Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is under fire after announcing Tuesday he is demanding work requirements for “all” social safety net programs as part of his debt ceiling “negotiations” with President Joe Biden.
F0r decades, study after study show that work requirements are not effective for many reasons, including many people on programs such as Medicaid are not physically able to work, while Americans using other programs, like SNAP, often called food stamps, are not able to work for lack of child or elder care. And many Americans accessing social safety net programs are working already.
Speaker McCarthy, without evidence, baselessly disagrees.
“What work requirements actually do is help people get a job,” he told reporters. Work requirements do nothing to “help” people get jobs, they simply threaten them with increased hunger, emotional trauma, and disease if they do not.
“Every data point shows that, and it helps people move forward,” McCarthy said, which is also false.
McCarthy claims – again, falsely – “the public wants it, both parties want it.”
“The idea that they want to put us into a default because they will not work with on that [sic] is ludicrous to me.”
Republicans are the ones pushing for a default, not Democrats.
Asked by a reporter if he is “talking about SNAP, which program are you talking about specifically?” the Speaker freely admitted, “Look, we’re talking about all the programs.”
He then began to repeat his false claims.
“Because it helps people get into a job.”
McCarthy also claimed that forcing people who may not be physically or emotionally able to work, or who may have responsibilities that preclude them from leaving the house to go to a job “helps the supply chain.”
What the Speaker is ignoring are the millions of undocumented immigrants currently within our borders desperate to work at jobs that won’t threaten their ability to stay in the country – not to mention the thousands of others coming to the U.S. seeking asylum or a way out of poverty, gangs, drugs, disease, and corruption.
“The Trump Administration took the worst aspects of the Clinton policy and made them exponentially vindictive, and even less effective at helping the poor,” Anne Kim in 2021 wrote at Washington Monthly. “Arkansas’ Medicaid work rules, according to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report, forced the disenrollment of about 18,000 people but prompted ‘no increase in employment or other community engagement activities.’ The tightening of SNAP or food stamp work requirements was especially nonsensical, given the program’s traditionally countercyclical role as a safety net for Americans who’ve lost their jobs during a recession. ‘Taking away food benefits doesn’t make it easier for anyone to find a stable job; it just makes people hungrier,’ as Ed Bolen of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently wrote.”
Despite McCarthy’s apparent implication that Americans accessing social safety net benefits are not currently working, in fact many who are, do.
Earlier this year the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published a state-by-state report that also finds nationally, more than 41% of SNAP recipients are in working families.
And last month the Kaiser Family Foundation published a report showing the majority of adults using Medicaid who were also able to work, are working.
“Speaker McCarthy’s big red line is that we MUST impose work requirements that don’t actual lead to more work but do make the process so cumbersome that millions of people fall out of the program due to red tape – or else he’ll force us to default,” observed Bobby Kogan, the senior director of Federal Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Watch Speaker McCarthy’s remarks below or at this link.