whether to certify disability, always asks patients what grade they finished in school,
which “is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this
information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education
aren’t going to be able to get a sit-down job.”^227 Dr. Timberlake was hesitant to deny
disability to someone who was unlikely to be able to find work.
She also spoke with a man in Washington, whose “dad had a heart attack and went back
to work in the mill. If there’d been a mill for [the son] to go back to work in, he says,
he’d have done that too.” But the mill had closed, so the son went on disability. In his
50s, he went to lots of meetings about retraining programs, but finally a staff member
pulled him aside and advised: “There’s nobody gonna hire you.... Just suck all the
benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you’re on your
own.” The system lacks incentives for retraining and disincentives for relocation. It has
become “a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills,”
Joffe-Walt concluded, that consigns them to permanent poverty. It pays $13,000 a year.
“Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work.”^228
Yes, I get the irony: the white working class is outraged about welfare but benefiting from
a different welfare program themselves. If we actually had a robust industrial policy and
effective job retraining, we’d be far better off. But we also need something else: a new
public understanding of government programs and who benefits from them.
One reason working-class whites associate the government only with subsidies for the
poor is that many subsidies for the middle class are submerged—visible only to policy
specialists (I learned this in grad school at MIT). These include the mortgage interest
deduction, student loans, and tax exemptions for retirement and health benefits. In 2007,
the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction cost taxpayers four times as much as Section 8
public housing subsidies,^229 but knowing that is the province of specialists.
Many Americans don’t even know that Medicare is a federal program. A man stood up at
a 2009 town hall held by Rep. Robert Inglis (R-SC) and told him to “Keep your
government hands off my Medicare.” Inglis politely explained, “Actually, sir, your health
care is being provided by the government.’” Inglis told the Huffington Post , “But he
wasn’t having any of it.”^230 Similarly, when Trump took office, some celebrated the
repeal of “Obamacare,” which they saw as a government welfare program, not realizing it
was the same as the “Affordable Care Act.”^231
Whose fault is that?
- Why Don’t the People Who Benefit Most from Government Help Seem to Appreciate It?