Snow Day Best of

A D.C. snow day gives us the chance to revisit some of our favorite conversations, including the Times’ Emily Badger on the Elizabethan origins of the term “able-bodied”; plus in honor of President’s Day, Alex Lawson and a pre-Indivisible Ezra Levin on a Founding Father’s vision for ending poverty.

This week on Off-Kilter — the snow gummed up our regularly scheduled programming, so we’re bringing back a couple of past conversations from the Off-Kilter archives to tide you over until next week.

First up, given the Trump admin’s ongoing attacks on the SNAP program, targeting so-called “able-bodied adults without dependents,” we’re bringing back a conversation Rebecca had with Emily Badger of the New York Times about the Elizabethan origins of the term “able-bodied.”

And later in the show, in honor of President’s day — we’re dusting off a conversation Rebecca had (back when the show was TalkPoverty Radio!) with two of our favorite history nerds: Alex Lawson, Executive Director of SS Works, and Ezra Levin, way back before he founded Indivisible, when he was at the Corporation for Enterprise Development. The pair joined Rebecca for a conversation about Founding Father Thomas Paine’s early vision for fighting poverty — known as agrarian justice.

This week’s guests:

• Emily Badger, reporter at the New York Times
• Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works
• Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on the show the snow gummed up our regularly scheduled programming so we’re bringing out a couple of past conversations from the Off Kilter archives to tide you over until next week. First up, given the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the SNAP program targeting so called “able-bodied” adults without dependents, we’re bringing back a conversation I had with Emily Badger, a reporter with the New York Times about the Elizabethan origins of the term “able-bodied”. Later in the show in honor of president’s day sort of we’re dusting off a conversation I had a while back with two of my favorite history nerds, Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works and Ezra Levin, way back before he founded Indivisible when he was at a little organization called the Corporation for Enterprise Development, that conversation’s about founding father Thomas Paine’s early vision for fighting poverty known as “Agrarian Justice”. Let’s take a listen.

I’m really excited to have both of you on, particularly after President’s Day, a lot of discussion of our great presidents over the years. But perhaps comparatively little discussion of the founding fathers, which has special implications for TalkPoverty and for discussion of poverty and anti poverty programs. So I want to start with you Ezra tell us why are the founding fathers important in a conversation about poverty, what am I hinting at here.

EZRA LEVIN: Well so I think the reason why the founding fathers are important in our work is because we can look to them for inspiration, for the roots of a lot of the policies that we’re advocating for today. So when you hear folks like Elizabeth Warren say that great if you started a factory but you’re really relying on society to help you bring your goods to market or you hear Barack Obama say you didn’t build that, they’re not making up these phrases. This is rooted in philosophy that’s hundreds of years old and it’s not just the underpinnings, the philosophical underpinnings, it’s actually the precise policies, which we’ll get to today actually basically policy papers coming out a hundred years ago are the basis for some of the ideas we’re fighting about right now. So it’s super relevant for today’s debate.

VALLAS: And Alex Lawson to put you on the spot do you have a favorite founding father? You seem like someone who would have a favorite founding father.

ALEX LAWSON: I do. I actually have a whole range of them, I put them in order but my favorite is Lafayette and he’s a character that’s often times forgotten in history but he was as famous as George Washington at the time and he saved America and George Washington from defeat with a very timely sailing over with some French boats and then kind of connected there because at the time there was a focus on America and our experiment here but there was a movement that was actually much more global and that’s why Lafayette was actually connected with America and that’s why another of my favorite founding fathers, Thomas Paine actually is also, he’s very much rooted in the history and woven into the fabric of America’s creation but the ideas that they were talking about, the ideas that are woven into our founding documents are actually, it’s a rich history, a philosophical history that was pretty global at the time and was transforming the entire world. And I think that that’s something, I don’t know if we’ve disconnected from that today but the understanding that these ideas that we were at the forefront of but they were transforming countries around the world. And I am being a little oblique but Thomas Paine speaking directly to the people had a lot of ideas that when I say Social Security is as American as apple pie it’s because I’m referencing the fact that the first proposal for social insurance program was written by Thomas Paine in 1797. And that is something that I don’t think a lot of people realize, that our ideas are actually woven into the fabric of America. Actually America was almost created because of the ideas that we fight for, it was against this inherited propertied moneyed power structure that was just completely unequal and there was no way that it could change. That was what a lot of the revolution was against.

VALLAS: Let’s get into who Thomas Paine is because just to show our hand, the three of us have been talking for a while about actually doing a segment digging into Paine and in particular to one of his pamphlets that as you have noted, Alex, was the first effectively white paper calling for Social Security. So Ezra I want to bring you in, who was Thomas Paine?

LEVIN: Paine’s a great guy, it’s just fun to read Paine too because he gets so angry in his writings. He really just jazzes up these ideas. You think it’s going to be really boring philosophical treaties, that’s not what it is. You go read some Paine it’s rpetty short, it gets to the point; it really will get your blood boiling. But Paine is great, he is not an elite, he is the son of a corset maker, he trains to be a corset maker in England and he goes and he’s a privateer for a year, comes back, has a few dollars, becomes a public employee, meets Benjamin Franklin while lobbying for the public employees and ends up going to America with the help of Ben Franklin and becomes a public intellectual really, one of the first public intellectuals and I think the great thing about Paine, well many great things about Paine, we’ll get to “Agrarian Justice”and some of his awesome ideas in there. But one of the great things about Paine is it’s not just that he’s created these new ideas in his work. That’s part of it but when the revolution is kicking off, 1776, early on he publishes “Common Sense” anonymously. And the great thing about “Common Sense” is that it’s written for the people, it’s really this document that’s supposed to go and get folks excited about revolution, recast the debate about revolution.

VALLAS: And this is the pamphlet that is described as having paved the way for the Declaration of Independence.

LEVIN: That’s right. And it’s a document that is read to the soldiers, it’s read to the citizens, it’s read to really galvanize support for this effort which doesn’t look too good in 1776 it’s looks kind of like we’re going to lose.

LAWSON: It looks even more than a little like we’re going to lose actually, we’re continually losing. George Washington is continually losing to the British.

VALLAS: Moral was low.

LAWSON: And I really do think you pointing out that it was by George Washington’s order that Paine’s words were read to the soldiers because he was speak to people about why this cause, which was a cause for humanity, it was that is what they were fighting for and it inspired people and then you have Lafayette sail across the ocean as well, which is very helpful.

LEVIN: Also very important.

VALLAS: Bringing him back in there, very subtle.

LAWSON: But I just to be not subtle about it that these ideas were not just American, that America even in its’ birth was pulling from Lafayette’s French, Thomas Paine was not born in America but these are key characters in the creation of America because what it was was this idea, it was this beautiful idea that people were fighting for that people should have the ability to succeed based on their own merits, not based on their blood or where they were born, all of those concepts and obviously it wasn’t perfect in its creation and as time goes on we’re better as we go towards a more perfect union but those ideas really are woven in even all the way at the start of America.

LEVIN: That internationalism, great I think it points to another great thing about Paine, there’s a story about him and Ben Franklin says, where there is justice that is my country, who knows if the story’s right. Supposedly Paine pipes up no, where there is injustice, that is my country. So you see Paine fighting for revolutionary egalitarian ideals in England, in America, in France so he’s just such a freaking inspiring figure, incredibly impressive. Let’s get to some of his revolutionary ideas.

VALLAS: Before we do I wanted to go back to something that was really interesting that I want it to get its’ due, you noted Ezra that the way that he wrote was different than the style at the time. How was it different?

LEVIN: He’s writing to the people. So he is simply not writing to elites, what would be the difference, I think the difference is perhaps if you think Piketty today, he blew up, his book comes out and everybody’s talking about it but in a relatively small circle here or maybe a lot of people buy Piketty’s book and put it on the shelf and say that they read it. this is a different level, this is Harry Potter level, this is writing that really speaks to everybody and it’s incredibly accessible and because of the accessibility his ideas are able to catch fire. I think it’s appropriate that we’re talking about this in TalkPoverty, there’s really a similar goal between Paine and what we’re trying to do here, which is not just speak to the inside the beltway crowd about ideas but highlight the voices of the people and speak to them too.

LAWSON: And just because I have to also like Harry Potter deeply progressive and in this incredibly accessible way so that people can understand these archetypal narratives that you see throughout Harry Potter as incredibly progressive. There’s so much work on equality woven into these stories but it’s not written in the hectoring or lecturing way but in a way that is inspiring to people because these ideas connect. And I did get a degree in philosophy so I do sometimes wander out into that area.

VALLAS: Just to make sure you’re putting it to good use.

LAWSON: Yes, exactly. But that is what I think is, I actually believe that ideas like this can be beautiful unto themselves and they are, they connect with people. And like I said the fact that George Washington actually ordered Thomas Paine’s words to be read because he captured the idea that people were willing to fight for and again, Lafayette sailed his boats across so that’s important too.

VALLAS: So without further a due, I want to take a trip to platform 9 and ¾ right if we can. So “Agrarian Justice”, Ezra you mentioned it and Alex I want you do actually give an overview of it because your organization Social Security Works has published its’ own edition of “Agrarian Justice”, so I would expect you to know a little something about it.

LAWSON: So let me actually tell you why we published and then because I think all of us can dig into the details. But why we published it, I mentioned it earlier, I often times am arguing with opponents of Social Security, they’re paid liars by greedy liars on Wall Street, they pay them and then they come on and they sow discord and confusion and one of their main tactics is to try to tell the story that Social Security and these ideas of us working together and creating things that we can’t do on our own are somehow alien or foreign to America. When in fact the exact opposite is true. This BS Wall Street greed over everything, I’m going to get all of mine and leave everyone else behind that is un-American. Actually the ideas of us working together of the people working together and being able to create something that’s just so much more than we could create individually that’s why we published the first proposal for a social insurance system.

VALLAS: Which is “Agrarian Justice”

LAWSON: Which is “Agrarian Justice”, 1797 so that I can say Social Security is as American as apple pie and apple pie is brought to America by the Dutch.

[LAUGHTER]

LEVIN: I was going to say, when do you date apple pie to?

LAWSON: Exactly but it’s actually, not to be too profound about my metaphors but the ideas that are brought to America from whatever place, it’s actually the concept that is key, that’s what makes America, America, the ideals of America, the vision of always getting better and better and better and that is why “Agrarian Justice” published in 1797, it’s actually more forward thinking than what we have now. It is a near universal old age and disability pension system that he envisions but it also has this other aspect which is a cash payment to people when they hit majority which we have not yet gotten there, I would like us to get there.

VALLAS: Which is like the children’s savings account that we had you on a couple weeks to talk about.

LEVIN: I think the context for when it was published and what it was responding to is super interesting too. There was this terrible sermon that’s titled “The Wisdom and Goodness of God in Having Made Both Rich and Poor” and this just really makes Thomas Paine mad because what he thinks is God didn’t create the poor and the rich, that’s ridiculous God created people and gave them the earth to inherit so this idea that is actually really popular at the time, that actually there are folks wok are born to be poor, there are folks that are born to be rich and that poverty serves a purpose, he hated it. And so he’s fighting against that idea in “Agrarian Justice”.

VALLAS: And he has a quote that seems like it’s directed responsive to that line from that sermon, he says in “Agrarian Justice”, “The rugged face of society checkered with the extremes of affluence and want proves that some extraordinary violence has been committed upon it and calls on justice for redress.” Said it better than I could have I think.

LEVIN: That’s right and I think one of those last words that you had was really crucial, justice and this gets to this whole concept in the policies that he’s proposing here, it’s all about justice. And so what he’s trying to get at is that when we talking about providing support to the poor this isn’t welfare, this isn’t charity, this isn’t something we’re doing out of the goodness of our hearts, this is something that is necessary to do to actually serve justice. Because the poor have been disinherited from their natural inheritance which is the earth. They have found this condition of poverty as a result of society which has forced them, maybe through bad jobs or through wage theft or through generations of inheritances that they didn’t get. So he’s all about serving justice with these policies and really doesn’t look too kindly of the idea of charity or the idea of welfare.

VALLAS: Justice, which is in the title “Agrarian Justice”, that piece of it might be intuitive, it might make sense to someone that hasn’t read it but Alex what’s the agrarian connection?

LAWSON: I don’t think there’s as straightforward an agrarian connection. There is, I don’t have a really good answer for that one. I actually think something, some of his ideas are when you start people with money, I don’t know.

VALLAS: Is it because of the land?

LAWSON: So this is how I read it, I could be wrong, the way I read it is that reason why it’s agrarian justice is because he’s responding to this comment that God created rich and poor but in fact no, God created man and woman and gave them the earth to inherit.

VALLAS: So it’s the earth piece, OK.

LAWSON: Everybody as a human being has a right to the earth, society then takes it away and distributes this property in different ways and so it’s about getting back to that fundamentally just distribution of natural inheritance.

VALLAS: And is the piece, I’m sorry to interrupt you Alex I want to get you back but just to make sure I’m understanding, the piece is at its core about property ownership and what is property ownership, what is the concept of ownership and what is the proper distribution and why might we need redistribution.

LEVIN: So it’s great it’s actually about two kinds of property and so he draws a distinction between these two kinds of property. One is your natural property that you inherited, it’s the earth, it’s the air, it’s the sky, that’s what everybody gets and then there’s this other kind of property which is man made, it’s wealth that’s accumulated over time and so when he’s talking about justice he considers both of these and he starts out immediately and says look, there’s nothing we can do about or there’s not much we can do about man created property, people are going to put in extra work, they’re going to earn, we’re not looking for equality of that kind of property. What we’re looking for is equality of that inheritance, which really is the difference between equality of outcome and the equality of opportunity. Really this is about the equality of opportunity.

LAWSON: The reason why I hesitate to answer that is because I have long thought that he should have named it something else like societial justice or because –

VALLAS: Or social justice.

LAWSON: Or social justice and I think it’s almost a proto idea of social justice because there’s a huge discussion and I want to point out that while he’s at these big topics he also is deep in the economics of why this all makes perfect sense as well. He spends a lot of time detailing how there can be no wealth without society, how a person cannot be rich if they are the only person in a wild area. That it is only through society that somebody can have wealth or not have wealth. And so even the richest people owe that ability to be rich to a society. That they cannot actually be rich on their own.

VALLAS: Which gets us to how inequality and poverty, these are man made outcomes, these are inventions of society and of civilization. But I want to dig into something you just brought up Alex which is the concept of some people and when he is discussing this class of people he’s describing them as landowners, that they have a debt to society, that they need to repay and this isn’t just an observation this is really at the core of what he then proposes as policy to achieve the justice that he is calling for. What does he call for? What is his policy? There’s a revenue component but there’s also a social insurance component.

LAWSON: I think it’s easiest to literally update it to our times and talk about, he’s talking about the billionaire class, he’s talking about people who are the 1 percent, the tippy top, it’s the one-thousandth of the top 1 percent who own so much of the wealth at that time and he’s saying that that accumulation, they didn’t do that on their own, and so actually there is a need to bring that inequality down and he proposes what I still believe is a very fair way of doing it. He proposes a near universal social insurance system. So an old age pension and a disability pension. And I’ll leave you to speak to also cash payment when a person hits majority which is so that they don’t start in debt but they start with an asset and he says they could buy a cow and then they could be productive members of society.

LEVIN: That’s what I did when I turned 21.

LAWSON: Yes.

VALLAS: You spent it on a cow.

LEVIN: A cow, obviously.

VALLAS: I clearly haven’t been to your house recently enough, Ezra.

[LAUGHTER]

LAWSON: But the part that is just a brilliant idea and the concept of this insurance that everyone gets it and they own it but the way he pays for it I think is really critical for understand his view on this as well. Because he pays for it with an estate tax so he pays for it and he spends a lot of time, and I fully agree with him, detailing why this is absolutely the most fair way to deal with it because he’s not even taxing the 1 percent or the billionaire class, he’s saying I’m not going to tax you, I’m going to tax the estate that is left behind when you die, which literally cannot even exist if there is not a society to protect that estate and at that point we can take a tax on that estate and we can funnel it, we can use it to pay for this near universal program that people earn that protects them against lost ways and that has this wonderful effect of lowering inequality. And that’s literally as true today as it was in 1797. If we actually took the estate tax and dedicated it to Social Security, a legacy tax to pay for a legacy debt as we are like to say, that is a very, very good way of actually making Social Security even more progressive than it is because you get this revenue coming in only on estates, not on people.

LEVIN: And I actually liked in the introduction to the version of “Agrarian Justice” that y’all published, you draw the direct connection between this estate tax and the principals at the founding of the country, you say the War of Independence was sought to rid America of royalty, aristocracy, and titled nobility, inherited wealth is at odds with the idea of a meritocracy, I think he is, this is one of the reasons why he goes to the estate tax.

LAWSON: Exactly.

LEVIN: For this exact reason.

LAWSON: And I think, again, its as true today as it was then, this massive imbalance of wealth, the inequality leads to chaos, it leads to instability and it leads to there has to be a change and the way you can do it is by, you just first have to vocalize that it is a problem when the few have so much and the many have so little and it’s un-American and it’s almost not commencerate with America.

VALLAS: Well Ezra I want to bring you in to summarize the 1700s version of the children’s savings accounts as well because I wish we had all day to talk about this but I’m being told our time is short.

LEVIN: Oh no, OK, we’ll just keep on talking once the mics go off.

VALLAS: That’s right.

LEVIN: OK great.

VALLAS: There will be a special bonus web version for the truly dedicated.

LEVIN: OK so there’s the other big idea in “Agrarian Justice” is this idea that once you turn age 21 you ought to have a little bit of money to start off life with. Maybe you buy a cow or you could buy a house, you start a business, pay for your education and he proposes at age 21 every single American would get 15 pounds, which doesn’t sound like a whole bunch of money but it’s around three months salary median income at the time if you actually adjust for inflation, $3,000 today but it’s even more than that in terms of the income folks have. And the basic idea here is that it comes back to this idea of justice, it’s being funded through the estate tax, so it’s taking the excess wealth, the excess opportunity that folks have had in society, taking a piece of that and investing it in the opportunity of the next generation. So there’s definitely a great amount of poetic justice in that structure and the basic idea is opportunity policy, as Alex mentioned earlier it’s about trying to prevent poverty before it starts by giving people a head start.

VALLAS: And in the minute and a half or so that we have I want to go back to what this means for the current political conversation. I was struck Alex you mentioned we’re hearing a lot of discussion about the inequality the levels that it’s reached, there’s a lot of anger there, this is timely given what we’re hearing in the presidential cycle. But I’m struck by the reality on the ground that for example as we talk about the estate tax which is often called the death tax, there’s zero political possibility with that given where one party is but more to the point in terms of an ongoing political debate, the step up basis in capital gains. There’s more spending on that in a year than there is the entire Child Tax Credit. You can do a side by side and that’s our largest expenditure on our nation’s children.

LEVIN: The angel of death tax cut.

VALLAS: Right, exactly so an optimism engendering conversation that we’re having and nice to remember our roots but how can we inject as my last question to both of you for the lightening round, how can we bring this back, this notion that these aren’t new ideas, that these aren’t ideas that we’ve taken from other countries in a way that is foreign to us, how do we bring this back as core to American values?

LAWSON: I tell you first we just keep talking about it like we are right now but I will tell you that I’m way more optimistic than many people. Because yes right now it doesn’t seem like things can happen but that’s what the greedy liars on Wall Street, they spend an enormous amount of money to make it seem like it’s impossible but just remember that this inequality has struck a nerve because people recognize as un-American. It’s like hitting America’s funny bone and once America’s like wait a minute why are those greedy liars on Wall Street hovering up all the wealth in this country and I’m paying the bill, no, we are the people and we demand justice and then once that demand is Clarian and clear it moves very quickly and those greedy liars on Wall Street will be quite shocked by how fast that justice can come.

VALLAS: And Ezra you’ll have the last word.

LEVIN: Great.

VALLAS: How you like it.

LEVIN: I disagree with every Alex just said no. [LAUGHTER] There’s no reason to be less optimistic now than Paine was that America could succeed and start a new country. Things looked pretty bad back them, as Alex said there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic today. I think there are two ways that we make policy. One is in these big changes where we get brand new programs and that’s great and we should fight for those. This is also small steps in the right direction that we can take, common sense ways that we can get everybody on board so they don’t, they can look at a policy proposal and say well obviously that’s a good idea. One thing that we talked about in the last podcast is preventing low income families from saving for their education, penalizing them for saving for their kids’ education. That’s crazy, nobody wants to do that, there’s a bipartisan bill to prevent that from happening. So I think keeping the conversation alive in both the big ways and the small ways is important.

VALLAS: Well thank you both for nerding out with me and we actually manage to avoid Paine puns, I can’t believe we were that good. Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works and so much more and Ezra Levin from the Corporation for Enterprise Development. Thank you so much for joining Talk Poverty Radio.

LAWSON: Great to be here.

LEVIN: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. The so-called “able-bodied” are now everywhere among government programs for the poor, Republican officials point out. But as Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz write in The New York Times upshot, “There is no standard for physical or mental ability that makes a person quote, unquote “able”. Rather,” they write, “The term has long been a political one. Across centuries of use it has consistently implied another negative; that the able-bodied could work but are not working or working hard enough and as such, they don’t deserve our aid.” To unpack the 400 year history of the term able-bodied, I’m joined by Emily Badger who writes about housing, transportation, inequality and more for the New York Times upshot. Emily, thanks so much for joining the show.

EMILY BADGER: Hi Rebecca. Thanks for having me back.

VALLAS: Well Emily, I have to admit I nerded out hard reading this piece because a 400 year history of the term that is perhaps more centrally housed in every debate around the deserving versus the undeserving poor, something we’re very much living through in this political moment, just how very cool that you did this. Help tell that story, where does it go back to 400 years ago?

BADGER: Sure, so I have to admit, I did not know this history myself as of a couple weeks ago, even being someone who writes about poverty and government programs designed to help the poor on a regular basis. But the genesis for this piece is that my colleague Margot who covers health care policy in particular, she and I realized in conversation with each other that we had this mutual suspicion of this term “able-bodied” that people constantly use in conversation with us in Washington and in policy circles and the think tank world. Where we both felt like we shouldn’t use this term ourselves as journalists, at least no without quotation marks around it because we both sort of sensed that it’s loaded, it carries a lot of connotations that people don’t explicitly express and in Washington is quite common that we fight about politics through rhetoric. There’s certain terms we know as journalists that we ought to be really careful with, for instance we don’t use terms like “anti-abortion” or “pro-abortion” because those are political terms in nature. So Margot and I thought that this term feels very political to us. We’re suspicious of it. What is the story behind it? Where did it come from? How have we come to use it? What do people really mean when they use it?

And we started reaching out to historians in particular, other people who are particularly familiar with the backstory of the Medicaid program and over and over again people kept telling us, you need to learn about English poor law dating to 1601 which is not something either Margot or I knew very much about. But in fact it turns out that this set of laws that date back 400 years to England which are really the foundation of how we have built social policy in the United States as well, literally they include the phrase “able-bodied”, they include from the very, very beginning this distinction between the impotent poor, meaning sort of people who are powerless to help themselves and able-bodied poor. And the idea that we should provide resources and aid to the impotent poor but we shouldn’t freely give stuff away to the able-bodied. Maybe what we should do is set them up at workhouses, try to connect them to work opportunities. But very, very early on there was this distinction between people who we thought should be work, people who couldn’t work for a reason.

VALLAS: So the first distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.

BADGER: Yes, exactly and the idea that some people are worthy and some people are not get expressed in a lot of different ways. We talk about people who are lazy versus people who are industrious or people who are able-bodied or people who are crippled or disabled or something like that. Whatever language we use always this idea that one group unquestionably should be given help by us without judgment and the other group is probably trying to freeload off of the public’s willingness to help. And when you think about it that way, as one historian pointed out to me part of the reason why we have these really expensive government bureaucracies in the United States around anti-poverty programs, we construct these elaborate bureaucracies to try to separate these two groups of people from each other and then it costs a lot of money in order to operate those bureaucracies. When we require people to qualify or submit new paperwork every year or multiple times a year to prove that you know, in fact, there is, they still qualify for these programs or when we’re talking about work requirements we require people to show that you’re in a job training program or that you’re actually working for work even if you don’t have work. All of that is part of this expensive process of trying to identify who is deserving and who is not.

VALLAS: And one of the points that your piece makes out is that it’s not just an inherently political term but it’s also a heavily moral term and that that’s a large part of why we actually see politicians and elected officials using it.

BADGER: Yeah, one of the historians who I talked to about this put it really perfectly to me when he said that the reason we make this physical distinction between people who are able in their bodies and people who are not is because the physical distinction always implies a moral distinction. And even though this dates back to Elizabethan England this idea is very American too I think, this idea that work is moral, if you are a good person you are working hard, if you are not working hard that’s a result of some kind of moral failing on your part. That’s a very old puritanical idea but obviously it’s one that carries through to debates that we’re having in 2018 about programs like Medicaid.

VALLAS: Continuing to tell that history going all the way back to 1601, you also take a look at who it was that was charged with making these distinctions back in the day. Today we’re familiar with the vast and expensive government bureaucracies you were describing and I do want to dig deeper into that because of how timely and current that conversation is right now but how did it work back in the 17th century?

BADGER: So the 1601 poor law in England codified what a lot of communities were already doing which is that it said we’re going to collect taxes from people and then use that money to redistribute it to support and help the poor. But the 1601 law didn’t set up some central English bureaucracy that ran this akin to a federal program in the U.S. today. What it ready did was it placed the onus on people in individual communities like parish wardens and overseers of the poor to be responsible for collecting and redistributing that money. So in practice what we mean is there are people actually living in the community who knew for instance that David over here has tuberculosis and he can’t support his family and he’s got 8 children and they’re all really dependent on him and obviously the mother can’t work because she’s also trying to take care of the children. It’s quite clear to the parish warden that David and his family are worthy. So there’s this notion that in trying to distinguish between these two groups of people, those decisions are being made by people who are embedded in the community who know their neighbors who are familiar with here’s this other guy who, he just panhandles out on the corner and everyone knows he’s perfectly healthy and he’s just lazy and unwilling to work.

The idea that these really subjective distinctions about who we should be giving aid to and who we shouldn’t, they could be made by people in the community because they know everyone in the community. And obviously translating this idea over the years, we’ve erected these larger and more centralized government programs. Someone who is sitting in a Medicaid office in Kentucky doesn’t personally know you and your story to be able to say if they think you are clearly worthy or not. So these same distinctions that have to be made between we want to give aid to and people we aren’t willing to give aid to have to be made through these other very complex processes. Have you received a doctor’s note that you can show us that explains why you aren’t capable of meeting a work requirement that we’ve imposed on you or some various other qualification criteria. Essentially what these bureaucracies are trying to do is the same that the parish warden was trying to do 400 years ago which is identify who really needs help versus who is really being lazy and sticking their hand out anyway. But it of course, makes the process of distinguishing and sorting through these people even more ridiculous when we think about having a bureaucracy do that.

VALLAS: Now I have to confess that almost everything I read in your piece was new to me. I really didn’t know the history here, I was fascinated to see that apparently at some point later than the 1601 Elizabethan poor law the English came to recognize not just the able bodied versus those who were not able-bodied but a third group of people, the able-bodied who were blocked from work for reasons that weren’t about their bodies.

BADGER: Yeah, I think that this follow pretty closely, once you start separating the poor into two groups of people and you start trying to live out those distinctions in practice, it will fairly quickly become clear to people who are executing these programs that wait a minute, there are people out there who appear to be physical capable of work but they’re not working and it doesn’t seem like they’re lazy, there must be other things that are preventing them from working, oh maybe there are structural obstacles also. Maybe the economy is really bad, there aren’t enough job in our local community. Maybe this person isn’t very mobile and so they can’t travel far enough away to where the jobs exist. If you deploy any thoughtfulness about this I think that you have to recognize that there are plenty of people who don’t work for reasons that don’t have to do with their body. This is the idea that there are barriers to employment for people that are outside of your body, they’re in the community, they’re in the structure of the economy, maybe they’re embedded in things like discrimination in the labor market. And this process of setting everyone who is poor into one of these two categories becomes murkier once you really start trying to make these distinctions in practice and you realize that the world is more complicated than that.

So the English start creating these workhouses where they say OK, some people need assistance, they’re able-bodied but they’re not working, maybe what we should be doing is creating work opportunities for them. And creating this third category of people doesn’t solve the problem. I think it just further muddies how we think about supporting the poor. But what was so striking to us about learning about this history is that all of these things that people were debating and even the language they were using to debate it, 300, 400 years ago are so identical to how we talk about the poor today. Not only are we still talking about the able-bodied and the deserving but we’re still having arguments today about people who are quote “able-bodied” why aren’t they working? Is it their own fault or is it because there are structural obstacles? And today just as was the case 300 years ago, I think we often have a really hard time distinguishing between personal failings and structure obstacles. Even when there are structural obstacles I think people still wind up frequently conflating that with some kind of moral deficiency on the part of people, which is really fundamentally unfair, I think.

VALLAS: One of the things that people will be very familiar with in terms of the kinds of bureaucratic hurdles and tape that have been set up over the years, the more recent years to make it harder for struggling folks to access basic assistance is drug tests. Something that many states have tried and that has been shown time and again to be extremely expensive and not all that effective given that very, very, very few people who end up actually taking the drug test are found to be positive and therefore here we are drug testing all these people under the assumption that we got all of these so-called able bodied folks who are trying to access assistance and are undeserving. I was fascinated to learn that current day, modern day drug tests actually have origins in the 18th century.

BADGER: Yeah, this is one of the particular moments in reporting this where everything came together for me and I realized how much we are having the same conversation today that was happening, 300, 400 years ago. One of the historians who I spoke with, her name is Susannah Ottoway was telling me that, so back in Elizabethan England when we have these local people in the community who are trying to decide who is worthy, who is not, who should we give help to, because they realized this is a very difficult distinction to make, they started to set up these rules. Things like, if anyone in the community has seen you getting drunk in the local alehouse we know that you are not worthy. And the idea -

VALLAS: I have to use your quote from that piece though.

BADGER: Oh yes.

VALLAS: Because it’s such great language, such like classic old English language. Quote, here was the rule, “nobody who tipples in the alehouse will get poor relief.” That was the 18th century drug test, right?

BADGER: Right yeah, exactly and the point that Susannah the historian made to me was if you can’t figure how to distinguish who is worthy from who is not then you set up rules that effectively force the poor to reveal themselves as being worthy or not. So you set up this rule about people who are drunk or today we would set up a rule about drug testing which is basically a hoop that we make the poor go through in order to reveal themselves as being someone who we ought give assistance to. And when Susannah said that to me I immediately thought this is so similar to what you often hear in Washington today where people, when we talk about creating more onerous eligibility criteria and hoops that people have to jump through you hear people say, if they really need it they’ll be willing to go through all of these hoops. If you really need aid, you’re going to be willing to come in to the local bureaucratic office and fill out new paperwork every month or you’re going to be more than happy to take this job training program and as a condition of receiving aid because if you really need it you will do anything to get it. And that’s this exact same idea that you could reveal yourself to be someone who desperately wants this by your willingness to overcome all the obstacles we’re putting between you and the aid.

And that’s a way that we justify making it a pain in the butt to sign up for these programs. And of course it ignores the fact that people may have a difficult time meeting all of those requirements for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their willingness or their desire. Maybe you don’t have a car and it’s not practical for you to get to this meeting every month, maybe your housing situation is really unstable and you don’t receive bureaucratic mailings that are sent to you twice a year reminding you to sign up for things. Or for instance, we looked pretty closely at the requirements that Kentucky is proposing to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients there. They’re talking about things like requiring people to pay at least $1 a month in premiums on healthcare which sounds like yeah of course that’s not really a lot of money but making people go through those hoops just to say that they’re contributing something is really just imposing another requirement on them in the hopes that it will deter a lot of people in the first place.

VALLAS: Now the Medicaid program itself is actually in many ways a historical tracker of the evolution of this kind of thinking and how it underlies policy making and that’s part of what you explore in this piece. Medicaid began in 1965, a little more present day but still a while ago, with as you put it Elizabethan notions in tact but over time has evolved to something that looks very different that’s not about trying to decide who is deserving versus undeserving, setting aside current debates which we’ll come back to in a minute. Tell a little bit of that story of the evolution of Medicaid.

BADGER: So the Medicaid program originally recognized these very familiar classes of people who deserving poor. If you are a pregnant woman, if you are blind, if you are physically disabled, these are classic categories that everyone has agreed going back a long time, these are people who are worthy of help. And over time the Medicaid program has extended help to people beyond those core groups that would be familiar even in Elizabethan times. It’s extended to women who had certain kinds of cervical or breast cancer, it was extended to more parents, it basically became more expansive and more generous over time. And that kind of culminates in the Affordable Care Act when we’re finally saying it doesn’t matter if you’re a parent, if you have dependents, if you have some kind of physical condition that prevents you from working, whatever you are, if you make below a certain income, you qualify. We’re going to get rid of all of these other distinctions about who qualifies and who doesn’t and set an income cut off.

That’s what the Affordable Care Act tried to do with the Medicaid expansion which ultimately a lot of states declined to participate in but that decision that that policy baked into the Affordable Care Act was the culmination of this several decade history of expanding the definition of who is worthy to the point where we said we’re not even going to talk about who is worthy and who is not we’re just going to look at your income. Are you truly poor? And that story, that evolution depending on your point of view sort of marks a kind of progress from this history that we’ve been talking about but what’s so notable about these new work requirements that are coming through Medicaid waivers from the Trump administration is that we’re now moving backwards. We’re rolling back that long-term story of expanding to more and more people. Now we’re saying wait a minute, maybe we expanded to too many people and I think the term able-bodied has particular come into fashion in the last five years or so because it has been used specifically to refer to the Medicaid expansion population.

But conservatives in particular who are concerned about all of the quote able-bodied are saying wait a minute let’s scale it back, let’s go back to trying to make some distinctions between who is able-bodied and who is not. But of course as we were talking about before once you decide to start doing that then you realize that making these distinction is very complicated because oh what if you’re able bodied but you have had an opioid addiction problem, it’s not politically tenable for us to say that people who are suffering from substance abuse, particularly in this time when we’re talking about the opioid epidemic that they should have to go to work in that condition or it’s not tenable for us to say that you have to get a job or do some job training program if you live in a community where the economy is really in the tank, where there are no job opportunities. One of the things that was so interesting to us about this is once you start saying that you want to make these distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving, then you realize wait no we have to carve out an exception for these people and for these people and for these people and that exercise of carving out all these exceptions sort of reveals the underlying folly of trying to make these distinctions in the first place.

VALLAS: And then of course in a lot of ways, I’m struck reflecting on the conversation and the whole story that your piece tells over those 400 years, in a lot of ways able-bodied really deserves to sent back to 1601 where it came from given that in this moment and that’s a lot of what you were just describing but I’ll add to it, it’s not, opioid addiction is a great example and substance misuse and just the very concept of able-bodied sets up a binary that’s all about physical ability and has no contemplation of mental impairments, mental health disabilities, anything else before you even get to structural barriers to work that might be going on with a human being.

BADGER: Right in addition to being anachronistic in many ways, it really grows out of this time when just about anyone who was working was doing some kind of physical work. And that’s just not the case today. In addition to being politically loaded and morally freighted it’s also just a weird term for our era in the 21st century when the labor market is not able physical labor. It is not able the abilities of your body for many people. So, in that way it feels very strange term to use today as well.

VALLAS: So given this history lesson that you’ve really heroically done and I want to thank also your colleague Margot Sanger-Katz, what’s your takeaway in terms of what people who are hearing this and people who are reading your piece should be thinking in this moment where we’re having yet another incredibly serious and very high stakes and very public debate that doesn’t just have to do with Medicaid but as news has broken over the course of the past several day is also going to include housing assistance and also food assistance and potentially almost every type of assistance that people might need to turn to when they fall on hard times/

BADGER: I don’t think, and Margot feels the same way I think, we’re not expecting this term to go away. And I think that a certain group of politicians in particular with continue to use it because it’s a valuable term. Because it allows them to talk about the poor in a way that conveys this very sort of particular idea that we are giving out hard earned taxpayer dollars to people who are freeloading, we need to find a way to stop doing that. It’s a productive term for advancing a particular point of view and for that reason I think people will continue to use it. But the main thing that Margot and I really wanted to get across in writing about this is this term is used so often and admittedly it’s used in news stories by the media that it has come to feel like an actual demographic term, like neutral language to describe certain people who would be recipients of government programs. And what we wanted to do and what we hoped would come out of this is to make more people think about the fact that this is not a neutral term.

This is not a clearly define demographic label the same way adults with dependent children is. And I think that the ultimate success of any kind of political rhetoric is that you hope that it becomes adopted as the norm for how we talk about something and I think that that has been happening with this term. The fact that many people are unaware of this history don’t necessary think about the connotations that come attached to it are a testament to the fact that it has become embedded in how lots of people talk about the poor. And so we just wanted people to, when you hear this phrase, stop and think wait a minute, who are really talking about here? And what are we really trying to communicate about them because for the most part I should add the caveat that in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamps program, there is actually a statutory category of people called able-bodied without dependents —

VALLAS: So called “ab-bods” right, which actually doesn’t even sound like it’s describing humans, it sounds almost robotic.

BADGER: Yes, yes, it sounds like some kind of poor cyborg of something like that. But other than that we really could find no other examples of where there was a clearly defined technical meaning of the term. And so really we just want to point out that this is not neutral language. It doesn’t have a technical definition. It’s being used in a slippery way to imply lots of unspoken things. And so just stop and take pause when you hear it, I think Margot and I are sort of secretly hoping that other journalists will realize that they should not just repeat this language when it comes out of politician’s mouths. I would stick it in quotes if I had to use it in a story. But I think that’s what we’re hoping would come out of this but of course it’s always going to be the case that we’re going to fight about our politics through rhetoric in Washington. That’s not going to change but at the very least let’s all be honest about what’s happening with this term.

VALLAS: Here, here, and obviously part of the same larger conversation around language that implicates word like “welfare” which also have deep histories and are not neutral terms at all but are political and moral terms and in some cases such as with welfare, racist dog whistles. I’m speaking with Emily Badger, she writes about housing, transportation, inequality, cities, lots of things for the New York Times Upshot. Emily, thank you so much for this great piece, for this history lesson. We’ll be linking to this on the syllabus on our show page so everyone can read it and thanks so much for coming back on the show.

BADGER: Yeah. Thanks again this is a great conversation.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.