions in tax cuts for the wealthy. This year, however, the G.O.P.’s main priority seems to be making war on the poor.
That war is being fought on multiple fronts. The move to slash housing subsidies follows moves to sharply increase work requirements
for those seeking food stamps. Meanwhile, the administration has been
granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose
onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements
whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer
people getting essential health care.
Even the administration’s de facto financial deregulation — its systematic gutting of consumer financial protection
— should be seen largely as an attack on the least well off, since poor
families and less educated workers are the most likely victims of
exploitative bankers.
The interesting
question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives
of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question,
instead, is why.
Is
it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of
safety net programs, but it’s hard to take those complaints seriously
coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with
huge tax cuts. Moreover, there’s good evidence that some of the programs
under attack actually do what tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a
significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic
performance.
For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn’t just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts
on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them
more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to
need further public assistance.
The same goes for Medicaid, where new studies suggest that more than half of each dollar spent on health care for children eventually comes back as higher tax receipts from healthier adults.
What
about the idea that anti-poverty programs create a “poverty trap,”
reducing the incentive for people to work their way to a better life?
That’s a very popular notion on the right. But the reality is that there
are very few Americans getting food stamps or Medicaid who could and should be working but aren’t.
It’s
true that some calculations indicate that means-tested programs —
programs available only to those with sufficiently low incomes — can
create disincentives for working and earning. But the evidence suggests
that while safety net programs have some adverse effect on incentives,
it’s a much smaller effect than many policymakers believe.
Furthermore,
we could reduce those disincentives by making programs more generous,
not less — providing more aid to the near-poor rather than less aid to
the poor. Somehow, conservatives never seem to consider that option.
So
what’s really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this
war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren’t
punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be
cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel.
Glenn Thrush
of The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump, aides said, refers to
nearly every program that provides benefits to poor people as welfare, a
term he regards as derogatory.” And I guess you can see where that
comes from. After all, he’s a self-made man who can’t attribute any of
his own success to, say, inherited wealth. Oh, wait.
Seriously,
a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel
no empathy for the poor. Some of that lack of empathy surely reflects
racial animus. But while the war on the poor will disproportionately
hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in
fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump.
Will they notice?
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