Dems fold - again

Republicans want the public to believe they are pushing for work-promoting social-welfare policies through ordinary bipartisan negotiations. What they are actually doing is threatening to deliberately induce an economic crisis unless Biden helps them cut off aid to hundreds of thousands of hardworking low-income Americans.

  Intelligencer

Because the Democrats care if the country defaults and the world goes into a crisis, whereas, the Republicans don't. So it's a no-win situation for Democrats.

[W]ork requirements serve their actual purpose perfectly well. Cutting aid to the indigent to sustainably fund tax cuts for the rich is an extremely unpopular economic program. In a 2019 Pew poll, only 17 percent of Americans endorsed cutting “assistance to the needy.” [...] In 2018, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 70 percent of Americans supported Medicaid work requirements.

[W]ork requirements reframe the debate over soaking the poor. Rather than presenting a trade-off between helping the needy and pampering the wealthy, work requirements appear to aid the industrious at the indolent’s expense.

[...]

The president will not acquiesce to work requirements for health-insurance coverage but is more open to the GOP’s proposals for limiting eligibility for food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

The neediest people and their most basic human needs.

It is worth taking a moment to underscore the perversity of this situation. [...] In an ordinary negotiation between two parties that each enjoy a democratic mandate, both sides make concessions to the other’s agendas: If Democrats must acquiesce to social-spending cuts, Republicans would then reciprocate by accommodating some liberal priority, such as progressive tax increases.

But McCarthy isn’t interested in horse trading. He’s interested in extortion. Republicans are not offering a single concession to the Democratic agenda. They are merely offering not to plunge the U.S. into a financial crisis by blocking the Treasury from financing spending that Congress has already ordered. [...] Republicans’ being manifestly willing to sabotage the economy for partisan gain should be a scandal for the party. Yet much of the press is intent on portraying the GOP’s indifference to its most basic obligations to the public as a banal political reality that Democrats are duty bound to accept.

[...]

Yes, all of the executive branch’s unilateral options for disarming the debt ceiling are freighted with risk, particularly in a context in which conservatives control the Supreme Court. But rewarding Republican extortion means harming various Democratic constituencies in the first instance and ensuring further debt-ceiling crises in the long run.

[...]

The ostensible purpose of these [GOP] policies is to liberate the poor from dependence on welfare while increasing labor-force participation, but all available evidence indicates that the GOP’s proposals would yield negligible impacts on employment at the cost of cutting off health care and food aid to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of working, low-income Americans because of missed paperwork and bureaucratic errors.

[...]

Their aim is not merely to strip welfare from the idle poor but to slash social-welfare spending in general. They are quite explicit about this intention.

Work requirements allow them to make progress on this objective precisely because such rules reliably deny benefits to the working Americans who comprise the vast majority of prime-age social-welfare recipients.

[...]

The House GOP’s most egregious proposal is to append work requirements to Medicaid. On a theoretical level, it is difficult to see why denying someone access to basic medical care would render them more capable of contributing to the economy.

[...]

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 93 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries ages 19 to 64 are either working, attending school, caregiving, or suffering from a disabling ailment. As for that remaining 7 percent: Giving people access to health-care coverage makes them more likely to obtain and maintain employment. Thus, Medicaid is itself a work-promoting policy.

But has anybody tried implementing the reasonable-sounding "work requirements"?

In 2018, Arkansas imposed work requirements on its Medicaid beneficiaries, and the policy accomplished none of its ostensible objectives. Not only did the requirements fail to increase employment, but they actually cost the state and federal government $26.1 million in the short term because of the administrative burdens of implementing the new requirements. Meanwhile, nearly 16,000 low-income Arkansans lost their health coverage. Only 1,232 of those individuals were actually nonworking. In other words: Roughly 92 percent of those who lost health insurance owing to Medicaid’s work requirements did so because of paperwork problems, not because they were neglecting to contribute to the economy.

[...]

Arkansas’s rules initially required Medicaid recipients to submit documentation of their work on a complex website that required both access to the internet and skill at navigating it. The website also shut down between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. each day. And if Medicaid enrollees failed to complete their submission by the fifth day of every month, they lost their coverage.

That sounds intentional. Nine pm to seven am would likely be the only time a poor working person - especially one with two or more jobs to make ends meet - could have the time to submit the required forms. Not to mention, much of the working poor do not have computer skills, much less computers.

[I]f the GOP actually wanted to deny health insurance to the working poor — both out of an ideological hostility to social welfare and a desire to free up fiscal space for cutting taxes on the wealthy in the long term — then you would expect them to deem Arkansas a success story and push to take its policy national. They have, of course.

[...]

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, already has strict work requirements and time limits for Americans under 50. The House GOP’s proposal would extend these requirements to those between the ages of 50 and 55.

[...]

The labor-force participation rate among workers ages 25 to 54 is currently at its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. And even if Americans in their early 50s were shirking work en masse, there is no evidence that appending work requirements to SNAP would significantly increase their workforce participation. Research from the Urban Institute shows the past imposition of work requirements and time limits did not meaningfully increase beneficiaries’ earnings or employment. Work requirements do reliably deny SNAP benefits to working Americans, however. Projections suggest that McCarthy’s proposal would cut off food aid to hundreds of thousands of people, a total far larger than the number of nonworking, able-bodied SNAP recipients between 50 and 55.

[...]

Currently, a SNAP recipient who participates in a workforce-training program that offers a stipend or financial support risks suffering a reduction in food aid or loss of eligibility altogether. This gives some SNAP recipients a short-term financial incentive to forgo such training programs. Congress could eliminate this perverse incentive by exempting income earned during training from SNAP eligibility calculations. This would make the program more supportive of work. But it would also increase its fiscal cost. Since the GOP’s actual concern is for reducing spending on the poor, not improving their employment outcomes, it has no interest in the training issue.

[...]

There is little reason to believe that denying anti-poverty funds to the parents of young children will improve their employment prospects. Meanwhile, research indicates that providing direct cash assistance to needy families increases the future labor-force participation of their children.

But it doesn't punish them for their sin of being poor.

UPDATE 05/28/2023:

The (tentative) "deal" in part: 

Raises debt ceiling for 2 years;

Rolls back non-defense, discretionary spending to fiscal 2022 levels;

No budget caps after 2025;

Defense spending as Biden requested: $886 billion;

Fully funds veterans medical;

Phased-in age increase for SNAP benefits from 49 to 54 sunset in 2030;

Some additional work requirements for temporary assistance;

No changes to work requirements for Medicaid;

"Claws back" unused Covid funds;

Rescinds $1.9 billion in (newly funded $80 billion) IRS money;

No new taxes or closing of loopholes for the rich;

Mandates spending reductions tied to spending increases

Floor vote in the House on Wednesday.  Then to the Senate if it passes.

Expect the most extreme MAGA representatives to vote no.  As well as some Democrats.

UPDATE 05/29/2023: