AOC's Dubious Project to Overcome America's 'Work Ethic Culture'
The federal response to the pandemic offered US households a record $2 trillion benefit explosion, including unprecedented temporary payments to nonworking adults. Originally billed as needed due to pandemic shutdowns, those extraordinary benefits have mostly run their course, with even President Joe Biden conceding last year that it “makes sense” that federal unemployment benefit expansions expired. But for progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), it’s not enough because, when it comes to government benefits, it’s never enough. Her recent comments blaming America’s “work ethic culture” for not providing even more pandemic benefits unconnected to work is an admission of how out of touch her policy positions really are.
During the past two years, federal pandemic benefits included several rounds of stimulus checks paid to an estimated 85 percent of US households, including nonworking adults. For a typical household of four, those payments totaled $11,400. Unprecedented unemployment benefits, such as $600 and later $300 weekly supplements, were paid to a peak of 33 million claimants. Some hadn’t previously worked, and two-thirds of early benefit recipients collected more than they made from working. Those receiving just average unemployment benefits could collect over $46,000 between April 2020 and Labor Day 2021. Expanded monthly “child checks” worth $250 or $300 per child were paid in the second half of 2021 to some 65 million children under Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, which offered those payments to nonworking parents for the first time. And record increases in food stamp benefits, still paid to over 21 million households in April 2022 (the most recent data available), also flowed to millions of nonworking adults.
The unprecedented largesse eventually ran its course, leaving 40-year-high inflation and now labor shortages in its wake. Nonetheless, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez recently called for still more work-free welfare, designed to overcome the American “work ethic” she claims “has had a chokehold on US policies, economics, & history from the Mayflower to now.” That echoes AOC’s proposed Green New Deal, in which she declared that government must provide “economic security” to all—even those who are “unwilling to work.” Never mind the astonishing $94 trillion price tag over just the first decade, or the steeply increased taxes those higher benefits would require.
It's worth recalling that AOC’s anti-work views are decidedly outside of even the Democratic mainstream, judging by presidential pronouncements in the past century. FDR designed new work-based benefits like social security, and of work-free welfare said the federal government “must and shall quit this business of relief.” JFK sought to reform welfare “by providing the opportunity every American cherishes to do sound and useful work.” LBJ associated his Great Society with “the marvelous products of our labor.” Bill Clinton signed a historic welfare reform law, saying “moving people from welfare to work” would “give structure, meaning, and dignity” to recipients’ lives. And Barack Obama — sounding a lot like Ronald Reagan — contended that “The best antipoverty program is a job, which confers not just income, but structure and dignity.”
For his part, Joe Biden has joined AOC in straying from his predecessors’ pro-work orthodoxy, especially in signing the March 2021 American Rescue Plan. That legislation removed the work requirement for the child tax credit, temporarily converting it into a de facto welfare check for millions of recipients. The greatest benefit increases went to parents previously ineligible because they did not work.
That policy was meant to outlast the pandemic, but didn’t. In fact, the Biden administration wanted to make the expensive work-free checks permanent. Constrained by budget reality, however, the House passed legislation that proposed extending the expanded benefits for just one year, and even that ran into a wall of opposition in the Senate. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) opposed the plan because it included “no work requirements whatsoever.” Polls indicate the American people overwhelmingly support Manchin’s call for expecting able-bodied adults to work in exchange for key benefits. One poll found only 28 percent of voters said they preferred the expanded child tax credit to be made permanent and go to all families, regardless of whether they worked.
All of which proves Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is right about one thing. America’s “work ethic culture,” as she derisively put it, continues to be central to our social fabric, as it has since before the nation’s founding. That also means AOC faces deservedly long odds in convincing Americans that is a bad thing.
Matt Weidinger is a Rowe Fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
