The War on Medicaid Moves to Michigan

A bill to strip jobless workers of Medicaid passes Michigan’s Republican-controlled Senate, how Wisconsin became ground zero for so-called “welfare reform,” and a conversation with the first Congressional candidate to run on a job guarantee. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter, the Republican war on Medicaid has now made its way to Michigan, in the form of what may be the most heartless “work requirements” proposal yet — which passed Michigan’s Republican-controlled Senate on a party line vote last week. Rebecca talks with two experts at the University of Michigan: Luke Shaefer, the director of poverty solutions and a professor of public policy, and one of the authors of $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, and Marianne Udow-Phillips, a former head of human services for the state of Michigan and currently the director of the Center for Health Care Research and Transformation. Next, Rebecca speaks with Michigan State Senator Curtis Hertel Jr., a Democrat who made waves by introducing an amendment that would make his colleagues in the State Senate jump through the same hoops they want to make struggling Michiganders jump through to keep their healthcare.

Later in the show, with the debate around so-called “work requirements” and other proposals to slash healthcare, food, and housing raging on in Washington and in states across the country, an article in the Washington Post this week took a look at some of the origins of these types of proposals, tracing them back to the state of Wisconsin, which in many ways was ground zero of “welfare reform” long before President Clinton signed it into law in 1996. Rebecca speaks with Robert Samuels about his article, “Wisconsin is the GOP model for ‘welfare reform.’ But as work requirements grow, so does one family’s desperation.”

And finally, in the last few weeks the idea of a federal job guarantee — a policy from the heyday of Dr. King’s Poor People’s campaign — has found its way into the platforms for potential 2020 presidential candidates like Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders. This level of national attention comes as candidates in races across the country are also viewing a job guarantee as a winning political platform. Rebecca talks with the first candidate for Congress to run on a job guarantee: Richard Dien Winfield — a professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens running as a democrat in Georgia’s 10th, a deep red rural district, that Trump carried handily — about why he thinks a platform this unapologetically progressive can deliver a win in Trump country.

No In Case You Missed It this week — sorry! — since our beloved Slevinator is out sick. (Send him well wishes!)

This week’s guests:

• Luke Shaefer, director of poverty solutions and a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
• Marianne Udow-Phillips, director of the Center for Health Care Research and Transformation at the University of Michigan and former head of human services for the state of Michigan
• Michigan State Senator Curtis Hertel Jr. (D)
• Robert Samuels, national political reporter at the Washington Post
• Richard Dien Winfield, Democratic candidate for Congress in Georgia’s 10th Congressional district

For more on this week’s topics:

• Marianne Udow-Phillips and Luke Shaefer break down the dangers of the Medicaid work requirements in their op-ed
• Robert Samuels’ piece in The Washington Post illuminates one family’s struggles under work requirements
• Learn more about Richard Dien Winfield’s congressional campaign and how he plans to turn Georgia blue

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, no ‘In Case You Missed It’ unfortunately, Jeremy is home sick, we’re all deeply sad about it but lots of other stuff to get through. The Republican war on Medicaid makes it’s way to Michigan in the form of what may be the most heartless so called ‘work requirements’ proposal yet. That bill passed the state senate on a party line vote last week. I talk with two experts at the University of Michigan and one of the Michigan state senators, a Democrat who vehemently opposed the bill. Next, an article in The Washington Post made waves this week, taking a look at some of the origins of work requirements and other proposals to slash vital programs, tracing them back to the state of Wiscosin which in many ways was ground zero of quote unquote, ‘welfare reform.’ I speak with Robert Samuels the reporter on that piece about the article. And finally with the idea of a jobs guarantee gaining all kinds of traction among progressive candidates for public office, I talk with the first candidate for congress to run on a jobs guarantee. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week the Republican war on Medicaid continuing, this time making its way to Michigan where the state senate passed one of the most extreme so-called work requirements proposals yet. The Michigan bill would take Medicaid away from workers unable to document at least 29 hours of work per week and the states own estimates say as many as 1 million Michiganders could lose their health care if the bill becomes law. This week for Off Kilter, I spoke to a few different people in Michigan about the bill and where it goes from here. First up, I’m joined by two professors at the University of Michigan, Luke Shaefer, the director of poverty solutions and a professor of public policy, he’s also one of the authors of “$2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America”. And Marianne Udow-Phillips, she’s a former head of human services for the state of Michigan and is currenly the director of the Center for Health Care Research and Transformation at the University of Michigan. Thanks to you both for joining the show.

LUKE SHAEFER: Thanks for having us.

MARIANNE UDOW-PHILLIPS: Yep, glad to be here.

VALLAS: So Luke first over to you just to give everyone a starting point of what this bill would do, tell me about the bill that was rammed through the Michigan state senate last week.

SHAEFER: I’m actually going to pass that question to Marianne because I think she has more details on the specifics than I do.

VALLAS: Totally fair, you can call a friend or whatever the lifeline used to be called, phone a friend. Marianne, over to you instead.

UDOW-PHILLIPS: So the Michigan state senate passed a bill last week that would require many Medicaid recipients not just those in the expansion population but many others to work a minimum of 29 hours per week in order to be eligible for Medicaid benefits. They would not be able to be provided with any work supports or child care or transportation and limited numbers of people would be exempt from that work requirements so it’s a much more sweeping requirement than many other states have passed and it proposed to the federal government the 29 hours a week in particular is a very high standard for people to meet.

VALLAS: And staying with you for a minute Marianne, who are the people that as this bill is written you are worried would be hurt?

UDOW-PHILLIPS: So there are about 2.3 million people in Michigan who are covered by the Medicaid program, many of them of course are already working but many of them are not working the 29 hours a week, so they might be working in part time jobs which is usually defined as 20% of the population. So we don’t know exact who is going to be effected, it could be as many as 1 million people effected by this piece of legislation.

VALLAS: And Luke over to you, a lot of your scholarship and research over the years has been not just about current policy debates but actually looking back to the legacy of so-called ‘welfare reform’ which became the law of the land in the mid 90s and what the fallout has been in the years since. Proponents of these kinds of policies not just in Michigan but nationwide and also at the federal level in congress, often point to the program that was created in the 1990s, TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as listeners will know because we talk about it on this show all the time. As a model for other programs, that’s certainly part of what’s happening here and the rhetoric around these kinds of proposals in Medicaid but you’ve looking at what the fallout has been. Tell us a little bit about the story that doesn’t get told by those proponents.

SHAEFER: Yeah, I think the key lesson with TANF is to be aware of unintended consequences. If the full purpose of implementing work requirements or time limits or any other arduous barriers to participation to reduce the rolls, reduce the caseloads then the 1996 welfare reform was very successful. But there’s lots of evidence now that it hurt families at the very bottom. Nationally, out of every 100 poor families the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that on 23 receive cash assistance, that’s a dramatic drop from where we were. And in our work, Kathy Eden and I have found that extreme poverty doubled and related to that the number of families on food assistance reporting that they have no cash income when they recertify under penalty of law actually quadrupeled to about 1.3 million in 2016.

I think the most important part of, the part that really stays with me over the long term from my book “$2 a Day” was getting to know families who were experiencing extreme poverty around the country and what they had to do to survive. I knew nothing about the blood plasma industry which is one of the ways that families get a little bit of cash when they need it. I didn’t know about the mechanics of selling your food stamps or SNAP and what that looks like. It’s a felony but a lot of parents will make the tradeoff in order to keep their kids in decent clothes or keep toilet paper in the bathroom. And I think now at this point we’re to the level where there’s just so much evidence that families were hurt at the bottom and so much evidence that what we did with TANF did not work out the way that we intended it to. So Ron Haskins one of the early champions of welfare work requirements now says that the program’s two central aims to quote, “provide income support to poor families [INAUDIBLE] struggle and help people achieve self sufficiency”, TANF is quote, “now seems not to be achieving either goal.” And he recommends careful study for new work requirements, which is not what we’re doing with this bill. And Peter Germanis, a former Reagan White House staffer who has written a number of papers including one called “TANF is broken” –

VALLAS: And some people may be familiar with him as “Peter the Citizen”

SHAEFER: Peter the citizen exactly has written about while the work requirements may send an important symbolic message the ones that were established under TANF were quote, “unreasonable, dysfunctional and not about work.” So there’s just no question that I think this model, the one that we hold up is the piece of evidence that work requirements can work is not what we think it is.

VALLAS: And now back over to you Marianne, there’s actually a lot of research that’s in Michigan not even just nationwide and even building on some of the statistics that Luke was just sharing about what really happened in the years following the huge hole we blew in the nation’s safety net that we called TANF in 1996, there’s a tremendous amount of research actually in Michigan telling us that taking away health care from people who can’t find work or get enough hours at their job isn’t the way that we should be going if our goals are so called ‘self-sufficiency’.

UDOW-PHILLIPS: Yes, that’s absolutely true. First of all, we have some data from our colleagues at the Institute of Health Policy and Innovation that more than half of all who are in the Medicaid expansion population are already working or they’re students, that about a quarter are out of work because in large part their health was fair or poor, because they had physical impairment or because they had mental impairment. And ironically one of the architects of this particular bill to require work first was also one of the sponsors of the Medicaid expansion in Michigan and it is because he believes that work is fundamental and that the Medicaid expansion would help people to get work and we’ve actually found that indeed the Medicaid expansion did help people in Michigan get work and is helping to keep them on the job. So I argue that Medicaid is really a work support, that to have your health to have insurance enables you to get work and you need that first before you can get a job.

VALLAS: And actually taking it away as you both argue in an op-ed that you wrote entitled “Beware of Unintended Consequence of Michigan Medicaid Work Demands” it actually may end up backfiring if the goals as the proponents of this bill really are about making sure that more people are working.

SHAEFER: Yeah.

UDOW-PHILLIPS: Absolutely right.

SHAEFER: I think one of the key pieces for me that was immediately obvious is how expensive it is to implement work requirements. The tax that it can levy on caseworkers, we’re asking caseworkers and bureaucracies that are already over stretched to do a lot. To take care of the reporting of hours, to ideally you would have some supportive services but in this case federal Medicaid funds can’t be used for things like childcare, transportation or training and so one of the rational responses to too many requirements, to much adding of red tape for caseworkers is that things get lost, people maybe don’t know how to respond to the forms and you lose a lot of people who might otherwise be on the case load just through these big costs. So we’re asking people to, we’re asking states to take on a large cost which we think would be better spent providing the healthcare services that can help keep them in the labor market.

UDOW-PHILLIPS: Absolutely right, in fact the senate fiscal agency which has in Michigan which hasn’t done a great job of really estimating the impact of this particular bill because there’s so many unknowns here but they did estimate that just to administer the work requirement itself would increase state costs by $20 to 30 million per year and that is probably a significant underestimate of all of the administrative things that would have to be put in place to make this requirement work according to the legislation.

VALLAS: Now we’ve talked a lot about what the proponents are claiming in terms of why they are advancing these types of proposals and this bill in particular. There’s one quote I actually want to pull out which was from the chief sponsor of the bill that passed the Michigan senate and the quote is as follows, “The best safety net every created by God is family. I’m not sure that government is supposed to supplement that process.” You heard that kind of a quote, part of me cringes deeply, another part of me goes are you kidding, why did this person really say this out loud, it’s like saying the quiet part out loud. What’s going on there?

UDOW-PHILLIPS: Well I can tell you a companion quote about that and a companion story, which I think really illustrates how difficult it is sometimes for people, policymakers who might not have direct experiences with individuals or families in poverty. Why they struggle to understand how things actually work. I was debating a legislator when I was running the Department of Human Services who also wanted to put a very hard time limit on TANF, on the number of years people could get cash assistance, as small those benefits are. And two-thirds of those on TANF are children and we were talking about the fact that we were projecting that food insecurity would increase and more people would be hungry in our state if those time limits were enforced at a much more stringent level. And his response was well, hunger is the first rung on the ladder of success. Now, I don’t know a hungry child who can learn, I don’t know a family in poverty who can have the kind of family support that people are used to if they grow up in middle class families but that is a concept that I think is difficult for many legislator who haven’t been in those environments to understand.

VALLAS: It also just defies common sense. You even think about the idea that somehow taking food or housing or healthcare away from someone is going to do anything to help them find work or thrive. It don’t quite compute. In the last couple of minutes that I have with you guys, there has been a lot of speculation about where this bill goes from here. It passed the senate, of course now all eyes are on Michigan’s house and in the interim there’s been a little bit of noise coming out of the Republican government Rick Snyder that he actually is not a huge fan of the bill that passed the senate, saying that it doesn’t seem to be reasonable, he really hopes that whatever ultimately is arrived at is not quite this. But it also sounds like he seems to be paving the way for something that might get packaged and marketed as some kind of compromise because it’s just not quite as extreme as the senate bill that just passed. Am I off in reading it that way?

UDOW-PHILLIPS: No, you’re not off in reading it that way. The governor is opposed to this particular piece of legislation and in fact Nick Lyon who is the director of the Department of Health and Human Services came out with a very strong statement publically of concern and actually encouraging the advocates to oppose this legislation. But tha tis not to say that the governor is absolutely opposed to any work requirement. This bill now goes to the house and we’ll see what the House will come up with. We don’t know the exact timeline that the House is going to use to talk about this bill. But it is likely that they will come up with something that is somewhat different from the Senate. Certainly that 29 hour work requirement piece has gotten a lot of attention. It could go down to 20 but they are likely to pass something that has a work requirement in it and then it’s not clear the governor would veto something else.

VALLAS: You’ve been hearing Marianne Udow-Phillips, she’s a former head of human services for the state of Michigan. She’s currently the director of the Center for Health Care Research and Transformation at the University of Michigan. And Luke Shaefer is the director of poverty solutions and a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. Thanks to you both for taking the time and my hope is that folks are going to be able to help shine a national spotlight on a truly egregious and terrifying piece of legislation that I hope never becomes law. Thanks to you both and I hope to have you back on the show sometime soon.

SHAEFER: Thank you.

UDOW-PHILLIPS: Thank you.

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

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Next up is Michigan state senator Curtis Hertel Jr., he’s a Democrat in the state Senate who made waves by introducing an amendment that would make his colleagues in the senate jump through the same hoops they want to make struggling Michiganders to jump through to keep their health care. Surprise, surprise, the Republican held chamber didn’t go for it. Senator Hertel, thanks so much for joining the show.

SENATOR CURTIS HERTEL JR: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So first off, you opposed the bill, would love to hear your reaction the proposal and why you voted no.

HERTEL: Well, I oppose work requirements period because I believe that health care is a right and I believe that it costs us more money to not cover people so it’s actually morally wrong and fiscally wrong. But this is the most draconian work requirements in place anywhere in the country, the idea that you have to work 29 hours a week so if you’re at a job, waiter, waitress, you’re out there working everyday, you work 10 hours for three weeks, you get sent home early the fourth week you lose your health care. If you’re a seasonal employee in the UP, we have the Upper Peninsula where the winters are pretty tough so there’s a lot more jobs in the summer than in the winter. So you’re a fisherman, you work 60 hours a week most of the year at the end of that period you’ll get employed over the summer, over the winter and then you lose your health care, it’s that idea, there’s no protection for you if unemployment jumps a huge amount in your county. There’s no protection for you if you did everything you could to try to find work but you just didn’t accomplish it that one month.

The cost of that, sending somebody on and off the system over and over again, so the bill is frankly poorly written, I think morally wrong and fiscally irresponsible so in general it’s just really bad policy. So while I oppose work requirements period this was probably the worst example of them.

VALLAS: Now one of the things that got a lot of attention around the passage on a party line vote of this extreme bill was one particular quote from the prime sponsor of the legislator and I mentioned it in the previous portion of this segment, I’ll say it again because it is so horrifying it bears repeating, “The best safety net every created by God is family. I’m not sure that government is supposed to supplement that process.” Tell a little bit of the story of what the context was in which he said that quote and shared that sentiment.

HERTEL: There was a woman who drove all the way to Lansing and did live here and wanted to talk about what Medicaid had done for her. And what it had done for her was the ability to take care of her grandkids. So she had grandchildren and wanted to help the family by taking care of them. She was providing a service, she was obviously allowing the parents to work and raising some very young children. And that was the context of that quote. And I think one of the problems I think with the legislature is that we don’t live real lives. We have people telling us how great we all are all the time, calling a senator, saying nice things about us and we start believing that we’re better than other people but we’re not. And we have somebody who comes to you and really says this is what this program has done for me and working would actually hurt my family and actually probably do less for the economy because just taking care of two young children. I think that respond is just not close to, well it’s certainly not empathetic but it’s flat out wrong. And for me, I think that, I’m a Catholic so [INAUDIBLE] my Christian views but I’m a Catholic, I think God calls us to try to help people even in public service. And I don’t really understand where you would think that the answer was to cut people away from healthcare.

VALLAS: As I mentioned up top, you got some attention for offering an amendment that would bring some equity to the table. That it wouldn’t just be people who are on Medicaid who would need to jump through new hoops to keep their health care but you wanted to see if your Republican colleagues would go for the idea of maybe having to jump through the same hoops themselves.

HERTEL: I think what’s good for the goose is good for the gander here. If we’re going to make people work 20 hours a week and document it and all those things and go through random audits, shouldn’t the legislature have to do the same thing? And when we go on break, whether it be summer break or election break or when we go to fancy conferences or whatever else we’re doing should we be getting government health care? I mean if we’re going to put these rules on the working poor when why shouldn’t we put it on ourselves? And I think that’s where the problem is. My biggest issue with all of this is I feel like Republicans in general feel like the working poor are just lazy people. And that’s not true, 60% of people on Medicaid expansion work. They are out there working, the problem is the economy doesn’t work for them. And for some reason poor people have become a giant social engineering program for Republicans. They think we’re spending too much on SNAP, they’re buying skittles and lobster. We think that they are in Michigan, we took their actual right of self governance away through emergency manager laws. We’ve drug tested them, now this, we even have proposals that say they can only buy their clothes from a thrift store. If we just embarrass people enough they’ll decide to stop being poor. I don’t think poor people want to be poor. You want to invest in people, you want to invest in job training, invest in childcare, invest in education programs. We can do things to try to encourage people not to be poor, but the idea that you can just shame them into being, if you just shame them enough that they’ll be more responsible people, that’s ridiculous. It has nothing to do with that. Most people are in situations that most of us couldn’t hardly imagine and frankly a lot of the people on Medicaid are working a lot harder than legislators who are in Lansing three days a week. So that was why I put that amendment in. I wanted to show the hypocrisy of my colleagues on this.

VALLAS: Will this bill, or do you think that some version of this proposals can pass the more moderate house in Michigan and what message do you have for your colleagues in that chamber?

HERTEL: Well first of all, I think the House might be more conservative. I think it will pass the House. The only good news we have is that we have a governor who has said that this bill in particular he wouldn’t sign. But that doesn’t mean they won’t make amendments and get to a bill that he can sign. The best thing this government ever did, as a Republican governor and a purple state was Medicaid expansion. It’s his biggest legacy and he’s a lame duck governor I hope that will slightly protect him. But what I can tell, they did some polling on this; they’re in trouble in this next election cycle. And that’s what they’re worried about. They think that shafting poor people will make them more popular with their base and that will help gin them up and get them out to vote. When I would ask for everybody to do is slow down a little bit and find out what’s actually right and this policy may sound good on a quick soundb ite. I mean the idea that people should have to work for something, I’m sure it sounds good. But the reality is most people are working and the idea that you’re going to punish somebody because they only get 28 hours one week, you’re going to punish somebody because they get sick. So imagine that, so you’re waitress and you work three 30 hour weeks for the last week you get sick, you get the flu. You don’t go into work, you lose your healthcare. That’s just dumb stupid policy which makes us less healthy as a state. So it’s so ungodly immoral that I don’t know how anyone could support it, I certainly don’t know how anyone could use God’s name to support it. So I’m going to stick with fighting against it and hopefully we can change some minds and hearts here.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Michigan state Senator Curtis Hertel Jr., he is a Democrat who has strongly opposed this legislation. Hopefully his words of caution are heard by his colleagues in Michigan’s House, which now is set to take up the legislation in some form. Senator thank you so much for your strong words and taking the time to join the show.

HERTEL: Thank you, we’ll keep fighting.

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

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. With the debate around so-called ‘work requirements’ and other proposals to take health care, food and housing away from struggling workers continuing to rage on in Washington and in states across the country an article in The Washington Post takes a look at some of the origins of these types of proposals, tracing them all the way back to the state of Wisconsin which in many ways was ground zero of quote, unquote ‘welfare reform’ long before President Clinton signed it into law in 1996. I’m pleased to speak with Robert Samuels whose article is titled “Wisconsin is the GOP Model for Welfare Reform but as Work Requirements Grow, so does One Family’s Desperation”; Robert is a national political writer with The Washignton Post who covers how policies in Washington effect the lives of everyday Americans. Robert thanks so much for joining the show.

ROBERT SAMUELS: It’s a pleasure being here, thank you.

VALLAS: So your recent piece is getting a lot of attention, the title is “Wisconsin is the GOP Model for Welfare Reform but as Work Requirements Grow, so does One Family’s Desperation”. I’d love to start by just asking you what got you interested in reporting this story?

SAMUELS: Coming into 2018, I noticed that lots of Republicans on the hill were talking about after tax reform, the next thing they wanted to tackle was the social safety net. And it became very clear when you started looking across the fifty states that there was a movement going on in lots of places in terms of refining and restricting, well the package that we now call welfare, things like food stamps, Medicaid, public housing. And so I really wanted to know what it must be like to be on one of those programs or need one of those programs and live in a state where it’s becoming harder and harder.

VALLAS: And it’s becoming harder and harder in Wisconsin in particular where your story is set because of very specific bills that haven’t gotten a ton of national attention that in a lot of ways look like the proposals we’re now seeing move through Congress, being advanced by Republicans in particular. And the story goes back to 2013. Tell a little bit of the story in terms of what Wisconsin’s been up to when it comes to cutting programs that help families make ends meet.

SAMUELS: Absolutely, during that time this story sort of flew a little under the radar because everyone was so focused on what Governor Scott Walker was doing with public sector unions. But along with that, he put a time restriction that limited that amount of time a person can receive food stamps if they weren’t working. If you’re able bodied and have no children, Scott Walker pushed legislation that would limit your time on food stamps to three months and after those three months you had to show some sort of work related activity which means you had to have a job for at least 20 hours a week or go to a training program to show that you wanted a job.

VALLAS: And that’s a policy that has been in the law that authorizes the food stamp program, now called SNAP for a long time but a lot of states had actually gotten waivers from that because of the recession and high unemployment so this was him putting that back into place and in a pretty harsh way but that’s not the only piece of legislation that he’s moved.

SAMUELS: No, that’s not. And Scott Walker was at the forefront about restricting or reversing the rest of those waivers that you saw that were so popular during the Obama administration. This February Scott Walker gave a state of the state address and said that he wanted to call a special session about welfare reform. And in that he proposed ten new restriction that would limit or reform the social safety net as we know it. That work requirement for able bodied single adults that I spoke about earlier was brought into families, the number of hours that a person had to work was raised from 20 to 30, all of a sudden if you owe child support you’re no longer eligible for Medicaid, there was drug testing for public housing. There had already been a move to get drug testing for food stamps. And in the case of one of the characters in our story what really struck them was an asset limitation that said if you have a car that’s worth more than $20,000 you could no longer be eligible to apply for food stamps.

VALLAS: Which of course is lots of folks who have just a little bit of money in the bank or maybe even a really cheap car but it would mean having to drain their savings or get rid of that vehicle that helps them get to work, also that they can be eligible for basic food. So this was a package of nine so-called welfare reform bills that ultimately passed through Wisconsin’s legislature and of course Scott Walker’s direct quote about why he’s doing all of this, “for those who are able, public assistance should be a trampoline not a hammock.” We’ve heard that before. But this isn’t the first time that Wisconsin has led the way in terms of finding new ways to take away basics from people who are struggling to make ends meet that other policy makers end up seeing and wanting to take and make their own. The story actually goes back to the 1990s as your piece tells.

SAMUELS: Right, actually in the history of the idea of welfare reform it starts in Wisconsin. A governor named Tommy Thompson was the first person who talked about time limiting, sorry Governor Tommy Thompson was the first person who talked about time limiting what was then called welfare which we now call cash assistance or TANF. A president named Bill Clinton saw this idea and he thought it was great and modeled it for the federal welfare reform that was taken and propped up by Republicans and Democrats in the congress at the time.

VALLAS: And Wisconsin in a lot of ways isn’t just ground zero of what became quote, unquote ‘welfare reform’ because of specific policies that the governor was championing. There were other people involved who became architects of this movement. One of whom was the secretary of welfare at the time in the state.

SAMUELS: That’s right.

VALLAS: So take us to present day. What do we know about what happened after these policies were put into place? Republicans often look to them and they say this is the way to get people to work, they wrap everything up in puppies and rainbows language about promoting work and helping families get the kick in the butt that they maybe need, that’s the language we often hear. But what do we know about what actually happened after we saw these policies go into effect?

SAMUELS: Well in 1996 on the national level what we saw was, there was a lot of interest in how this would work. The federal government commissioned a study a five year look at a bunch of welfare programs in which they had a group that was subjected to these new requirements and a control group and what they found was initially very encouraging during the first two years of that evaluation. They saw families who were subjected to work requirements they got jobs faster. And their incomes were rising faster and it looked like a success. But toward the fifth year something really unusual started to happen in their mind. Those gains were lost and families who were in that control group who were not subjected to work requirements, their employment numbers were about the same, their income numbers were actually a little bit higher, not statistically so but a little bit higher and it appeared in that long term it did not make that much of a difference and it highlighted the idea that the bigger problem might be jobs and the fact that people were living in a community were there was not access to good paying consistent jobs that were year round and not seasonal.

In Wisconsin, what we saw was super interesting. For most people who believe in these welfare requirements it’s charted as a success because they will tell you, and the numbers show this, that 25,000 people found work after they were sanctioned because they went through the training program that the state of Wisconsin had encouraged them to go to. What the state doesn’t really talk about as much is the fact that 86,000 people who are on food stamps they did not report getting a new job when they were sanctioned and no one knows what happened to them and the state’s not looking. They presume with no evidence that some of those people found a new job. The opponents and the hunger advocates would say that’s very wishful thinking.

VALLAS: So you end up having all this focus on this 25,000 number, which sounds really great without any context of course that’s out of a statewide total of 700,000 people that we’re talking about here. So folks can do the math as to what kind of a percentage that is but you’ve got way more, more than 3 times the number of people who ended up actually finding work at whatever point in time this was getting measured who aren’t necessarily better off who the state isn’t aware has found work and who are now just hungrier.

SAMUELS: Yeah, the 25,000 to 700,000 ratio isn’t too fair because not all those people were subject to the requirements. These are single, [able] bodied adults. The 700,000 number includes families and includes people who are disable. So it’s not truly apples to apples but the 25,000 to 86,000 is fairly comparable because there are people in the same bucket. And the 86,000, what really struck me about that number was there wasn’t much interest from the state level to figure out what the issue was with these people and why they couldn’t find jobs. For those who are in the business of feeding people, that’s a strange way of putting it but people who run food pantries, people in churches and homeless shelters who feel a moral obligation to feed the hungry and feed the sick, they’re wondering gee, are we going to be able to feed all these people? The number of folks who need the help in some cases have quintupled since those work requirements were initiated in 2013.

VALLAS: Now you spoke with families for this story, Wisconsin folks who had been impacted by the policies put into place recently. So we’re not talking about back in the 1990s but closer to present day, some of the policies that Scott Walker has put into place. Tell the story of some of those families.

SAMUELS: Well, most of them, the broad section of them didn’t fully know what to do. In the story that we wrote in the Post we highlighted on a family James Howlett and his longtime partner Nadine, they had two kids. And James drove a lyft and Nadine had a job cleaning hospitals. Nadine actually ended up losing her job and it happened around the same time as James’ car broke down. And they were doing super well, they were getting less and less government assistance and now they’re actually in a situation where they needed more government assistance. Getting back on to one of these programs ended up being super hard for them. The qualifications had become so different for each of these things that are in the bundle that we call the social safety net and some of them, they qualified for and some of them they did not. Some of them they could qualify for if they had qualified for another program which they weren’t qualified for. So they were caught in this catch-22 and I’m there with James as he’s dropping off his kids off at school to once again to go fight with the welfare office to see if they can give them cash assistance or a public assistance loan and James looks at his car, a Ford Fusion that has broken shock absorbers and he says jeez, they just passed this asset limitation. Does this mean that I can’t afford this car anymore? What does this mean?

His confusion was I think very telling because he’s not very sure, no one’s really sure how the state is going to enact this law but I thought it was really illustrative of the plight of the poor in Wisconsin. That not only are there laws that would make it harder for them to get on public assistance, if they were put off because of their own fortune and because of their own quest of economic mobility but there was a larger perception that no one in the state wanted to help them, that they were deemed as problems or frauds or cheaters and that understanding, it depletes your well. I’ll tell you that after the story ran I called James to see how he was doing because so many people had called because they wanted to help him and he felt his only solution was to leave Wisconsin, that everything had become so punitive and anti-poverty that he felt he had a better chance in another state. So when he he got his car fixed his packed up his kids and the little they had left and they moved.

VALLAS: And another piece in that story that ends up in your article is you’ve mentioned that they applied for an emergency loan from the state but they ended up being disqualified because of some of the complex rules you were describing. They ended up actually getting evicted.

SAMUELS: Yeah, so they had worked and Nadine’s job was going well, James was doing super well driving his ride share and they had worked themselves off TANF, off public cash assistance. And when they lost the job, when they both lost their jobs Nadine formally, James informally because he couldn’t drive a broken car. They applied for an emergency loan and they learned that in Wisconsin they could not get an emergency loan if they did not have public assistance even though they were eligible for food stamps and they were deemed poor by most standards of Wisconsin. And because of that, because they couldn’t get the loan, they couldn’t pay the rent and they ended up homeless and because there are so many homeless families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin they couldn’t stay in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They had to go to the suburbs and stay there where churches had a network of homeless shelters and if they’re in the suburbs of Milwaukee, that really depleted Nadine’s access to a job cleaning hospitals. There are fewer hospitals, they were farther away and they had no way to get there if the car wasn’t working.

VALLAS: And that also gets to another one of the talking points that you hear from Scott Walker, that you often hear from other Republicans, I’ll use Walker’s language here, he said, “We have a lot of jobs coming to Wisconsin and we need people to do the work” which he says makes this the perfect time to be cutting these programs because there are all the jobs out there why aren’t people just taking them? That’s the implication. But your reporting actually looks at where the jobs are being created and it’s not necessarily a great match for where everyone in the state is.

SAMUELS: Right so there are lots of jobs coming to Wisconsin. And many of them are the jobs that are really prized in the American ethos, welding jobs, stuff in manufacturing, factory jobs. The trouble is that the tax incentives that are available in Wisconsin really encourage those companies to build factories in the suburbs and to build their factories in the suburbs around the I-94 corridor. And the problem is if you’re living in inner city Milwaukee those places are really hard to get to if you don’t drive or you don’t have a car and so for a lot of people within the inner city they’re looking at these jobs pop up and they have no full way to get to them so it seems a little false to them that there are lots of jobs because within their community they don’t see that many. What they see are service jobs, stuff at restaurants, stuff at fast food places, stuff at your general retail store that don’t pay as well and their hours are intermittent. Interestingly enough, this wasn’t in the story but a number of churches had tried to find ways to ferry people from the inner city to these jobs. Those types of programs are limited in scope and scale obviously but also for a mother that’s really hard. If your closest good paying job is two hours away and you’re a single mom that means you probably have four hours of child care every day that you need for your kid to make sure they’re safe and that’s a really hard thing to find and a really hard thing to pay for.

VALLAS: In the last minute or so that we have, what do you hope that policymakers both at the federal level and potentially in other states besides Wisconsin take away from your reporting and from the story of Nadine and James?

SAMUELS: Most of all the idea, the plight of the poor is very complicated in the story and it’s very nuanced. And with every solution that’s being offered it will effect people in different ways and it’s worth exploring how those policies effect people in different ways and not to rely on the prototypical language on either side about why poor people stay poor.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Robert Samuels, he’s a reporter at The Washington Post whose recent story is “GOP Model for Welfare Reform but as Work Requirements Grow, so does One Family’s Desperation”, you can find it on our nerdy syllabus page on Medium. Robert thank you so much for your reporting and for taking the time to come on the show.

SAMUELS: No problem, thank you Rebecca.

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

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. A policy from the heyday of Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign is gaining momentum among progressive candidates as midterms approach in November. And that’s a federal job guarantee. The first candidate for congress to run on a job guarantee is Richard Dien Winfield. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens and he is running as a Democrat in Georgia’s 10th district, that’s a deep red rural district that Trump carried handily. I’m thrilled to have him on the show to see why he thinks a platform this unapologetically progressive might deliver a win in Trump country. Richard, thanks so much for joining the show.

RICHARD DIEN WINFIELD: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: To give folks a sense of who you are, you’re a philosophy professor from Queens with no Georgia roots, why did you decide to run for Congress and in deep red Georgia at that?

WINFIELD: Well after living here for 35 years teaching philosophy at University of Georgia I felt that after the election of Trump that now was the time to take advantage of a race for congress in a very deep red district to try to change the political agenda in our nation and to have us focus on our social rights that the constitution has never specifically recognized and enforced and these revolve around the right to a livelihood that’s decent enough to support oneself and one’s family, the right to decent housing, the right to education at all levels, the right to healthcare. The right, basically, to own the resources we need to exercise our freedoms, our household freedoms, our social freedoms and our political freedoms. And I felt this is an excellent time to do so because in a sense our failure to address these rights has put our entire democracy in jeopardy and we see that with the rise of a regime that is a sense moving in a very autocratic direction. It’s allowing someone to come to power who is using his office in many respects to enrich himself and his family to empower the rich and I have to say that his ability to come to power reflects the failure of not just the Republican but also the Democratic party to provide the real solutions to our deepening social inequalities in general and of course to overcoming the racial and gender inequalities that have hardly been removed despite all the victories of the civil rights movement.

VALLAS: Now Georgia’s 10th as I mentioned is a deep red rural district. In fact it’s actually one in which Republican candidates have typically run unopposed. Democrats in the past haven’t even tried. What makes you think that this is a district where the kind of platform you’re describing could actually be successful?

WINFIELD: To win in this district, it is not enough to get out a strong Democratic turnout. One needs to win at least a third of the independents and Republicans who supported Donald Trump. And I think we have to recognize that a good part of Donald Trump’s appeal was that he highlighted the economic anxiety of much of the white population and offered as a solution not just scapegoating immigrants and minorities but also claiming that he could bring back jobs to America. That he could resuscitate our manufacturing sector. So I think if we offer the real solutions, the real solutions to joblessness, to low wages, to underemployment, to difficulties meeting the costs of housing, our healthcare crisis, the problems with our educational system, that if we can really provide the solutions to all of these difficulties it’s possible to win over a large enough minority of former Trump supporters to have a path to victory and that’s what I intend to do. I find for my own experience in this primary campaign when I am addressing voters who might have voted for Trump and these I am encountering in union halls where I’ve been speaking. I’m a member of the Communication Workers of America. I’m part of an effort to try to unionize all the employees of the University of Georgia. When I’ve spoken to such groups both black and white are showing their enthusiasm for the idea of guaranteed jobs, fair wages and employee empowerment. And I have to say that these are three fundamental issues that establishment Democrats have neglected and I think the labor movement is suspicious of the Democratic party precisely because it has failed to deliver in these areas.

VALLAS: I mentioned that the idea of a job guarantee is far from new. It has some of its roots in Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. It has cropped up over the years in various parts of American history when it has been appropriate for the American government to be effectively the employer of last resort because of economic downturns and so forth. But it has never been a policy that we’ve had in place in a lasting way. How do you think that a job guarantee could work today and what are you calling for specifically?

WINFIELD: I think we can take as a model the huge effort that was undertaken during the Great Depression with the establishment of the WPA the CCC, the federal writer’s project, the federal arts projects and all of these other mobilizations where the government directly employed people of all backgrounds and skills in providing both products and services that our community needs. And whereas in the past this has involved electrification, setting up clean energy hydroelectric projects, refurbishing public facilities, having hundreds of thousands of public concerts and performances. Today we can think of similar but somewhat different needs that can be addressed by putting people to work. We do have to fix our ailing infrastructure; we have to build a new clean infrastructure to overcome climate warming. We have to build public transport, mass transport, especially in rural areas such as the 10th district. People are stranded if they’re not able to drive or don’t have a car.

We need to provide human services on a mass scale. We need to have childcare and elder care available to people. We need to help our schools succeed by adding staff and facilities and we need to bring the arts and culture to every place, to every nook and cranny because there is a kind of wasteland where people have access to virtually nothing. There’s no public support for the arts. So we can take advantage of a jobs program, which guarantees the right to employment to all who are willing to work and use this as a way of putting resources to work that really would pay for themselves. Because when you consider how much will be provided by putting those who can’t find work or enough full time work to doing things that would serve our community. Not only can we [add] from the costs of this mobilization the value of the physical and human services, but we can subtract the cost of unemployment insurance, the cost of food stamps, the cost of all the welfare assistance that people would no longer need. We can also subtract all the cost of much of our mass incarceration, which costs at least $30,000 per year per inmate. We can subtract the cost of much of our opioid epidemic because we would be relieving the kind of economic despair that’s driving people to extreme behavior.

So in many respects we’ll also be doing what is good for business, large and small. We’ll have maximum consumer demand because everyone will have income in their pockets and by the way we should understand a federal jobs guarantee also should insure that those who are truly disabled and those who can no longer work are given a replacement income equal to a fair minimum wage. And when I say a fair minimum wage I do not mean a merely living wage, which is another recipe for a level of poverty and a recipe for increasing economic inequality. We need instead to give everyone a share in our national prosperity and to do that we have to tie wages to productivity gains. If we do that, and we do the math we discover that the minimum wage adjusted not just for inflation but productivity gains come to $22 per hour. So let’s at least start at $20 per hour, $41,600 per year for a 40-hour week. We raise the floor. We eliminate poverty wages. We eliminate unemployment. Then we can also think about balancing the relation between employer and employee because employees are more disempowered than ever. Especially with the advance of globalization and the gig economy, unionization is at al all time low.

We need to counter this with two bold measures. One is to do something that’s been done in the countries in Europe that have the strongest manufacturing sector, namely have worker co-determination, or what in Germany is called ‘Mitbestimmung’, namely they insure that the boards of directors of corporations reserve half their members to non managerial employees elected by their peers, that will fundamental change how business operates. Now the fateful decisions on outsourcing, on automation, on executive pay, on how firms will deal with the environment will now have input from employees. And we also have to have mandatory collective bargaining in all workplaces with multiple employees. That will also eliminate the situation that most workers have in the 10th district of being in a situation where their employers can basically tell them take it or leave it and fire them at will.

So I think we have to remedy the situation and have a fair balance between employer and employee. And these three measures, guaranteed jobs, a fair minimum wage tied to productivity gains and employee empowerment are going to fundamental transform our nation and put us in a position to deal with balancing work and family, fixing our medical system, having affordable housing and deal with public education and being equal before the law and I have very bold proposals to make on all of these issues that I’d be happy to discuss.

VALLAS: Athens is probably best known for being home to the University of Georgia and the Bulldogs associated with that school. It’s maybe less well-known as the poorest college town in America. How is your platform being received in the district and in particular, how is it being received by conservatives, many of whom are not looking for what they’re going to view as big government?

WINFIELD: Well I think, first of all I’m engaged in a primary campaign where the voters I’m dealing with and the events I’m going to are primarily directed at potential Democratic voters. And in my district as in much of the south the Democratic Party is overwhelmingly African-American. And that audience is extremely receptive to the strong economic message I’m putting forward. I think conservatives can also find much to agree with because I’m really concerned with you could say the standard traditional American dream of having people be in a nation where they can succeed through hard work and be independent because what I’m talking about is giving everyone a chance to work and provide for themselves and their family and shall we say to get ahead. Not to be dependent, not to be getting handouts, not to be living on the dole. And that’s what a guaranteed job program does. It’s not a matter of socialism; it’s a matter of redeeming capitalism, of remaking capitalism with a human face.

In a sense, saving the souls of entrepreneurs because if we as a nation require all entrepreneurs to pay fair wages, to respect the environment, to give a proper amount to employee empowerment, to balance family and work so that we have paid family leave. Then they can do the right thing and be competitive with without such regulations they cannot do. If they try to do the right thing it involves any extra expenditures, they put themselves at the mercy of leaner and meaner competitors. And this is the really lesson in business ethics that business schools never teach, that only proper public regulation can make business ethical and in a sense, save the souls of entrepreneurs. So I think this platform, which is good for business again because it provides maximum consumer demand, it fights against the great fluctuations in employment levels and purchase power that has a role to play in precipitating depressions and recessions, it inoculates us in other words against these extreme business cycles. It also will enhance the growth of the economy because if you think back to the years after the Second World War through 1973 when wages by and large rose in lockstep with productivity, our nation had twice the rate of growth that it has since then when wages have stagnated. And the reason for this is that with our nation becoming more and more unequal and with more and more of the new wealth going to the top more wealth is sitting there unused. It can’t be put to productive investment. Whereas if we have less social inequality much more of our national income will be spent on the needs of life that people will be spending. And that will have it’s multiplier effects and produce greater economic growth as was the case before 1973. When we had a more evenly distributed national income. So I think in all these respects there’s much for conservatives to like. I think the laissez-faire conservatives give capitalism a bad name.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Richard Dien Winfield, he’s a professor philosophy at the University of Georgia in Athens. He’s running as a Democrat for congress in Georgia’s 10th, a deep red rural district. His primary election is on May 22nd. You can find out more about his campaign at winfieldforcongress.com. Richard thanks so much for taking the time and best of luck, I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens with this campaign.

WINFIELD: Great, thanks for the opportunity to speak about the issues.

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.