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| Kids hugging Minnesota governor Tim Walz after he signs a bill to provide free school lunches for all kids. Image source. |
Here's a recent post from Adam Lee, More washing machines in schools, please, about washing machines in schools. It mentions schools in New York City and other US cities which have washing machines that students can use, and how this can be extremely helpful for students whose families aren't able to wash their clothes (maybe because they're homeless, for example). There are schools where a significant fraction of students frequently miss school because they don't have clean clothes. The post quotes an article which gives some statistics about the difference it can make if the school provides washing machines- "Similarly, in 2017, a Kansas City public school reported that only 46% of students were meeting the requirement to attend school 90% of the time. After installing a washing machine, this figure shot up to 84%."
My first thought, when I read this, was, wow this is great! If this helps people, then schools should totally do it! I never would have thought of this- I had no idea there were students who were missing school because of laundry. But if this helps, then society should provide washing machines.
My second thought was, I grew up in a conservative Christian environment where most people were Republican, and I just KNOW that my "Republican role models" would NOT like this. Oh, I KNOW that some of the good people who were my role models growing up would totally scoff at this and think it was absurd. I want to unpack the reasons why.
Basically, the Republican belief was that parents are supposed to be responsible and take care of their kids' needs. Parents are supposed to make sure their kids have clean clothes. And if some parents are failing at that, now these liberals are butting in and saying "oh we feel so BADDDD for them! It's so SADDDD! The government should do it!" Utterly ridiculous. People are failing to be good responsible parents, and liberals are saying "that's okay, no need to take responsibility and be good parents! We'll just make this another task for our bloated, meddling government to take on! We'll just make the good responsible taxpayers pay for it!"
(This is what Republicans believed back when I was a teenager. Now the Republican party has turned into a nakedly racist personality cult around Trump. I won't even try to explain that.)
The thing I was missing, back then, when I heard Republican-leaning adults say things like that, was the fact that some people really are poor/homeless, and it's not simply a matter of "they're lazy and irresponsible." It's about structural disadvantages. It's not something they can easily change by "being responsible." They really are in that situation, and it doesn't help to say "here are all the things you should have done differently in your life." What if, instead, we actually help them?
I have more examples.
Back in 2012, I was telling someone about Libby Anne's viral post, How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement. This post is fantastic; you should read it. It's about how Libby Anne was "pro-life" because she genuinely did want to save unborn babies, but then she found out that the "pro-life" movement wasn't actually doing the things that have been proven to reduce the abortion rate. Things like making sure everyone has access to birth control and good sex ed. The "pro-life" side was actually fighting against those things!
One thing that she mentioned in her post was that sometimes pregnant people have abortions because they don't have the financial resources to take care of a baby. They would prefer to keep the baby, but they look at the reality of how much everything costs- medical expenses for giving birth, daycare, etc- and it's just not reasonable. If the government made sure that everyone had prenatal care, if the government paid the hospital costs for giving birth, if the government paid for daycare- that would reduce the abortion rate.
I was telling someone about this, someone who was "pro-life" and tended to vote Republican, and she laughed at the idea that the government should pay for health care for pregnant people, and for daycare. To her, it was just utterly absurd, laughable. Making the good responsible taxpayers pay these high costs- daycare is expensive!- just because some people aren't responsible enough to avoid pregnancy if they're not financially ready to have a kid. So ridiculous, wanting the government to swoop in and solve everyone's problems, instead of teaching people to be responsible and take care of themselves. Making the government huge, adding more and more expensive government programs, so people can be lazy and the government will do everything for them. Ridiculous.
And another time, someone was showing me the hospital bill from a family member who had had surgery. The numbers on this bill were ridiculous, a few thousand dollars here or there for little minor things, in addition to the huge costs for the surgery itself. And at the bottom of the page, it added up to an astronomical number- and then it showed what part the insurance paid for, and what part the patient had to pay for, and fortunately the patient's part was pretty small and not a problem. (They told me that actually, the insurance doesn't even pay what this bill says the insurance should pay- the insurance company will negotiate with the hospital and come to a smaller number. So basically all the numbers are fake.)
So, they told me, this is why it's so important for everyone to have health insurance. Can you imagine if this family member didn't have health insurance, and literally had to pay those amounts? Gosh.
They said "this is why it's so important for everyone to have health insurance", and I felt like... wait, don't we oppose that? They didn't mean it like "this is why our society should have universal health care, so it's not possible for someone to be in a situation where they're sick, they're recovering from surgery, and on top of that they have to pay tens of thousands of dollars." They meant, "see, when you are an adult, you will have to learn how insurance works, and make sure you buy good insurance for yourself- see, this is what can happen to people who don't have insurance. Every adult should know about this and take responsibility to make sure it doesn't happen to their family. That's the way it is."
And do you remember in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president, and a video leaked where he said:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
And also:
[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
When this leaked, it was a huge thing. People were so angry about it.
And I was confused... I couldn't understand why people were so angry, because... I thought, yeah, this pretty much is what we as Republicans believe. I have heard "Republican role models" state it this directly. Yes, I have. I didn't know such remarks would be such a scandal. They were very much in the normal range of things I often heard normal Republicans say. "People vote Democrat just because the government gives them free stuff," etc.
I remember back then, I read a blog post about Romney's "47%" comments, and the blogger said, "I do believe people are entitled to food, health care, and housing. These are basic needs, and society has a responsibility to make sure everyone's basic needs are met."
All of this, all these examples about Republicans not wanting the government to spend money on meeting people's basic needs, all of them come down to this question: What is the purpose of government?
Long ago, when I was growing up in a conservative environment, I guess I would have answered like this: Well, a society needs to have a government, to build the things that are needed for a functional society but aren't cost-effective for people to build on their own. For example, roads. You have to have roads. If the government doesn't build roads, what are you gonna do, build your own road every time you want to go somewhere? No, that doesn't make any sense, there should be a society-wide organizational structure that handles things like that.
Things that kind of run in the background, that you take for granted as parts of a functional society. Roads, libraries, police, public schools, standards about how medicines get approval to be sold, standards about cleanliness in restaurant kitchens, laws against murder, you know, things like that.
Here's what doesn't make sense about this perspective: Basically, it views everything the government is *already doing* as normal things the government needs to do. Having the government pay for libraries is fine because the government is already doing that, and we feel that it's normal and not "too much government." And public schools- can you imagine if public schools didn't exist, and there was a movement of people saying "government should pay for schools for all children"- can you imagine what the Republican response would be to that? They would think it was absurd, that it was way too expensive, and people should "take responsibility" and not have kids if they don't have the money to send them to private schools. But since public schools already exist and we all feel this is normal, I've never heard any of my "Republican role models" say they shouldn't exist. I went to a public school. Yeah there was a lot of complaining about how public schools are teaching sex ed, and evolution, etc, but I never heard anyone say the entire public school model is bad.
But anyway, that's more or less how I viewed the purpose of government back then. Just do the minimum-level things that need to be done to have a society.
If someone suggested "hey, what if the government starts this new program that helps this or that group of people?" I would have said, well, maybe, but that's not really the government's role. You shouldn't add government programs to help people just because you want to be nice. That's not really how it's supposed to work. And besides, then you have to raise taxes- the people who don't need the new program will be disproportionately paying for it, and that's not fair.
Back when I had that mindset, one of the things that challenged it was this: I read an article about poor people being drug-tested before they could get food stamps. And this article said, actually it would be cheaper for the government to just give them all food stamps regardless. Doing the drug testing and the paperwork is an extra government expense which outweighs the amount of money the government is saving by denying benefits to people who don't pass the drug tests.
Hmm, interesting! So if our concern was mainly about how it's not fair for the people who don't need help to be paying taxes to benefit poor people, well, then don't require drug testing for people who get food stamps. Save the taxpayers money!
And then there were studies about how government programs can actually save money for the government in the long run. For example, the government pays for public schools, and then in the long run you get a society where everyone is educated, and the economy is more productive, which benefits the government. The government pays for vaccines for children, and then in the long run you get less sickness and a more productive workforce. And so on.
So, hmm, one might say, even though the "purpose" of government isn't to help people, maybe the government should do things to help people, if those things benefit the government and good responsible taxpayers in the long run.
And maybe you could even take it a step farther and say "If the government pays for this, even if it doesn't result in 'greater productivity' that you can measure in dollars, it gives everyone the benefit of living in a society which provides for everyone's basic needs." I want the US to be that kind of society.
This whole line of reasoning is based on the idea that the government is "supposed to" just do a few minimal things to set up a society, but isn't "supposed to" have a goal of helping people. But what if we view this completely differently?
What if we view it like this: We have a structure which has the power to make policies which can really help a lot of people. We have the ability to create a society where everyone's basic needs are met. A government is big enough that it's actually capable of doing this. So, let's do it!
I don't know if that's the "purpose" of government, but hey, since government exists, we have the means to make society so much better, so let's do it!
What if it's not just about creating a society where people kinda sorta have the opportunity to make a good life for themselves, and if they don't it's their own fault for not "taking responsibility"? What if we really had a "safety net"? What if we made sure that, no matter what, everyone had access to food?
Sometimes I think about how amazing modern medicine is. How, 100 years ago, if you had this or that medical problem, you would die from it, but nowadays we have treatment and you get better and it's no big deal. And here's my question: If we discover an amazing new cure for some disease (or other medical problem), does it mean "now we can have a society where no one has this disease"? Or does it mean "now if you have enough money, then you can pay to be cured, but if you're poor then tough luck"? Sometimes I imagine kids in history class learning, "This society discovered a cure for this horrible disease. But, they only let rich people have the cure." And the kids would all be like "oh goodness, that's terrible!"
I started this blog post by linking to Adam Lee's blog- let's go back to that. In his post, he discusses school lunch debt, and he says:
It’s obscene that there’s such a thing as school lunch debt. Only a mind so warped by capitalism that it’s lost all its morals could conceive of something so sick and cruel. The occasional feel-good stories about donors paying off lunch debt don’t disguise the fact that it shouldn’t exist in the first place.
I have to admit, this isn't intuitive to me. I don't feel appalled at the concept of school lunch debt. My intuition is more like "well to get food, you have to pay for it." So, for anyone coming from that background, let me talk about the logic behind "It's obscene that there's such a thing as school lunch debt."
These are children, whose families are too poor to afford food. Society should not stand by and let this happen. This is a judgment on our society. Allowing children to accumulate debt, for food. Society should give them the food for free. And "society" means the government, because the government is able to collect taxes from everyone, and thereby spread the costs out fairly.
A society which allows children to accumulate school lunch debt, rather than giving them food for free- that's awful.
But the typical Republican answer to this is "yes, we should give money to help poor people. But it should be charities or private individuals doing it, not the government. That's not the government's job."
My take on where this argument is coming from- and I can't speak for the motivations of everyone who uses it, but generally this is the way I've viewed it- is this: Giving money to help others should be a choice, which can serve as a kind of indicator about whether you're a moral person or not. In church, there are sermons about how you should give money, God commands you to give money, it's a sin to not give money, etc- and in some sense people want it to be this way, rather than the government automatically taxing everyone's paycheck and so removing the elements of choice and sin.
What if the government raised taxes and then gave food to everyone who can't afford it? Well, that takes away rich people's opportunity to feel like "wow I'm such a good person because I decided to donate some money to feed people." When Republicans say "that's not the government's job," I take that to mean "there should exist people who don't have enough money to meet their basic needs, as a test for us, so we can step up and prove we are good moral people, by giving them some money." So the important thing is not to actually solve the problem and ensure everyone's needs are met, but to lift up some role models among the population of rich people, to praise them for being such good people because they donate money.
If the government taxes you more and then feeds people, well, nobody's going to admire you for your generosity, because it wasn't your choice to give the money.
(Very interesting, though, that these are the same people who oppose marriage equality- ie, the "sin" of being gay-married isn't something people should get to have a "choice" on, unlike the "sin" of not being generous.)
Also, the "it's not the government's job" argument treats caring for poor people as a sort of optional extra thing that very very good moral people do, rather than a bare-minimum-level obligation. And the donor can require the recipients to jump through hoops to prove that they "deserve" help. It's based on the idea that the normal state of the world- the way it should be- is that people "take responsibility" and don't need help, and then if there are some people who made bad choices, it's their own fault, they deserve to be poor, but we feel some pity for them, so we'll give them some money, and maybe require them to show they're grateful and they're taking steps toward "being responsible" before they can get the money.
But what if it was like this instead: What if "the way it should be" is that society is obligated to give money to poor people, to make sure everyone's needs are met? What if it was just normal that kids at school get free lunch? What if we didn't think of these things as "charity" but as something that people are entitled to?
Maybe people say "that's not the government's job" and sure, maybe, in some theoretical world where you have abstract discussions about "the government's job"... But if the government can actually get things done, more effectively than private charity can, doesn't it make sense for the government to do it?
Really weird how apparently "making sure this actually get done" is less important than "making sure the government doesn't do something that's not its correct role."And here is where Republicans will bring up the argument "government programs are inefficient." I don't know enough details about this to know how good of an argument it is- I'm sure that yes you can find plenty of examples of government programs being inefficient or wasteful. But what matters is the results. If the government is able to, say, provide health care to everyone, even if it does so "inefficiently", isn't that better than an ad-hoc network of gofundmes?
I don't know the details about how it would work, how to pay for it- obviously you can't just indiscriminately fund every program anyone suggests- but my point is, let's dream big. Let's imagine a society which really does a good job of helping everyone, and then let's take a look at what practical steps could help get closer to that. The Republican approach is more like, let's not even consider funding new government programs, because we already know it will screw up the economy, and reward people for being lazy- let's just not change anything, we already know the effects will be bad, even without thinking about any actual policies or doing any actual math.
Maybe the key difference is that Democrats are making policy based on the question "how can we make society better?" and Republicans are basing it on the question "how can we make society the way it SHOULD be?" Ie, people should go to college, and get married, and have kids- so make policies which encourage and reward those things. Make people do what they're supposed to do.
So, these are my thoughts on Republican opposition to government programs giving people "free stuff." There is an overall framework to this ideology which makes logical sense- it's about Republican views on how people "should" live and how society "should" be and what the government "should" do. If you grow up in an environment where everyone believes that, and you don't have access to information about what life is actually like for poor people in the US, then sure, it makes sense that you would believe that.
But if you listen to people, and learn about how poverty and structural inequality actually work, how it's not just a matter of being "irresponsible"- and how much of a difference it can make if the government steps in to help them... We have the power to do a lot of good and improve society. Let's do it.
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