On Welfare: Poverty, Unemployment, Health, Etc

Someone by the name C. Atkins responded to a comment of mine. It’s from the lengthy comments section of a worthy article, I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump by Jonna Ivin (STIR Journal).

He was disagreeing with me and I disagree with him, but he was courteous and seemed sincere. I wanted to respond fully to him, not an easy task because I needed to gather the info to make my case. The main problem was that he was speculating based on his own biases. He took his speculations as being obviously true according to his experience. Even though he offered two links, he pointed to no specific evidence. Speculation isn’t necessary, since there is a ton of good data out there, some of which can be found below. It’s an extremely complicated topic demanding a thorough analysis. I’ll try to cover the main points at hand.

To start off he wrote that, “Actually, the negative effects of SSI, the lack of incentive to get off it (most recipients are long-term recipients) and the need for reform have been fairly well documented in recent studies and articles.” Well, actually, that isn’t true, as far as I can tell, although I’d welcome evidence to the contrary. To supposedly back up his claim, he offered an article from The Boston Globe (A legacy of unintended side effects by Patricia Wen), but nowhere in the article does the author discuss anything about most recipients being long-term recipients. All the data I’ve seen, including what I offer below, agrees that most welfare recipients are temporary.

He then offers a personal observation in saying, “Anecdotally, I have lived in an impoverished rural area, and most families I knew and worked with relied on SSI as a permanent source of income for the whole family. Instead of providing financial planning services or anything that could help families get out of poverty, the government cut whole communities monthly checks.” My main response is anecdotal evidence is mostly meaningless. As he lives in an impoverished rural area, his experience doesn’t apply to most Americans, including most poor Americans and most welfare recipients. Rural people in general and poor rural people specifically are a small and shrinking part of the population. Disproportionately, they are those who were too old, disabled, uneducated, or whatever to move elsewhere to find work when good jobs left the area (e.g., closing of mines, factories, and such)—the people left behind, both by their fellow citizens and by the economy.

Let me pull out a couple of things from Patricia Wen’s article. Here is a central point made by the author: “A Globe investigation has found that this Supplemental Security Income program — created by Congress primarily to aid indigent children with severe physical disabilities such as cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and blindness — now largely serves children with relatively common mental, learning, and behavioral disorders such as ADHD. It has also created, for many needy parents, a financial motive to seek prescriptions for powerful drugs for their children.” There has been an increase in the diagnosis of many psychiatric and neurocognitive conditions. No one knows to what degree it’s an actual increase in incidents or simply greater diagnosis. There are environmental factors that have been proven to contribute to such things: social stress, economic problems, growing inequality, parasite load, environmental toxins, etc. Take lead toxicity as a key example—the rates are highest in poor communities and they are positively correlated to numerous problems: lowered IQ, learning disabilities, ADHD, aggressive behavior, self-control issues, autism, asthma, diabetes, obesity, etc (obesity is an interesting, if non-intuitive, example—as one way the body protects itself from toxins is by storing them in fat cells; plus, the heavy metal toxicity itself causes metabolic disorders). Besides lead, there is other heavy metal toxins such as mercury with its own diverse set of problems. Plus, there is a vast increase of diverse chemicals that humans are exposed to and, because toxic dumps are mostly located in poor communities, those most exposed are the poor.

There has been little research done on the majority of these chemicals, much less what effects they have when combined. Still, there has been some useful research that offers damning conclusions: “About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.” That is limited to just deaths, not lost income from sickness and disability, not the costs of increased need for healthcare, not all the other problems that follow when high rates of pollution-related diseases and death hit entire communities.

To continue with the article, Wen writes that, “In New England, the numbers are even higher — 63 percent of children qualify for SSI based on such mental disabilities. That is the highest percentage for any region in the country. And here and across the nation, the SSI trend line is up, with children under 5 the fastest-growing group. Once diagnosed, these children often bring in close to half their family’s income.” That caught my attention because regional differences are a useful way of looking at variations in populations. Many differences are seen from one region to another, such as personality traits, for reasons not entirely understood. This might relate to the regional disparities in certain environmental factors, such as New England having higher rates of toxoplasmosis, from the feline-spread parasite toxoplasma gondii. Toxoplasmosis can severely alter neurological functioning with a quite interesting array of effects. As Americans have increasingly kept cats in their homes, the rates of toxoplasmosis have increased. One might predict certain kinds of disabilities, specifically mental disabilities, would increase at the same time.

I would point out one important detail. Such things as lead toxicity and toxoplasmosis harm the young most of all. When the brain and nervous system is developing, these environmental factors can play havoc with normal development, leaving behind permanent damage, some of which can be measured but not all. Research has found that, for every drop in IQ point, there is a large amount of money lost in lifetime earnings. That doesn’t even include other costs such as for healthcare and personal struggle and suffering. The point being that we should expect to see these problems primarily in children, but of course they will be carried over into adulthood.

C. Atkins added a second comment with another personal observation: “Again, anecdotally, many people were on SSI for reasons entirely preventable by diet (diabetes, etc.). And yet, the government doesn’t limit SNAP purchases to foods that won’t slowly kill you. The government doesn’t support education about healthy diet, or programs that seek to make healthy food more accessible. In rural areas, people have traded kitchen gardens for free potato chips and soda (they’re cheaper than vegetables – I get it). People were starving before, but now we have a crisis of obesity-related diseases killing people. Which is worse? (I wish I knew, statistically speaking).” Again, anecdotal is what it is and nothing more. It might be true for the particular community he lives in, although his perception of his own community could be severely skewed by the people he knows or chooses to focus upon. All I can say is that I know of no data that supports his claims. For example, welfare recipients don’t eat any less healthy than the rest of the population. That isn’t necessarily saying much, as the average American doesn’t eat the healthiest diet, but the point being that welfare doesn’t particularly alter people’s eating habits. It is true that many welfare recipients live in food deserts which makes eating healthy more difficult. That is also true of many poor people who aren’t welfare recipients. It simply sucks being poor for many reasons because life is made a thousand times more difficult. Having to drive long distances or spend long periods of time on public transportation looking for stores that sell healthy food does not incentivize healthy eating habits, not that this has anything to do with welfare.

Along with that comment, C. Atkins included a link to another article. It’s an NPR piece by Chana Joffe-Walt, Unfit For Work. That is a much better article, but maybe I’m being biased since it favors the conclusion of my original comment. There is a lot more going on than is apparent from a casual look. Even those on welfare in poor communities generally don’t have the perspective to understand the larger context of their situation. I give Joffe-Walt great credit in willing to challenge her preconceptions and talk to people to figure out what is going on. One lady she talked to had back problems, a common disability for poor people who spend their lives doing physical labor. It’s not easy growing old while poor. The lady explained that she was on disability because she couldn’t stand for long periods of time and the only jobs available to her were those that required the very thing she was unable to do. Joffe-Walt was surprised by this because, in her professional class world, sitting jobs were the norm. From the transcript, she explains:

“At first, I thought Ethel’s dream job was to be the lady at Social Security, because she thought she’d be good at weeding out the cheaters. But no. After a confusing back and forth, it turned out Ethel wanted this woman’s job because she gets to sit. That’s it. And when I asked her, OK, but why that lady? Why not any other job where you get to sit? Ethel said she could not think of a single other job where you get to sit all day. She said she’d never seen one.

“I brushed this off in the moment. I was getting in my car. It was getting late. And also, it just did not seem possible to me that there would be a place in America today where someone could go her whole working life without any exposure to jobs where you get to sit, until she applied for disability and saw a woman who gets to sit all day. There had to be an office or storefront in town where Ethel would have seen a job that’s not physical.

“And I started sort of casually looking. At McDonald’s, they’re all standing. There’s a truck mechanic, no. A fish plant, definitely no. I looked at the jobs listings in Greensboro– occupational therapist, McDonald’s, McDonald’s, truck driver heavy lifting, KFC, registered nurse, McDonald’s. I actually think it might be possible that Ethel could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain.

“It is that gap between the world I live in and Ethel’s world that’s a big part of why the disability program has been growing so rapidly. A gap that prevents someone from even imagining the working world I live in, where there are jobs where you can work and have a sore back, or, in her husband Joseph’s case, damaged nerves in his hands.”

Like Joffe-Walt, this is something few of us ever think about. It brings me back to my grandfather who worked in the same factory most of his life. He had almost no education and wasn’t particularly smart, but he got a good job at a time when none of that mattered. With on-the-job training, he worked his way up to a floor supervisor position. The thing is that is all he knew how to do. If he had become disabled, such as a back injury, he simply would have been out of work with no prospects of finding a new job, despite his having lived in a fairly large city. There just aren’t many sitting jobs for people who spent their lives doing physical labor. And in areas where poverty is most concentrated, there just aren’t many sitting jobs at all. Chana Joffe-walt continues with this line of thought:

“Joseph and Ethel Thomas live in a depressed town in a poor state in a national economy that is basically in the process of fully abandoning every kind of job they know how to do. Being poorly educated in a rotten place, that in and of itself has become a disability.

“This is a new reality. This gap between workers who are fit for the US economy and millions of workers who are increasingly not. And it’s a change that’s spreading to towns and cities that have thrived in the American economy. Places that made cars and steel and batteries and textiles.

“The disability programs are acting like a sponge, sopping up otherwise desperate people. This is happening so often in so many parts of the country, this shift from work to disability programs, that I have actually been reporting on it for years, and I didn’t even know it.”

This is why so many people remain clueless about how bad it has gotten for so many. The permanently unemployed also aren’t added to the unemployment rate. The government, since Reagan, has been hiding the data from the public. That is the time period when the economy was beginning its decades-long descent for most Americans, such as with wages continually stagnating for the average worker and dropping for lower income workers since 1974, this trend still having yet to stop. So, even for those lucky enough to be employed, times have been getting tougher for quite a while now. Even many professionals with college degrees are struggling. It’s not uncommon for public school teachers to live below the poverty line, especially preschool teachers, one of the most important jobs in any society.

As David Autor explained (from the same transcript), “Well, that’s kind of an ugly secret of the American labor market, that part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low until recently is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program. They’re on the disability insurance program. And they don’t show up in the labor force statistics. And so it artificially reduces the unemployment rate that we observe.”

Welfare is not only hiding how bad our economy is and has been for a long time. It also props up the economy. Without welfare, there would be poverty so severe and desperate that it would destabilize the entire society. Many of the lost jobs are never coming back and, as automation and computerization further takes hold, even more jobs will be lost. This is particularly true for the kinds of jobs that once helped the poor live decent lives and to move up into the middle class. The consequence of this is that socioeconomic mobility has decreased and the middle class shrunk. Recent generations of Americans, beginning with Generation X, are doing worse than their parents and grandparents.

There are many secondary effects to all of this. It’s not just economic problems. Increased stress has proven deleterious effects on individual health (physical and mental), on marriages and family life, and on communities. This has been exacerbated because at the same time the War on Drugs and mass incarceration has decimated entire populations. Some communities not only have a majority of their residents unemployed, since factories and mines closed down, but also a majority of their male residents caught up in the legal system and for those people it makes finding a job even harder. The sad part is a large reason they get caught up in the legal system is because, lacking employment opportunities in the legal market, they are looking to make money on the black market which is the place of last employment. It’s unsurprising that when you take away people’s gainful employment and cut welfare, ever larger numbers of people will become stressed and desperate. For the poor who are employed, many of them end up working multiple jobs, leaving little time left over for spending time with spouses and children, for shopping for healthy food and cooking meals, etc.

Will live in a severely dysfunctional society that is getting ever more dysfunctional as time goes on. These problems are so vastly beyond what individuals can deal with. The poor are struggling just to get by on a daily basis. Even if they magically found the time and money to seek education and training, the economy is so bad right now that even many with education and training are struggling to find good work or to find work at all. If you’re an older worker who loses their job, few companies want to hire you. You’re just fucked and our heartless society cares little about what becomes of you. Throw some mental health and physical health issues on top of that and you are even more fucked. Then your only hope left is to get disability pay so that you won’t spend the last years of your life sleeping on someone’s couch or, worse still, homeless.

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Relevant articles:

Who’s on Welfare? 9 Shocking Stats About Public Assistance
By Megan Elliott

About 39% of children received welfare benefits during an average month in 2012. Roughly 17% of adults between 18 and 64 received benefits and 12.6% of people over age 65 did as well. Those under 18 also received larger average monthly benefits than adults between 18 and 64 ($447/month vs. $393/month).

Your Assumptions About Welfare Recipients Are Wrong
By Bryce Covert

In reality, many of these benefits that families rely on are paltry and, worse, have recently shrunk. The value of benefits from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), formerly known as welfare, have fallen so that their purchasing power is less than what it was in 1996 for the vast majority of recipients. A family of three that relies solely on TANF won’t be able to make market rent for a two-bedroom apartment and will live at just 50 percent of the poverty line, or $9,765 a year. Food stamps from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) were reduced in November to an average of less than $1.40 a meal and more cuts are likely on their way after Congress agrees to a new farm bill. Housing assistance from the Section 8 rental voucher program got hammered by sequestration and local authorities had to rescind vouchers from those who had gotten off waiting lists, freeze the lists, and reduce the amount of rent each voucher would cover.

Get a Job? Most Welfare Recipients Already Have One
By Eric Morath

It’s poor-paying jobs, not unemployment, that strains the welfare system.

That’s one key finding from a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that showed the majority of households receiving government assistance are headed by a working adult.

The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — flowed to working families and individuals with jobs. In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare.

“When companies pay too little for workers to provide for their families, workers rely on public assistance programs to meet their basic needs,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the university’s Center for Labor Research and Education and one of the report’s authors.

Most people on welfare use it temporarily
By Emily Badger

This new data follows participation from 2009 to 2012. And it reveals, across those four years, that the vast majority of people receiving welfare — about 63 percent — participated in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program for cumulatively less than 12 months. Less than 10 percent were enrolled in the program for most of that time. Similarly, about a third of people using food stamps and Medicaid were what the Census would consider “short-term program participants.” And the same is true of about a quarter of people getting housing assistance.

This means that sizable shares of people moved out of these programs within a year of needing them (or that they needed them for stretches that amounted to less than a year over a four-year period). And this snapshot reflects a particularly rough stretch in the economy at the end of the recession.

At any given month in 2012, just 1 percent of the U.S. population was relying, for example, on welfare, the program that’s drawn particular scrutiny of late.

Contrary to “Entitlement Society” Rhetoric, Over Nine-Tenths of Entitlement Benefits Go to Elderly, Disabled, or Working Households
By Arloc Sherman, Robert Greenstein, and Kathy Ruffing

Federal budget and Census data show that, in 2010, 91 percentof the benefit dollars from entitlement and other mandatory programs went to the elderly (people 65 and over), the seriously disabled, and members of working households. People who are neither elderly nor disabled — and do not live in a working household — received only 9 percent of the benefits.

Moreover, the vast bulk of that 9 percent goes for medical care, unemployment insurance benefits (which individuals must have a significant work history to receive), Social Security survivor benefits for the children and spouses of deceased workers, and Social Security benefits for retirees between ages 62 and 64. Seven out of the 9 percentage points go for one of these four purposes.

A small number of discretionary (i.e., non-entitlement) programs also provide substantial benefits to individuals, but the lack of full funding for some of these programs means they do not reach all eligible recipients. Indeed, in some cases — such as in low-income rental assistance programs — the vast majority of people who are eligible receive nobenefits because of program funding limits.[4] If we broaden the universe of programs examined to include the principal discretionary programs that provide benefits — low-income housing programs, the WIC nutrition program for low-income women and young children, and low-income energy assistance — the result is essentially unchanged. Some 90 percent of the benefit dollars still go to the elderly, the disabled, and working households.

This figure also changes little if we tweak the definition of a “working household” or of who is “disabled.” This analysis defines a working household as one in which an individual works at least 1,000 hours in a year; raising the threshold to 1,500 hours makes little difference. This analysis defines a disabled person as one who receives Social Security disability benefits or the disability component of the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) or who qualifies for Medicare on the basis of disability; modifying the definition to include disabled people who are not in one of these categories also makes little difference.

Moreover, if we look only at entitlement programs that are targeted to people with low incomes, the percentage of benefit dollars going to people who are elderly or disabled or members of working households remains high. Five of every six benefit dollars in these programs — 83 percent — go to such people.

If anything, these figures understate the percentage of the benefits that generally go to people who are elderly, disabled, or members of working households. As noted, these data are for fiscal year 2010, a year when the unemployment rate averaged 9.6 percent and an unusually large number of Americans were in economic distress. In fiscal year 2007, the share of entitlement benefits going to people who are elderly or disabled or members of working households was a bit higher.

6 SNAP (FOOD STAMP) MYTHS
From Coalition Against Hunger

Myth #1: People who get SNAP don’t work.

FACT: The overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Among SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, more than half work while receiving SNAP—and more than 80 percent work in the year prior to or the year after receiving SNAP. The rates are even higher for families with children—more than 60 percent work while receiving SNAP, and almost 90 percent work in the prior or subsequent year.”

What’s more, many SNAP participants aren’t physically able to work. About 20 percent of SNAP participants are elderly or have a disability, according to the USDA. […]

Myth #3: SNAP is rife with fraud and abuse.

FACT: “SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. SNAP fraud has actually been cut by three-quarters over the past 15 years, and the program’s error rate is at an all-time low of less than 3 percent. The introduction of EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) cards has dramatically reduced consumer fraud. According to the USDA, the small amount of fraud that continues is usually on the part of retailers, not consumers. […]

Myth #6: SNAP leads to unhealthy eating habits and obesity.

FACT: National studies show no significant link, positive or negative, between food stamps and healthy eating. Nor do they demonstrate a relationship between food stamps and weight gain.

The Myth of ‘Out of Control’ Disability Benefits
By Chad Stone

True, the disability insurance rolls have grown in recent decades, but most of that reflects well-understood demographic factors that have increased the number of insured workers, especially in the crucial 50 to 64 age group where risk of disability peaks. These factors include: overall population growth; the aging of baby boomers; the rise in the share of women in the labor force; and the rise in Social Security’s full retirement age from 65 to 66.

Properly measured, the share of insured workers receiving disability insurance benefits has risen much more modestly than the raw number of beneficiaries

New Government Study Debunks Social Security Myths
From Citizens Disability

A government study issued in April 2016 revealed that the vast majority of people denied their Social Security Disability benefits do not return to work. In a comprehensive study conducted by the Office of the Inspector General, only 27 percent of claimants who were denied ended up returning to work.

Social Security Disability Insurance is for those who have worked throughout their lives and paid into the system. If you have to stop working, in most cases you can collect Social Security Disability Insurance as long as your disability begins within five years of when you stopped working. This new study shows that, despite what some people may believe, the vast majority of people applying for disability genuinely cannot work.

If only 27 percent of people applying for disability return to work when they are denied, it is pretty clear that they honestly cannot work. Many people believe that many disability applicants are just trying to “fool the system.” This new study proves that people who genuinely cannot work are applying for disability.

If the myths of Social Security Disability fraud were right, we could expect to see considerably larger numbers of people going back to work once they are denied and need to support themselves. Instead, these number show that most people genuinely cannot return to work, and need the benefits that they paid into for so many years of their working lives.

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No, The Poor Aren’t Undeserving Moral Reprobates

What 7 States Discovered After Spending More Than $1 Million Drug Testing Welfare Recipients
by Bryce Covert and Josh Israel, Think Progress

“According to state data gathered by ThinkProgress, the seven states with existing programs — Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah — are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to ferret out very few drug users. The statistics show that applicants actually test positive at a lower rate than the drug use of the general population. The national drug use rate is 9.4 percent. In these states, however, the rate of positive drug tests to total welfare applicants ranges from 0.002 percent to 8.3 percent, but all except one have a rate below 1 percent. Meanwhile, they’ve collectively spent nearly $1 million on the effort, and millions more may have to be spent in coming years.”

This goes back to my thoughts on the scapegoating of the poor, most especially poor minorities. It is minorities who are used as the symbol of and proxy for poverty, even as most poor people are white. It is poor minorities that get called welfare queens, even as most people on welfare are white. Besides, most people only go on welfare temporarily and most public assistance goes to people with employment.

The poor, of all races, are supposedly lazy. The more well off think that, if they just worked harder, all of their problems would be solved. That is obvious bullshit. As I’ve noted, the poor are the hardest working Americans around. The problem is that they are working too hard for too little.

The other trope is that the poor, especially those on welfare, are stuck in their situation because of low moral behavior. They are criminals, drug addicts, etc. We could argue about correlation versus causation. It is unsurprising that impoverished, unemployed, and sometimes homeless people turn to crime and even drugs. But what we should be careful about the assumptions we make. Why would we assume poor people are doing more drugs when drugs are an expensive habit?

Similarly, we find in reality that it isn’t poor minorities who use most of the drugs in our society. White people do as much or more drugs than minorities in general, although of course minorities get targeted, profiled, and arrested more for drug crimes. The wealthier demographics of our society have high rates of drug use, because of the simple reason that they can afford it and can avoid the legal consequences.

I’d like to see us do random drug testing of wealthy people. I bet the rates would be off the charts. Why the double standard?

When we consider other data, we find an interesting pattern. The poor are better at identifying the emotional experience of others, which is to say they are better at empathizing. Related to this, the poor give a higher percentage of their money to charity. If we are looking for undeserving moral reprobates, maybe conservatives are looking in the wrong place.

Orphan Trains in Context: History, Culture, and Law

Orphan trains represent a transitional period in American history. Many threads from the past became entangled as American society struggled with issues of greater freedom and social justice.

In the early US, there obviously wasn’t much in the way of welfare, for families and for children without families. It didn’t take long for an era of reform to follow after the era of revolution. Shifting conditions, economic and demographic, forced change to happen. The stress on society was immense and new systems were put into place to offer a relief valve. This is the context in which I wish to speak of orphan trains.

These orphan trains operated from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Children without parents (or without what judges deemed capable or “worthy” parents) were considered a major problem in the big cities, and this problem grew with the influx of immigrants, often poor and unemployed. Industrialization brought people to the cities and built the railroads, simultaneously exacerbating the problem and offering a possible solution, a pathway for moving a perceived excess of youths elsewhere.

It was a time when the Westward expansion and rural farm life was being idealized to a greater extent. It just so happened that sending unwanted kids West also made them someone else’s problems, but it worked out well since those out West often were looking for cheap labor. The kids, however, didn’t always benefit from this deal… not that urban poverty offered them much hope either.

It was natural for trains to be used in dealing with orphans, juvenile delinquents, and “street urchins”. Large numbers of children from the cities on the Eastern seaboard were sent west on trains. The kids were pulled off the trains in rural areas and, in the early phase of this system, anyone who wanted a kid could take one or two or three. Some people were actually looking to adopt children, but others wanted extra hands on the farm or around the house. The main obligation supposedly being that a “good home” was provided, although this was defined loosely and not enforced to any great degree.

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The early waves of reformers were a product of their time. The first orphan trains operated prior to the Civil War. The slavery debate was heating up and it touched upon every aspect of society, orphan trains included. Some abolitionists feared that the orphan trains were being used as an extension of slavery, and there was reason behind their fear. Not all the orphans were being adopted. Many were being indentured, a term I was unfamilliar with:

“When a child is adopted, he/she become equal to the natural children in all respects – including inheritance.

“Indenture was a legal means to remove a child from an unsatisfactory home without a long court procedure. The child was not given inheritance rights. People tended to use the two terms interchangeably but they are not the same thing. Many people simply did not know the difference.”

The legal background to adoption and foster care has its roots in indenture, which is a practice and a legal construct many centuries old and having continued into the early 20th century. This indenture of orphans is basically the same indentured servitude that preceded and was the precedent for slavery. In fact, the out-placing of children with the orphan trains has its origins long before the Civil War, having been inspired by the out-placing of British children to the American colonies where they were sold into indentured servitude. Besides Africans, the first generation of indentured servants in America include the Irish. Interestingly and unsurprisingly, Irish children were a major target of the welfare societies operating the orphan trains.

Indenture diverged from slavery as a new racial order took over in the late colonial period. This was a sore point in American society, for it showed the class war at the heart of the American experiment, an experiment ruled by a plutocracy. This is why the debate of how to deal with the welfare of children was mixed up with the debate of slavery and capitalism. Defenders of slavery feared the expansion of indenture for similar reasons they feared industrialized capitalism as it was practiced in the North, as both were seen as competition for the slave system, making slaves less valuable and bringing whites down to the same level of slaves.

* * * *

The orphan trains were at the heart of all this. There was great debate about them, about how the process was being implemented and its results. The debate only ended when the orphan trains themselves ended, seventy-five years after they began in the 1850s.

During that time period, some reformers sought to go beyond indenture, but new legal systems were slow to develop. Initially, there wasn’t much legal framework upon which to base adoption and foster care. Trying to avoid the problems of the old ways of doing things, many new problems took their place. Getting rid of indenture without creating new legal protections for children simply created a system that was haphazard and lacked oversight.

No one knew what happened to many of the children who were neither indentured nor adopted. They simply slipped through the cracks, sent away and lost to all records. Abuse, no doubt, was rampant. Many children were used as cheap or even free labor. Still others became victims, whether of violence or sexual exploitation… or who knows what else.

It was upon the groundwork of colonial practices of indenture and slavery that capitalism was built. And it was against such practices that the struggle for democratic freedom was fought. The 1800s was the time when our society sought to get beyond old forms of social control and oppression, both indenture and slavery, the remnants of which continued well into the twentieth century with child labor in factories and the chain gangs of prison laborers.

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Protection of the defenseless took a long time to become established in law. Our modern sentiments about the innocence of childhood and the universality of human rights is a fairly recent invention.

Another recent invention is our present conception of whiteness. One of the most interesting stories of the orphan trains relates back to one of the main protagonists of this story, the Irish. They weren’t always deemed white. The English and Anglo-Americans were known to compare the Irish to Africans and Native Americans. The Irish were savages and foreigners, partly because they were mostly Catholic. Unlike today, Catholicism wasn’t seen as just another variety of Christianity. Protestants, specifically WASPs, saw Catholics as an alien culture. One of the names given to poor Irish children was “street Arabs”.

How did these Irish become white and hence “real Americans”?

This was a long process. In the early colonies, Africans and Irish indentured servants lived together, worked together, and I suppose had children together when the opportunity allowed. The racial order of slavery came later and that was the beginning of the Irish transition toward whiteness, initially simply being represented by their legally defined non-blackness. This shift of racial identity was solidified during the era of orphan trains.

WASPs, in their fear of Catholics, intentionally placed Catholic children into Protestant homes. In response, Catholics began to implement their own programs to deal with Catholic children in need of homes. One such case involved nuns bringing a trainload of Irish orphans to Arizona to be adopted by Catholic families. The problem was that the Catholic families in question were Mexican-American. The nuns didn’t understand the local racism/ethnocentrism involved and were taken by surprise by the response of the local WASPs. The “white” population living there took great offense at this challenge to racial purity. Suddenly, when put into that context, the Irish children were deemed to be innocent whites to be protected against an inferior race. This is ironic because where those Irish children came from in the big cities out East they were considered the inferior race.

This is the just-so story about how the leopard got his spots… er, I mean, how the Irish got his whiteness.

* * * *

This is key to understanding America. It was in the East where hyphenated ethnic Americans were minorities, seen as outsiders and threats to the status quo. But it was out West where the American Dream took fuller form and part of this was emergence of broader notion of whiteness. Old stigmas of ethnicity and class could be left behind and a new life begun. Out West, the right skin color and work ethic were what mattered. Whiteness offered great privilege for those willing to leave the East or else who, like these orphans, were forced to leave.

The untold part of this story is, as always, the indigenous perspective. Every ethnic group was being pushed elsewhere, in the contest for power and social control. The British sent the Scots-Irish to Ireland and the Irish to America. The welfare reformers then tried their best to send the children of the Irish and other ethnic minorities to the West, a place many ethnic minorites already had escaped to. The Native Americans, of course, were pushed ever westward finally ending up in reservations. Like the children of ethnic minorities, many children of Native Americans were removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools where every aspect of their culture was forbidden.

It was all about forced assimilation through cultural genocide. It never fully succeeded in all cases, but it succeeded well enough to undermine the power of most minority groups that sought to maintain their political, economic, and cultural independence. Quite an ugly process, oftentimes motivated by good intentions based in the belief in the power of environmental influences, a rather modern understanding of human nature. Reformers wanted to save people from themselves, going so far as to save children from their own parents and communities. Orphan trains were one tool in the battle to defend WASP identity and so-called real American values.

This is the background for what American became in the 20th century, everything from the Ku Klux Klan to univesal public education. The question was always how does one make immigrants and minorities into good American citizens, even against their will if necessary.

* * * *

The deeper challenge that Americans have never been able to face is that of the problems of the social order itself. The various minorities didn’t cause their own poverty and all the issues related to poverty, such as homelessness and orphaned children. The social order was built on high economic inequality and low economic mobility. This is obvious when one sees that the prejudices and oppressions of American society have their deepest roots in British imperialism and colonialism.

Shipping poor kids out of poor neighborhoods and communities does absolutely nothing to solve the problem that caused those kids to be born into poverty. Get rid of one generation of kids without changing the conditions and new generations will continue to be born into poverty. So much of welfare has always focused on results, instead of causes. The fear that the poor were a threat to the social order was a real fear, but sadly reformers were often the least likely to be in a position to understand that the social order itself was a threat to much of the population. When a system of conflict, oppression, and social control is created, almost everything becomes a potential threat.

A new country was founded with the American Revolution and yet all the old problems of the British Empire were carried over. Reformers are interested in reform for the very reason that they wish to defend the social order. But because they are invested in the social order, they aren’t in the position to see clearly the problems of the social order that need to be reformed. That is the eternal failure of reform. Hence, that is the frustration of social justice advocates across all of American history.

This country still struggles with poverty and inequality, all of the problems that have plagued this society from the beginning. We are no closer to dealing with these problems than were the 19th century reformers. In many ways, the problems have grown worse as wealth and power have been concentrated even further.

* * * *

Orphan Train Myths And Legal Reality
Rebecca S. Trammell

“The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction” by Linda Gordon
Debra Dickerson

In Arizona, all social significance hinged on the differences between “whites” and the inferiors: Mexicans, “Chinamen,” blacks and Indians. Closest to white in appearance and comportment, Mexicans were at the top of the list but remained (then as now) non-white. Intermarriage (or more often, intercourse) between whites and Mexicans was common and largely accepted in the Southwest, but there were limits — Mexicans adopting white children, for instance. Gordon’s convincing analysis of the nuns’ mistake and the debacle that followed points up some potent racial ironies that are still worth savoring today: The Easterners didn’t understand that the same train ride that would bring their Irish charges parents and homes would also make them white. Of course, had they been white in New York, there would have been no need for the arduous journey west.

Orphan Train Riders: The White Slavery Movement
Our Future Rooted in Our Past

These children were labeled as “Street Arabs”, “the dangerous classes”, and ‘street urchins” to name a few. In the mid 1800’s and early 1900’s of the United States history, these problems escalated and led Charles Loring Brace, a minister in New York, to found The Children’s Aid Society in 1853 in New York City. Orphanages or asylums as they were called back then, did exist, but Charles L. Brace felt that it was not the best environment for children to grow and develop. Brace thought that the children would benefit from fresh air, work and a loving family and resulted in the birth of the Orphan Trains. Unfortunately the loving family life was not always the case and the child would have to be moved to another family.

In 1865, the New York Foundling Asylum was founded by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Beginning in 1872, the Asylum began to send children in trains out to families in the west. Indentured forms were filled out by the people accepting the child with indenture lasting until they were 18 years of age. The New England Home For Little Wanderers (NEHFLW) in Boston, Chicago Home Society, Minnesota Home Society, and other such societies also placed children with families on the frontier. Most children were never adopted into the families they went to but became indentured servants.

Book Review: Orphan Train
Literary Hoarders

Between 1854 and 1929, so-called “orphan trains” transported more than 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children between the ages of 2 and 14 from the East Coast to the Midwest for foster care and adoption. But their treatment often amounted to indentured servitude. Chosen first were infants, for more traditional adoptions, and older boys, for their manual labor; adolescent girls were typically selected last. While some children quickly found love and acceptance, many walked a harder road.

Orphan Trains of Nebraska
Ancestry.com

From 1854 to 1929, signs like this were posted and published all across the Midwest. Over 150,000 orphaned, homeless or neglected children were uprooted from the city and sent by “Orphan Trains” to farming communities, primarily in the Midwest, to be adopted out to good homes. In this way, the city of New York was not only drastically reducing their orphan problems, — they were also aiding others who desperately wanted children. The children were taken by train and often lined up at predetermined stops to be “looked over” and adopted (or in many cases indentured). Those not selected were taken to the next stop in hopes of finding a new home. For many children, life improved because they found homes with loving adults to care for them. Others, however, were not so fortunate, and their lives became more miserable as they found themselves in homes where they were used chiefly for slave labor. (in 1927, there were still 12 states, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia, Nebraska and Kansas allowing indenture of children who had been turned over to poor farms or county authorities) And even though the “Orphan Train” brings thoughts of poor orphaned children, this was not always the case. Many of the children still had parents, but their family could not care for them and put them into state run homes, until they could get back on their feet. When the official transporting of children was ended in 1930, the migration of these children encompassed 47 states!

Orphan Trains (1854 – 1929)
Angelique Brown

In the 1920s the number of Orphan Trains decreased sharply. It was at that time that states began passing laws that prohibited placing children across state lines. Additionally, there was criticism from abolitionists who felt that the Orphan Trains supported slavery. Pro-slavery advocates criticized the practice as well, saying that it was making slaves obsolete. In 1912, the U.S. Children’s Bureau was established with the mission of helping states support children and families and alleviate many of the factors that led to children living on the street. As state and local governments became more involved in supporting families, the use of the Orphan Trains was no longer needed.

Riding the Orphan Train: What we can learn about modern slavery from our own history
Beyond Borders

Between 1853 and 1929 roughly a quarter million American children were swept off the streets of New York and other east coast cities and sent westward on trains to live with and work for farm families. Some were true orphans. Many others were not. Many landed in loving homes and were cared for and sent to school. Many others were not and essentially became child slaves.

In fact, before the civil war opponents of this practice in the south argued that the real purpose of the orphan trains was to reduce demand for slavery in midwestern states. Then, after slavery had been outlawed, abolitionists in the north opposed the practice, arguing that many families were now using the free labor of these children in place of slaves they had lost or could never afford.

Trains would stop in midwestern and southern towns, and the children would file off and parade before the assembled townspeople, often on hastily constructed stages. Locals would inspect the children, feel their muscles, look at their teeth, and question them. Contact between the children and their families back east was strongly discouraged. Many of these children ran away from the abusive new homes they were placed in, and a few even found their way back to their families in the east.

Questions remain for orphan train survivors and descendants
ECM Publishers

An ad in an 1882 edition of the Albert Lea newspaper stated, “A company of boys from the Children’s Aid Society of New York City will arrive in Albert Lea on Friday, November 17, for the purpose of finding homes and employment with farmers and others. There will be a meeting for the distribution.”

An article in the November, 19, 1913 St. Cloud paper reported that 100 children from New York, ranging in ages from one to four years, would be distributed in tearns County. (Pictured are Betty Murphy and Sister Justina Bieganek, both of whom were riders, Barb Noll, Gen Gustafson and Colleen Murphy. Staff photo by Joyce Moran)

Distributed?? Today, one sometimes hears about pumpkins being distributed … or, seedling trees. But children?

Such was the case, however, when, from 1854 to 1929, an estimated 200,000 children were transported by train from the Children’s Aid Society Orphanage and the New York Foundling Orphanage, both of New York City, bound for distribution to homes across the United States.

The children generally arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. A cloth patch attached to their shirts contained their names. Some carried birth and Baptismal Certificates—some did not. Most did carry an indenture paper which legalized their adoption.

“The children went through the most traumatic experience of all,” said Renae Wendinger of Sleepy Eye, MN, the daughter of one who rode an orphan train—”the breaking of family ties.”

Wendinger was in Little Falls August 25 and 26, participating in the 40th annual reunion of Orphan Train Riders who came to Minnesota and nearby vicinities. The reunion took place, as it often has over the years, at the St. Francis Center.

“Some children went to good homes,” continued Wendinger. “Some did not. Some people just wanted a servant or someone to take care of them in their old age. This was not considered cruel because our country was still familiar with servants and slavery.”

Going on, Wendinger related that some children were legally adopted while others were not. And often, she said, siblings were not kept together because a family only wanted one child.

Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed
Stephen O’Connor

Most of these charges were not new. Editorialists and critics had compared outplacement to slavery practically since the departure of the first train, and these were far from the first examples of abuse that had been brought up in a public forum. What was different was that so many joined so vocally in the criticism, a signal both that a new consensus was emerging among a mostly younger class of child welfare professionals and that Brace’s power and prestige had begun to erode.

Brace was being attacked partly because of his prominence, especially after the publication of The Dangerous Classes. T/he sins that the CAS was being accused of were, after all, true of virtually every organization that placed orphaned or vagrant children in families. The New York Department of Charities relied on correspondence from the foster parents to monitor even children placed in the city and, as Mary Ellen Wilson’s case demonstrated, did not do a much better job than the CAS of checking up when required reports did not come in. In-city placements by a well-regarded Philadelphia agency were visited only once a year, while children placed by the Catholic Protectory were visited once every two to five years. Those children placed by the Randall’s Island House of Refuge were never visited at all. The attacks on Charles Loring Brace were clearly part of a much-needed self-correction of the entire American child welfare system. And he was singled out for attack because he was the exemplar of the old consensus — the main idol who had to be toppled.

“Philomena’s” story is just one example of the forced adoption of Irish children
Tom Deignan, Irish Central

For a people so passionate about the past, an Irish American’s longing for roots he never knew might seem unusual. But over the course of Irish American history, there are unfortunately many stories of children separated at young ages from their parents and compelled to grow up in strange, sometimes abusive, new surroundings.

And even if they were relocated to loving homes (as Michael Hess seems to have been, raised by a Catholic family in St. Louis), these Irish children were forced to grow up detached from the faith and culture into which they were born.

Perhaps the most prominent and controversial symbol of this was the Children’s Aid Society, which ran so-called “orphan trains” for Irish and other immigrant children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Supporters argued that large numbers of Irish kids were wandering big city streets homeless, and that relocating them to loving families in the mid-West was a blessing.

Critics, however, note that the children were often exploited for their ability to labor on farms.

“At its worst it was not much better than slavery,” author Christina Baker Kline said in a recent NPR interview.

Earlier this year, Kline did extensive research for her novel “Orphan Train,” which features a young Irish girl named Niamh who loses her family in a tenement fire.

Orphan train children “were all between the ages of mostly two — but sometimes as young as babies, baby trains were called ‘mercy trains’ — and up to the age of 14. Those 14-year-old boys, 12- to 14-year-old boys, were the most in demand because obviously they were labor,” Kline said.

It also did not help that Children’s Aid Society founder Charles Loring Brace had an extensive record of anti-Catholic writing, and was open to the charge that he was taking Catholics off the dirty city streets in order to convert them into Protestants.

According to Kline, the extent of the era’s anti-Irish sentiment went to bizarre lengths.

“I came across a newspaper article from The New York Times about how the trains that were being sent were not allowing redheads,” she said.

During a heated exchange of letters in The New York Times back in 2001, Irish American novelist and historian Peter Quinn said the Children’s Aid Society “was not merely a compassionate agent of charitable relief…but an active partner with the courts and Protestant proselytizing societies in seeking to ‘redeem’ Irish Catholic children from a cultural-religious identity considered destructive of personal virtue and moral behavior.”

Of course, many Irish “orphan train” children grew up to live happy and productive lives. But the pervasive sense of dislocation and loss these children must have felt – especially after their own parents endured the trauma and uncertainty of emigration – is a rarely-discussed aspect of the Irish experience in America.

The Orphan Trains Transcript
American Experience, PBS

NARRATOR: Children drifted from farm to farm. Some even made their way back to New York. There were stories of children landing in reform school in Michigan; from Indiana, rumors of children on the dole. A southerner named J. H. Mills claimed that “men needing labor, their slaves being set free, take these boys and treat them as slaves.”

ELLIOTT HOFFMAN BOBO: There was one boy. I refused to go home with this farmer, too. He took this other boy, Albert– maybe I shouldn’t name him, but– and they kept him on the farm, wouldn’t send him to school, worked him eighteen hours a day in the field and he just lost his mind. And he died at an early age, less than thirty years of age. And he finally ran away from home, but it was too late. They wouldn’t let him go to town and see people, afraid he’d tell them how badly he was treated. And he never saw anybody. Didn’t– once– I saw him about two times during the whole time he was there, about ten years. I just saw him twice and he was afraid to talk to me. And I couldn’t– I couldn’t help him. I didn’t know enough to help him. But my dad always thought that he was abused, so he was afraid to talk about it, afraid he’d be abused some more.

NARRATOR: The record books are filled with names and dates, details of departures and arrivals, but say little about the quality of the children’s treatment. The extent of abuse is unknown.

The Society’s goal was to visit each child once a year, but there were only a handful of agents to monitor thousands of placements. With reports of children drifting through the countryside, Brace consented in 1883 to an independent investigation. It found the local committees were ineffective at screening foster parents. Supervision was lax. Many older boys had run away. But its overall conclusion was positive. The majority of children under fourteen were leading satisfactory lives.

READER: [Ann] “Dear Mr. Brace: When I lived in New York, I had no bonnet and now I have more bonnets than I can wear. And I get no whippings and I have a father and mother and brothers and sisters here and they are kinder to me than my own ever were. I think I will never be happier than I am now.”

NARRATOR: In New York, the children of a new generation of immigrants were facing deprivation and homelessness. Brace continued to insist that removal from the city was the street children’s best hope for deliverance. he used photographs like these, made by his protégé, Jacob Riis, to dramatize their plight.

The Society boasted about the story of two street kids, Andrew Burke and John Brady, who were sent to the same Indiana town on the same day. On arrival, the judge who adopted Brady considered him “the homeliest, toughest, most unpromising boy in the whole lot.” He said, “I had a curious desire to see what could be made of such a specimen of humanity.” John Brady grew up to be governor of Alaska. His friend, Andrew Burke, grew up to be governor of North Dakota.

But many rural people viewed the orphan train children with suspicion, as incorrigible offspring of drunkards and prostitutes. The children spoke with the accents of Ireland, Germany and Italy. Unlike most Midwesterners, many were Catholic. One official said, “What was good for New York was very bad for the west.”

READER: [farmer] “I have known several of these city Arabs being provided with homes and never heard of but one that proved to be honest. I believe it is the blood and not the education that tells.”

ALICE AYLER: Bad blood. That’s what they used to consider it. We kids from New York were of inferior stock. Bad blood is what’s running through those veins and some people have bad blood and others have blue blood. Well, the bad blood is supposed to carry the bad things down from your parents. Through your life, all the bad things are supposed to come through that bad blood and you don’t have a chance to do better.

Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed
Stephen O’Connor
pp. 95-7

“The most significant antecedent of all, however, not only for Brace’s orphan trains but also for both of the earlier American “placing out” efforts, was simply the indenture system. Indenture even had a long history of being used for the reform and removal of undesirable or potentially criminal children. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the British routinely gathered up — or kidnapped — poor children from the slums of London and sent them to the colonies to be bound servants. For much of that same period American commissioners of the poor had sought to “reform” destitute children by placing them in supposedly “respectable” homes at great distances from their depraved parents. The Philadelphia House of Refuge, where John Jackson had been incarcerated, commonly indentured boys to sea captains and had even placed one child as far away as Peru.

“By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the indenture system was in its final phase, having succumbed, on the one hand, to the looser employer-employee ties fostered by wage labor and the market economy, and, on the other hand, to the changing attitudes toward children and — under the influence of abolitionism — bonded servitude itself. In a way, the orphan trains were an attempt to modify an increasingly outmoded system, or at least to rescue that system’s best elements.

“Under the standard indenture agreement, a child was “bound,” generally until the age of twenty-one, to a master who, in exchange for labor, was expected to train the child in the “art and mystery” of his craft and to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, and a “common” education. At the termination of the indenture, the master was also supposed to give the apprentice a suit of clothes and often a bit of money and a Bible.

“The agreement between the CAS and prospective families was identical in its general outline but differed in ways designed to give the child more freedom and protection. The most important difference was that orphan train riders were not “bound” to the families they went to live with. Unless the child was adopted by the new family, the CAS or the child’s birth parents retained guardianship. Also, the relationship between the child and the family could be dissolved at any time if either party was dissatisfied, and the CAS would attempt to find the child a new placement and arrange for the child’s transportation, either to that new placement or back to New York City. And finally, the head of the family with which the child was placed was not the child’s “master” but his or her “employer.” This did not mean that the child was paid wages — although many children, especially the older boys, were in fact paid for their labors. The term was testimony to the looser nature of the placement, by comparison to indenture, and to the legal equality of the two parties. “Employer” also implied, of course, that the child was still expected to work, as a farmhand domestic, or in some other capacity. But the relationship was not meant to be a cold exchange of labor for basic necessities. From the beginning the ideal consummation of any placement was held to be the child’s incorporation into the family.

“Brace’s reinvention of indenture was, however, only one of many ways in which American society was struggling to preserve this ancient and ubiquitous institution. Indenture was nothing like an outmoded profession — blacksmithing, for example — that could disappear without a trace in a single generation. It was an essential component of American family and social organization. Long after the notion of bonded servitude (at least of noncriminal whites) had become intolerable in a democratic republic, long after payment only in room, board, and on-the-job training had come to seem exploitative and unnatural, and even long after the legal apparatus of indenture — the contracts, penalties, and terminology — had fallen into neglect, there were still families that needed work done they were unwilling to do themselves, and there were still parents who could not afford or did not want to raise their children to adulthood, and there were still adolescents who could not bear to remain in the homes in which they had been born. Throughout the Victorian era and well into the twentieth century aspects of indenture survived as a social safety valve, as a source of cheap labor, and, most important of all, as a set of assumptions about the obligations of family, of adults and children, and of the rich and the poor. By looking closely at these assumptions, we can see not only yet another way in which the orphan trains were inevitable, but how they could also seem natural, normal, and good.

“Little Orphan Annie has come to our house to stay
To wash the dinner dishes up
And brush the crumbs away,
To shoo the chickens off the porch
And dust the hearth and sweep,
To make the fires, bake the bread
And earn her board and keep.
— James Whitcomb Riley”

The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America
Marilyn Irvin Holt
Kindle Locations 440-488

PLACING OUT In America was given form by Charles Loring Brace. Born in 1826, Brace was the product of nineteenth-century values and of old New England traditions. His family was comfortable in its financial and social status, and Brace grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. There he was influenced by the sermons of the renowned theologian Horace Bushnell who believed in the naturalness, the “unconscious influences,” of child rearing, deemphasizing the use of threats and coercion in the shaping of a child’s character. Bushnell also may have played a role in Brace’s decision to become a minister. Graduated from Yale in 1846, Brace then attended the Yale Divinity School and the Union Theological Seminary, but after completing his education, Brace was not sure that a church ministry should be his calling. He leaned toward missionary work and had his first introduction to life as a city missionary at New York City’s Five Points Mission. That experience was of great importance to Brace’s career, and he maintained ties to that institution and the Five Points district after leaving to become instrumental in founding the New York Children’s Aid Society in 1853.’

With the Aid Society as the vehicle, Brace devoted his life to working with the poor. His contributions were many and during his lifetime his tireless efforts brought him recognition as an urban reformer. Brace also received some measure of notice for his writings, whose topics ranged from his experiences among the lower classes to analyses of life in foreign lands and ancient civilizations. One theme that held a particular fascination for him was the evolution of civilization, or perhaps more accurately, the forces that led a civilization from one step of development and culture to another. Because of this interest, Brace was a student of the theories of Charles Darwin and greatly admired this man, whom he came to know. Seemingly Brace was intrigued by the implications of Social Darwinism, and, as evidenced by his Dangerous Classes of New York, believed that society could be greatly changed, if not brought down, by a growing poverty class. As Brace’s writings illustrate, he did not follow the school of evolutionists that argued for “natural” events to take their course. Brace disavowed survival of the fittest. Rather, he was convinced that society could create artificial social structures for improving the lives of the poor, and he sided with the evolutionists who argued for intervention programs that would change and benefit all society.2

Brace was convinced that just as humans had developed through an evolutionary process, their behavior could evolve, and be shaped, for the good. There was one qualifying point, however. After becoming a city missionary and working with adults at Five Points and later New York’s Blackwell’s Island, with its penitentiary and workhouse, Brace became convinced that any effort “to reform adults was well-nigh hopeless.” He therefore directed his energies to the salvation of children. His life’s work produced numerous social-welfare programs, and by 1894 the New York Children’s Aid Society supported forty-five major activities in New York City and its environs. Included among these projects were twenty-two industrial schools; six lodging houses (five for boys, one for girls); a farm school; and a children’s summer home on Long Island. These accomplishments, which gave help and support to many thousands of young lives, have been overshadowed by Brace’s best known legacy-placing out.3

Although Brace later wrote of placing out as if no other person but he or any, other country but America had used the system, it was an imported idea. Indeed, he was not the only American to have an interest in the system’s possibilities. At least two contemporaries are known to have considered placing out as an option for dealing with the urban poor. Robert M. I Iartlev, of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and John Earl Williams, of the Boston Children’s Mission, advocated the system; the association with which Hartley, was involved established the New York Juvenile Asylum, a later advocate of placing; out, and Williams was to become treasurer for the New York Children’s Aid Society. In fact, the Boston Children’s Mission, founded in 1849 and incorporated in 1864, began a modest in-state placement program under the direction of Williams in ih5o. It was Charles Loring Brace, however, who gave the concept definition in America.4

What these men idealized was a theory, for removing the urban poor to the less populated and more rural areas of the country. Abstractly, they viewed placing out as a solution. They might personalize their arguments with sad human examples, but they’ were in fact creators of a particular view of what should he done with the poor, and more often expressed concern in terms of the immediate effect of the poor on society,. Familiar with traditional forms of charitable support, they knew that from the Colonial period children and adults had been indentured and that the institutionalized were commonly used as farm laborers to earn their keep. They shared a belief in the code, “labor is elevating and idleness is sinful.” Additionally, these men seemed to have little concept of life in the expanding west. Brace’s writings point to an idealized view of rural life, not unlike that expressed in popular thought. Supposedly the unlatched door of the country home offered hospitality to friend or stranger, and class or circumstance of birth had little meaning. The rigors of frontier life evidently went unrecognized, and as importantly, these city reformers seemed blissfully ignorant of the urbanization of western cities such as Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. No longer frontier outposts, these were by the 185os centers for commerce and transportation. Equally ignored was the far west, with its influx of emigrants, gold seekers, and entrepreneurs. Brace and his contemporaries certainly were aware of westward expansion but seemed oblivious to the growth of cities like San Francisco, which established its first orphan asylum in 1851, in part to house children orphaned on the Overland Trail.’ Instead, the focus of these men centered on eastern cities, and their romantic notions of the west remained steadfast.

Those who considered the idea of placing out were well aware of established forms for assisting the poor. Brace and his colleagues simply added a new dimension. It is quite possible that Brace shaped his ideas while on a trip to Europe in 1850. At that time he toured England’s “ragged” schools, which were based on the principle of reform rather than simple incarceration of children, a revolutionary idea for the times. No doubt Brace and contemporaries were already familiar with this work, but for Brace the experience of seeing programs in action allowed for a formulation of strategy. Also, Brace could not have failed to learn more about the British system of “transportation,” a well-known practice used as far back as the early 1700s. Under this system the country’s less desirable citizens were shipped to North America, Capetown, and Australia. Initially, transportation was a punishment whereby convicted felons were removed from their home country. By the time Brace saw the system, a new component had been added. Along with convicts, the poor, particularly women and children, were being resettled. The government transported many and gave approval to the British Ladies’ Female Emigrant Society to send more women out of country. The frontiers of the Empire needed labor, and in some cases prospective wives for male settlers. Transportation became a way, to supply that demand. Children and women were sent successfully to Canada and Australia, and at least one foray was made into the United States when London’s Home and Refuge for Destitute Children, in 1869, resettled twenty-one boys to the English colony of Wakefield, Kansas. In addition to what Brace saw in England, he encountered another form of relocation in the German states. There he observed a program established by prominent citizens, known as “The Friends in Need,” which placed vagrant city children with rural families. He also may have come into contact with the work of Pastor Andreas Brain, which did the same thing in Neukirchen, Germany. Bran’s work was inspired by his sermon text “The Christian Family-Parlour is the Best Reformatory,” a theme not unlike that taught by Bushnell.” It seems that Brace borrowed the basic idea of supplying labor while at the same time removing the destitute from high population centers, and tailored this to American society, sending thousands of children to experience lite in the West.

Kindle Locations 501-508

The plea for Christian charity went hand in hand with a warning. Brace’s writings, whether a society circular or his notable book, The Dangerous Classes o, f New York, paired charity with the caution that these children, left unattended, would some day threaten society. “The class increases; immigration is pouring in its multitude of poor foreigners, who leave these young outcasts everywhere in our midst,” warned Brace. “These boys and girls,” he wrote, “will soon form the great lower class of our city [and] if unreclaimed, [will] poison society all around them.” The solution was “a means of draining the city of this class.” Brace certainly had real concern for what happened to the children of the city, but his writings went beyond a simple appeal for help. Harking back to what Brace believed about social evolution, there was a desire to impose control over the possible ramifications of a growing underclass. Thus, Brace asked that support, financial and spiritual, he given the Aid Society to “drain” the potential threat. Meanwhile, he began the process “by communicating with farmers, manufacturers, or families who may have need of [child] employment.”‘

Kindle Locations 781-790

The ethnic backgrounds of those placed out reflect in part Brace’s personal prejudices. Brace believed that American and West European cultures were superior and that children from those backgrounds were more acceptable to receiving communities and families. When writing of children who came to the society for help, Brace gave approving descriptions of children such as the “yellow-haired German boy … with such honest blue eyes” and the “sharp, intelligient Yankee lad [who] comes in to do what he has never done before-ask for assistance.” To the Mediterranean and East European born, Brace was less receptive, particularly as he feuded with the Catholic community over placing out and as he believed Eastern and Southern European groups less advanced and civilized. In fact, when there were instances of Italian children being placed, the Aid Society pointedly described their earlier conditions, proving, at least to some minds, that this group was inferior: “Eugene M-, eleven years old, [was] found locked in a vacant room in a wretched tenement, deserted by his Italian parents.” After a stay at New York’s Home for the Friendless, the boy was sent to a “superior home” in Kansas .41

To a degree, Brace’s prejudices were those of American society. Robert Hartley, writing for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (A I C P), expressed much the same thoughts, particularly against Catholics, and despaired of the “accumulated refuse” that “had landed in New York.” Reformer Jacob Riis did not share such sentiments, but he certainly observed them. Writing of New York’s Fresh Air Movement, Riis noted that rural communities were not willing to open their doors to just anyone:

Kindle Locations 840-843

One historian writing on childhood in America has concluded that the Civil War served as a dividing line in not only the nation’s history but for children’s history. A loss of a national innocence led adults in their desire for a less troubled time to project an aura of virtue around childhood. Children were seen as the only hope left to the country.47 This analysis provides a psychological framework in which to consider the continuation of placing out during and after the war. The innocence of children was to be preserved, and their protection became a national mission.

Kindle Locations 1011-1019

It may be argued that the n i c P, Brace, and other reformers cloaked their fears of the lower classes, especially the foreign element, in the guise of charity. Certainly by standards of the late twentieth century their attitudes smack of bigotry and intimidation, but the times in which they lived must be considered, not to excuse, but to explain a viewpoint that allowed heartfelt concern for the worthy poor to coexist with apprehensions for what immigrants and a growing American-born class of poor might bring. This was the time of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party, a period of America for Americans sentiment, and a time when educated men and women still spoke of Native Americans as “savages” and debated the question of blacks as a subhuman species. If Hartley, Brace, and their contemporaries are today to be interpreted as racists, that label must be applied to much of society. Just as city missionaries labored among the immigrants, missionaries among the Indians attempted to impose the white work ethic and standards of conduct, and those sympathetic to the plight of blacks, including the strongest abolitionists, often viewed that group as children who could not progress without white guidance. These attitudes did not diminish real compassion. In fact, for the times, men like Brace and Hartley were viewed as forward thinking. They, at least, were willing to tackle the needs of the destitute and downtrodden, despite rhetoric that today seems to curse the very people they were sworn to help.

Kindle Locations 1589-1601

Despite the apparent increase in legal adoptions during the latter years of the system, implicit in debates over placing out was the question of the legal status of those removed from the cities. If placing-out institutions did not demand indenture, adoption, or agreements with families to serve as foster care parents, who accepted legal responsibility for a minor? Certainly, there were those who were indentured and had the contracts as proof of their status within the home. There were those who had been legally adopted, giving them the benefits of family name and rights of inheritance. It is apparent now, as then, however, that many of the placed out, and perhaps the majority, existed in a kind of no man’s land of legal status. The institution to release the child for resettlement may have verbalized the rights of “prior” guardianship, but most orphanages or asylums that worked with placing-out organizations, expressed little interest in the outcome. For those placed out and not indentured or legally adopted, it was a state of limbo. It is clear in placing-out accounts that many, unsure of their place, assigned themselves a status. Many twentieth-century accounts state that the child was adopted into the family or treated as one of the family’s own, but being treated as part of the family and having a record of adoption are quite separate things. It is probable that many receiving families were uneducated or unaware of the niceties of the law and therefore never considered or understood either option. When Peter Manachisa, for example, was placed by the Sisters of Charity in a Louisiana home, his new parents signed indenture, not adoption, papers; Peter was given his new family’s name and he later learned that his parents, of limited education, had believed they were adopting him.33 For a growing number of reformers and officials of state boards of charity and institutions, the rather cavalier attitude of placing agencies in ignoring the legal implications of status may have represented just another reason for the system’s abolition.

Kindle Locations 1990-2002

In this new world of educated social workers and theorists and progressive thought, indenture, one of the long-held social options for placement came under scrutiny and was found lacking. Indenture of children and adults was deeply rooted in American life. It routinely served as a means of reducing the inmate populations of institutions and as a way for parents to provide their children with board and the means of learning a trade. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, there were rumblings. The superintendents of the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Atchison, Kansas, had seen heated debate when state approval was given for indenture, and they were not unique in suffering, as one writer put it, the “wrath of the parents and relatives of [indentured] children, and of the politicians who are, or think they are interested in them.” One of those politicians was Governor Arthur Capper of Kansas, who received this viewpoint from a private citizen: “In fact it is my opinion that both boys and girls in this Institution [Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home] if permitted to remain where they are until they can acquire the training and education in household and other vocations will be able to go out and take employment independently and without being indentured to their employers.””

Local complaints supported a growing national concern. In 1927, twelve states-Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Maryland, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia, and Nebraska-still allowed indenture of their institutional charges and of children who had been turned over to county authorities or poor farms. These states were pushed into the national limelight when calls were made for them to abolish the practice for “more intelligient child care services.” Pressure increased when the national Children’s Bureau published its study of indenture in Wisconsin. That study reflected some of the same criticisms made of placing out, citing children who were “worked virtually as unpaid servants in households and on farms, often deprived of schooling and . . . sometimes cruelly treated.” The Children’s Bureau demanded abolition of all indenture, calling it “a relic of sixteenth-century England.” 29 If indenture, a much older practice than placing out, could be cited for its antiquarian principles, then surely placing practices that sometimes included indenture could be called into question.

Minimum Wage, Wage Suppression, Welfare State, etc

I’ll keep this post simple. I mostly just want to offer some views on the wage issue that most people don’t come across. You won’t hear most of this in the MSM. You won’t likely even see it in social media, unless you have some very well informed friends. But first let me summarize the issue while offering some straightforward analysis.

The specific issue at hand is the minimum wage and whether to raise it. Everyone is talking about it. But the discussions I come across most often lack much depth and breadth. I see two related issues: wage suppression and welfare state.

Wage suppression is my main focus. It relates to decades (or even generations) of Fed hard money policy, union-busting, and off-shoring.

The Fed hard money policy is something I came across in William Greider’s Come Home, America. You can find the relevant passage at the bottom of the page.

Union-busting is something I was already well aware of. And off-shoring as well. These two are closely related.

It is easier to bust unions with threats of off-shoring. If labor tries to strike, the scabs will be in far off foreign countries. This is very sneaky and basically immoral in all ways. It undermines both democracy and free markets for there is no such thing as anti-democratic free markets. Corporations often off-shore to countries that lack not only democracy but also lack human rights, workers protections, and safety/environmental regulations. In these foreign countries, corporations are sometimes free to bribe officials and use private goons, police or the state military to bust up unions the old fashioned way.

It isn’t just foreign governments that corporations can bribe, threaten, control and otherwise influence. Off-shoring is possible because our own corporatist (corporate-owned-and-operated) government allows and encourages it with free trade agreements. These free trade agreements are shaped by big biz and so unsurprisingly are business friendly and labor unfriendly. Such trade is only ‘free’ for big biz. In these free trade agreements, there are rarely if any demands for participating countries to have democracy, human rights, workers protections, or safety-environmental regulations.

The second issue is where it gets most interesting.

Conservatives, libertarians and even many mainstream Democrats complain about what they deem an out-of-control welfare state. But this welfare state ultimately functions in two ways. Because minimum wage workers aren’t making a living wage, they end up on welfare which means the welfare state is a massive apparatus to use taxpayer money to subsidize big biz. And so without welfare the average American would be even more desperate.

What does desperation breed? Populist reform or even revolution. The ruling elite will never willingly end the welfare state because, along with mass incarceration, it is a social control policy. If minimum wage and all welfare was instantly ended, there would be revolution over night.

The minimum wage and welfare combo is the only thing making wage suppression and social oppression tolerable. As long as people are getting by, even if only barely, they won’t fight for their rights as citizens. It is the old bread and circus routine with big biz media serving the circus part of the equation.

There are a number of options here:

We can raise the minimum wage while continuing wage suppression and while not increasing welfare.
We can strengthen and broaden welfare while continuing wage suppression and while not raising the minimum wage.
We can more moderate raise the minimum wage and increase welfare while continuing wage suppression.
We can end wage suppression and solve the problem at its root.
Or we can do none of the above and wait for the populist revolts to begin.

There are no other options. Excluding a return to such things as feudalism, indentured servitude, debt bondage, slavery, etc. Although there are other ideas that could work, such as a basic income, related to Paine’s citizen dividend. So, at least within the present system, there are no other options.

* * *

Here are a few links to helpful articles and a couple of discussions:

An Idea Conservatives Should Love
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.
truthdig.com
Feb 17, 2014

The Skills Gap Argument as Cover for Wage Suppression
By J.URIS D.EBTOR
January 23, 2013

Suppressing wages and increasing corporate profits:
The tough math behind the current economic recovery.
By mybudget360

Suppressing wages
By davald
The Observer
December 10, 2012

The China trade toll
Widespread wage suppression, 2 million jobs lost in the U.S.
By Robert E. Scott
Economic Policy Institute
July 30, 2008

NAFTA AT SEVEN
Its impact on workers in all three nations
By Robert E. Scott
Economic Policy Institute
April 2001

ALEC AND WAGE SUPPRESSION
By Mary Bottari and Rebekah Wilce
from PRWatch
July 23, 2013

The Force Behind Bills To Lower Wages and Suppress Workers’ Rights? You Guessed It: ALEC
By Mary Bottari and Rebekah Wilce
inthesetimes.com
July 30, 2013

Union Busting adds to corrupt bureaucracy and incites crime
By zacherydtaylor
open.salon.com
September 26, 2013

On Becoming a Nietzschean Society
By Greg Horsman
About Questioning and Skepticism
November 1, 2013

What is ‘wage suppression’ and is it real?
Discussion on talkrational.org

Why should taxpayers subsidize low wage workers? (fast food, minimum wage, salaries)
City-Data forum

And below is the aforementioned passage from William Greider’s Come Home, America.

* * *

Kindle Locations 557-562

It was mainly the Federal Reserve-sheltered from public scrutiny and protected from political accountability-that engineered America’s great shift in fortunes. The Fed “hardened” the value of money and wealth with its successful campaign to suppress price inflation. Then it proceeded to encourage or passively allow the scandalous financial behavior that followed-wealth being concentrated in the financial sector, the growing inequalities among Americans, deregulation and the creation of dominating megabanks, and recurrent frauds and financial bubbles followed repeatedly by government bailouts of banks and financial firms.

The Federal Reserve’s policy essentially tilted the normal economic balance hard in one direction, then held it there for a generation. It favored wealth over wage income, creditors over debtors, capital over labor, financial investors over producers.

Kindle Locations 601-602

“Hardening” the value of money may modestly benefit average consumers, but the true winners are people with vast accumulations of financial wealth. As the Federal Reserve drove the inflation rate lower and lower, eventually getting it close to zero, disinflation was a great gift to the wealthy, one that kept on giving.

Kindle Locations 621-635

The “hard money” policy was sustained in a way that might have shocked many Americans if they had known about it. The Federal Reserve suppressed inflation by targeting the wages of working people. It prevented their incomes from rising even though, in a healthy economy, wages would normally rise consistently. Nobody in authority ever acknowledged this strategy in a straightforward way, but the reality was well understood by economists and financial investors. By holding back the natural energies of the economic recovery, this monetary policy kept labor markets slack and the unemployment rate higher as a result, at around 6 percent. That made it very difficult for industrial workers, union and nonunion, to demand higher wages. If the economy had been allowed to grow faster, more jobs would have been created, unemployment would have fallen, and workers would have gained bargaining power.

But the conservative Federal Reserve regarded rising wages as an inflationary threat and worked deliberately to prevent it. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, the Fed protected its victory over inflation by keeping its foot on the brake and tapping it occasionally to make sure the economy did not get too healthy. That is, the federal government-represented by the central bank-ensured that the broad ranks of working people would not share in the “good times.”

Paul Volcker used to carry in his pocket a card setting out the latest wage settlements in contracts negotiated by unions. When politicians urged him to let up and lower interest rates, the Fed chairman would cite recent wage agreements as evidence that he must hold tight. Monetary economists devised a theory to justify the antiwage policy. They claimed inflation would return if the Fed let the economy progress to below a so-called natural rate of unemployment. The theory was bogus; it was subsequently disproved by real-world experience when unemployment fell to 4 percent in the late 1990s, yet no inflation appeared.

The Federal Reserve, in other words, has played a central role in suppressing wages during the last three decades, a policy that was powerfully reinforced by globalization and the migration of US jobs to low-wage economies. Was this in the public interest? The question was not discussed in polite circles. The presumption among the governing elites, including the most influential newspapers, is that everyone shares a common interest in subduing inflation and therefore wage suppression is required. Wall Street celebrated the central bank’s success in restraining economic growth by dubbing it the “Goldilocks economy”-not too hot, not too cold, but just right. It may have seemed just right to financial investors. For working people, it was way too cold.

When Will the Inevitable Come?

I was thinking about trends. Nothing new, yet the wheels of my brain were going round and round. I can’t help but wonder how long this can go on.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Big business profits steadily increase as the middle class disappears and wealth inequality grows. The unemployed and underemployed are getting to around a quarter of the population and growing. Poverty and homelessness is on the rise. A large number of people are on welfare or in prison.

If you counted all these Americans, that might be around a third of the population (or more) that has become an apparently permanent underclass, a discarded and oppressed people, the so-called “useless eaters”. And there is no hope in sight of it reversing. If anything, it will just get worse and worse.

This is my theory for why the the prison population grows so much (even while crime decreases), more than most other sectors of the economy. The Prison-Industrial Complex is Big Business, the second half of the Military-Industrial Complex (the latter being the single largest part of the US economy). How many citizens have to be imprisoned before it can be declared we live in an authoritarian/fascist/corporatist police state?

I think we have long gone past that point. What is the step that follows authoritarianism? Do we go to more overt forms of concentration camps? Does the government create more perpetual wars in order to send all the excess population off to die fighting the poor and desperate people in other countries?

It isn’t even just the US. It’s not like immigrants are taking away our jobs for jobs everywhere are disappearing. Many people in other countries (most people in quite a few countries) have also become a permanent underclass. The same big businesses and big governments driving this trend in the US are driving this trend around the world.

I’m always surprised by how few people seem to see this happening. It is the one thing that rarely if ever (certainly never fully) gets discussed in the MSM. It will almost inevitably lead to world war, revolution or genocide. How this story ends is completely predictable in the broad terms: mass suffering and violence. The only thing stopping this from happening over night is the twin forces of the welfare state and the police state. Even my respectable upper middle class conservative father basically agrees with me that revolution would follow if the mass welfare and imprisonment suddenly ended.

The answer conservatives always offer me is that there needs to be more private charity, just put a few more band-aids on the gushing wound. Or else they say all these ‘lazy’ people just need to work harder. Really!?! What a brilliant solution! As soon as they can find work or get out of prison, they’ll certainly try that working harder idea.

I just never can figure out why those in power want to push the world over this ledge. The temporary gains for the powerful are alluring I’m sure, but the consequences are going to be ugly for all involved. How will all their wealth comfort them when the mobs rise up, when the bombs start dropping on their mansions and gated communities, or when the desperate armed men show up at their offices and boardrooms? You’d think the plutocracy would understand they have a vested interest in avoiding this tragic result of their own making.

The saddest part of all is nothing in this post is an exaggeration nor a conspiracy theory. It is just a simple explanation of the world we live in and where it is heading. People aren’t disappeared in our country. There is no need to speculate about it. We know what happened to these people. We know where they are. They are in prisons and jails, in inner cities, in poverty-stricken communities, in projects, in homeless shelters and on the street. They are hidden in plain sight. Their numbers are growing and at some point their numbers will be too large to control.

None of this had to be this way. It wasn’t always an inevitable outcome, but sure seems to be getting that way. We came to this point through a few decades of choices. The clear trends of this growing inequality didn’t become apparent until 1970s and could have been reversed early on. Even with the 2008 economic debacle, major changes could have been put in place. People could have been held accountable and regulations could have been strengthened. Instead, the plutocracy just doubled down on the exact same type of actions that brought us here in the first place.

It feels like a collective madness. I guess we’ll just have to play it out and let events resolve the issues we are afraid to face.

I’ve said this all before and I’m sure I’ll say it all again and again.

Tea Party Welfare

Books About Conservatism and the Tea Party
By Timothy Noah, The New York Times

“Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment. Indeed, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their exceptionally informative book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” more than a few Tea Partiers “dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign.” But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers’ anti-government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren’t opposed to government benefits per se, according to Skocpol and Williamson; rather, they’re opposed to “unearned” government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. “So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys,” Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don’t get much at all.”

“This poses a particular problem for a conservative Republican like Rep. Paul Ryan, who favors privatizing Medicare and shifting more of the financial burden onto recipients. But it’s also a problem for anyone seeking to lower the budget deficit, because it’s the “earned” benefits like Social Security and Medicare that are mainly responsible for runaway government spending. On the other hand, although Tea Partiers, who tend to be comfortably middle class but not wealthy, hate paying taxes, they don’t necessarily mind when other people pay taxes; the South Dakota poll had 56 percent of Tea Party supporters favoring a 5 percent increase in income taxes for people who earn more than $1 million a year.”

This is what I’ve been pointing out again and again.

The Tea Party conservative (and the fiscal conservatives who support them) isn’t against big government and isn’t against welfare. Rather, they are against big government that helps other people who aren’t like them: minorities, immigrants, and the young.

The GOP strongholds are the Deep South and the Far West which are the regions that receive the most federal benefits, meaning they receive more federal taxpayer money than they pay in federal taxes. The Far West, in fact, has been dependent on government funding since the 19th century simply to make the region habitable.

I see the same thing in Iowa. Eastern Iowa isn’t as dependent on farm subsidies and so Eastern Iowans don’t elect politicians to make sure they get this type of government welfare which means they more often vote for Democrats. Western Iowans, however, are dependent on government welfare through farming subsidies and so they vote for Republicans who always get federal funds for their constituents.

These kinds of conservatives will complain about spending other people’s money. Yet they are perfectly fine with other people’s money being spent on themselves and on what they care about (e.g., abstinence-only sex education, oil subsidies, military, etc). There is this fundamental disconnect from reality that is mind-blowing. If the Tea Party got rid of government, it is people like the Tea Party supporters (along with others living in Republican-voting states) who would be among those who would suffer the most.

They benefit from the welfare such as farm subsidies created by progressives and attack progressivism. They’ll tell the government to keep its hands off of their Medicare. Where do they think Medicare comes from? Who do they think pays for it? It’s just plain bizarre.

	Benjamin David Steel… on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Ron Pavellas on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Benjamin David Steel… on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Ron Pavellas on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Benjamin David Steel… on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Benjamin David Steel… on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Benjamin David Steel… on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Ron Pavellas on L. Reuteri Is Your Friend
	Benjamin David Steel… on Henry Fairlie’s Toryism,…
	HeyIOnlyComeHereTahW… on Henry Fairlie’s Toryism,…
	Henry Fairlie’… on Nature’s God and America…
	Henry Fairlie’… on Spirit of ’76
	Henry Fairlie’… on “You’re the only people alive…
	Henry Fairlie’… on American Leftist Supermajority
	Benjamin David Steel… on Ancient Social Identity: The C…

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Tag Archives: welfare

On Welfare: Poverty, Unemployment, Health, Etc

No, The Poor Aren’t Undeserving Moral Reprobates

When Will the Inevitable Come?