Right-Wing Media Have No Clue How Anti-Poverty Programs Work

Right-wing media are promoting a flawed study that claims it is more lucrative for low-income Americans to accept government benefits than take low-paying jobs, a notion that reveals the conservative sphere’s ignorance on how anti-poverty programs work.

On August 19, the libertarian Cato Institute released a report titled “The Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013.” The new study updates a much-maligned version by the same name released in 1995. Both reports claim to analyze welfare benefit levels nationwide and state-by-state and push the misleading notion that “[t]he current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work.”

Cato Institute senior fellow Michael Tanner said Fox News’ Your World; “There is no evidence to suggest that poor people are lazy, and every survey suggests that people on welfare say they would like to work, that they are not happy being on welfare. But just because they’re not lazy doesn’t mean they’re stupid; if you pay people more not to work than to work, well, a lot of them are going to choose not to work.”

The argument that government assistance and benefits are too generous and thus drive recipients out of work has been thoroughly debunked by experts, and Tanner’s calculations have been the subject of scrutiny in the past. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities highlighted nearly two decades ago, Tanner is still basing his calculations on the assumption that recipients take full advantage of every single benefit program that is potentially available to them. From CBPP:

“Cato’s conclusions are striking. They also are inaccurate — the Cato report is replete with analytic errors. For the nation in general and for California in particular, the report paints a misleading picture both of the amount of benefits most [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] families receive and of the supposed advantages from relying on welfare rather than working.”

Both the 1995 and 2013 reports also fail to account for differing costs of living or the per capita income of the states surveyed.

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