Requiring work for benefits is wise

There are good reasons to criticize the “Big, Beautiful Bill” the US House just sent to the Senate. But its imposition of work requirements for able-bodied recipients of Medicaid — and more-comprehensive work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — are not among them.

I pray North Carolina’s senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, hold out for more budget savings. I pray their counterparts in the House rediscover the virtues of fiscal responsibility and agree to any additional Medicaid reforms or other savings the Senate includes in its version.

What lawmakers certainly shouldn’t do is fulfill the prayers of progressive critics who dislike work requirements. As currently written, the bill requires childless, able-bodied recipients of Medicaid or SNAP to spend at least 20 hours a week working, training for a job, or volunteering their time.

When then-President Bill Clinton signed a bipartisan welfare reform bill back in 1996, progressives similarly attacked its work requirement for cash assistance. They claimed it would wreak destruction among low-income mothers and children. That’s not what happened. While some households decided to forgo cash assistance, most responded to the requirement by entering the job market. Developing marketable skills and a stronger work ethic, they gained rather than lost income and set positive examples for their children.

Federal policymakers should have applied the same logic to health care, food subsidies, housing assistance, and other in-kind benefits at the same time. Now, three decades later, Congress can rectify this mistake.

Chronic poverty doesn’t occur by happenstance. Among those who lack serious physical or mental disabilities, poverty is strongly correlated with self-destructive behaviors: dropping out of school, abusing alcohol or other drugs, getting pregnant outside of marriage, and staying out of the labor market.

To say these behaviors are self-destructive is not to say they are easily avoided, especially by young people with limited life experience and short time horizons. I’ve witnessed the consequences of some of these behaviors firsthand. Addictions are hard to overcome. Temptations are hard to resist. And the longer folks go without developing significant work experience, the harder it gets to thrust their feet into the necessary doors.

Most voters want their government to finance a basic safety net. But they also want their tax dollars to go primarily to temporary assistance for families in crisis and to long-term assistance to the disabled. When policymakers cross these two very different streams, the results aren’t pretty — and voters see that.

A recent survey found, for example, that 81% of Americans agree with work requirements for able-bodied recipients of Medicaid. In a 2023 poll, two-thirds of respondents felt the same way about work rules for SNAP.

Is it costly to administer such requirements? Absolutely — and conservatives ought to recognize that fact. There’s a competing model, popular with elements of both the right and left, that would use tax or spending tools to offer a universal basic income (UBI) without behavioral strings of any kind. Among their justifications is that the administrative savings would be considerable, reducing the overall cost to taxpayers.

They’re mistaken. It ought not be easy to receive public assistance for long. Otherwise, government weakens the incentive to work, study, marry, and develop other healthy habits. Such habits represent the only proven means of breaking the poverty cycle for good.

A study just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined one of the most-popular versions of the idea: unconditional cash payments to parents of newborn children. Some were randomly awarded $333 a month. Others received only $20 a month. After four years of receiving monthly allotments, the two groups of children exhibited no statistically significant differences across seven measures of language, cognition, and behavior.

At the same time, another new NBER paper found that the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax benefits predicated on parental work had positive impacts on a host of different outcomes, including infant birthweight, childhood health, educational attainment, wages, and poverty in adulthood.

Work works.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.