The Cruel Irrationality of Our ‘Deserved vs. Undeserved Poor’ Moral Framework in Two Paragraphs

A Washington Post report on the senior homelessness crisis somehow manages to avoid the solution of “just give them homes.”

The greatest conceivable crime to many Americans is giving aid to someone who is seen as “undeserved,” who is viewed, based on the collective, sanctimonious x-ray vision of the American public as “able to work but unwilling.” This foundation—propped up by US media’s non-stop barrage of Perseverance Porn, institutional racism, Welfare Queen tropes, No One Wants to Work Anymore trend pieces, the Welfare Fraud faux-investigative segment, the Lazy Fake Homeless Person Scammer faux investigative segment, and unchecked far-right austerity ideology—is where all discussions of social welfare begin and end. It’s better to let 10 people starve on the streets than to accidentally give one Underserved Degenerate a meal and a home. This simply cannot happen.   

Nowhere has this puritan logic on display more starkly than a recent Washington Post article on seniors and homelessness. Two paragraphs, reporting on attempts to morally sort out its suffering human inventory into those deemed worthy of a roof and hot meals and those who ought to be left to die living on the streets, puts the absurdity in full display: 

Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, will only pay for a long-term nursing home or assisted living bed if someone is unable to care for themselves. Many elderly homeless people are not debilitated enough to meet that criteria…

Once that short-term stay ends, nursing homes must decide if the person is infirm enough to qualify for long-term care. If the answer is no, they must leave the nursing home, starting the cycle over again. 

“Infirm enough to qualify for long-term care” is another way of saying: Only when you’re about to die will we maybe, just maybe, give you a nursing home or hospital bed. Everyone else, who’s just above the threshold of insufficiently infirm, needs to go get a job as a Walmart greeter or working the drive-thru line at Popeyes. 

The whole piece is worth reading and has some important reporting, though it does manage to offer a number of “solutions,” none of which are simply “give people homes.” Instead, we are fed the usual mix of needlessly complex, targeted boutique welfare approaches sandwiched between standard Liberal Oh, Dearism.  

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the moral tier system of Deserved and Undeserved isn’t just a bizarre vestige of America’s frontier protestant past (though it is, in part). It’s also an essential element of disciplining the bottom rung of labor and keeping wages low. The public debate around Covid pandemic aid in 2021 and 2022 made this clear. Republicans said it openly, centrist Democrats couched it in concern about inflation. But ultimately the argument for sunsetting poverty-reducing stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment was that a fixed amount of human suffering was a necessary baseline to incentivize people to take the jobs that no one wants to work and for wages that maintain precarity and fear. As I noted in January:

Creating a modestly higher floor for millions in response to the pandemic reduced poverty and increased wages and labor power across the board, which organs of capital openly insisted that, by not letting working people fall into an economic abyss, the government was setting a dangerous precedent that would allow workers’ wages to rise, thus “disincentivizing” them from taking low-paying, difficult, and abusive jobs— a “nut” those in power are “still trying to crack.” Sen. Lindsay Graham (SC-R) said as much in June 2021, telling reporters, “[people] are not going to work for $15 an hour and make $23 unemployed.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board articulated a similar sentiment when it opposed the move to extend unemployment benefits in April 2020, writing that “Employees say they’ll take the unemployment check for as long as they can make more money by not working. One internal Trump Administration analysis estimates that this work disincentive applies to millions of Americans.” The Chamber of Commerce also aggressively lobbied to end what was, in effect, a basic income for people on unemployment. Neil Bradley, the chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer, stated matter-of-factly in May 2021 that “the disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market.”

The same logic applies to elderly populations as well. The need for elderly poverty, namely visible poverty, is essential for the same reason other poverty is. Organs of capital need these people to “go back to work” to expand the labor pool and stem recent increases in wages and labor power. Just as organs of capital lobby for an increase in child labor and an increase in prison labor, the need for elderly to “come back to work” has been pushed through media outlets and state houses for the better part of 18 months, even getting a fun, jazzy label of “unretirement.”

The Deserved vs. Underserved framework is essential to this arrangement. As the Post article notes, paltry social security payments and medicare are not remotely sufficient to keep 250,000 unhoused elderly people off the streets (this number, from 2019, is likely much higher now “post-pandemic”), because what Americans call “falling through the cracks” is the logical outcome of a welfare system not predicated on positive rights to shelter, food, and healthcare, but a convoluted system of qualifying for Deserved Status.

People “fall through the cracks” because the cracks are deliberately created and maintained because people are supposed to fall through them. Otherwise, there’s nothing menacing those working for the lowest wages.

Notice how the problem isn’t a society that’s designed to leave people to suffer on their own, but a mysterious, agency-free and unexpected shift in poor people. The Post writes that the crisis was brought about by “a demographic surge that is overwhelming America’s social safety net” as if it’s an unfortunate, but inevitable natural disaster. 

The fact that the US wastes an obscene amount of resources, time, and effort sorting out the Deserved and Undeserved is a well-documented fact. Researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) have shown time and again that adding a bunch of pointless paperwork to show one is morally worthy to receive benefits only exists to maintain this thin pretense of moral sanctimony. As Vox notes, “according to Georgetown University political scientists Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan, the administrative costs for programs like SNAP, the family assistance program known as TANF, and the Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children can range from 15 to 40 cents of each dollar of benefits distributed in the programs.”

Just getting food stamps is a needless gauntlet of presumptuousness, invasive questions, and scolding. You’ve no doubt seen the sign at Subway saying they accept EBT cards, or food stamps, but they can’t warm up the sandwich. 

This is true at countless sandwich shops and grocery stores. We can’t have the greedy poor living like royalty and having hot food. Iowa Republicans, always trying to raise the ante for cruel policies, attempted to overhaul its social welfare programs in January by banning SNAP users from buying white grains, baked, refried or chili beans, fresh meats (only canned products like canned tuna or canned salmon are allowed) and—most cruelly of all—they wanted to ban sliced cheese because this was seen as an indulgence. 

The Deserved and Undeserved distinction undergirding capitalist charity logic isn’t, of  course, new. As industrialization and its attendant widescale inner city poverty took root in 18th century Britain, the logic of the workhouses that sprung up to address the surplus populations operated along the same moral lines. As historian Peter Ackroyd notes in his 2018 book Dominion, it went from an informal moral determination to a systematized one in the 1830s:

In 1832… a new system of poor relief was introduced at this time, with the purpose of distinguishing between those who would not work and those who could not work. The old Poor Law was maintained by the people of the local parish, who best knew the circumstances of those who claimed relief; it had been operating since the beginning of the seventeenth century but was now regarded by the new breed of bureaucrats as outmoded and outworn. The New Poor Law was proposed in 1834 as a model of organization and efficiency. It was the Benthamite way. The old parishes were grouped into ‘unions’ which, under the supervision of three Poor Law commissioners in Whitehall, controlled the novel institution of ‘workhouses’ as instruments of containment and control…

The instruments of their power were the local boards of guardians who ensured that only the sick or the properly indigent were permitted to enter the workhouse. Outdoor relief to able-bodied men was prohibited. Poverty was not enough; after all, the adult male could work himself out of poverty. ”

The point, politically, of means-testing rather than the politics of entitlements and rights is to make programs less comprehensible, more difficult to navigate for the elderly and less tech literate, easier to gut, more subject to racist demagoguery and—above all—consistent with the underlying logic of capitalism that those at the bottom rung of society who can physically work for the lowest wage legally allowed must do so. The more overtly right-wing cousin of means-testing, Work Requirements, are also making a comeback into mainstream discourse of late, being put front in center of the so-called debt ceiling negotiations by Republicans. 

On a psychosocial level, means testing is politically effective because almost everyone views their own poverty and the poverty of those close to them as random, not their fault, and a matter of circumstance. But the poverty of others, especially when the subject is white and the others are not, as the product of laziness, bad choices, and intractable drug addiction there is simply no solution to. Means testing, at its core, appeals to our vanity and own sense of how hard we work.

The wealthiest country in the history of the world suffers from no organic or necessary austerity. No outside factor, no lack of resources, is forcing this regime on us. The scarcity logic is entirely constructed, designed to prop up a moral binary of deserved and undeserved to maintain a wholly unnecessary population of fixed poverty to keep wages and labor power to a minimum. The super rich hide over $4 trillion in wealth in tax shelters that should be taxed but isn’t. We write checks to our military and clandestine complex to the tune of $1 trillion a year and no one bats an eye. But if someone deemed “able bodied” collects food stamps and has a hot sandwich or a safe, comfortable house without mopping up the floor of Sam’s Club first, our media and right-wing outrage machine have a collective meltdown. Grandma is not quite infirm enough for nursing care, so we throw her back on the street because otherwise someone may live high on the hog of not slowly dying and being moderately comfortable. And this, above all, cannot be tolerated.