Republicans Are Attacking the “Idle” Poor, But the Real Freeloaders Are the Rich
The GOP is defending its cruel budget bill with ancient tropes about the industrious rich and “undeserving” poor. It’s time to reverse the script.
Conor Lynch
For decades, Republicans have promoted the stereotype of the shiftless and unscrupulous poor person — along with its quasi-mythical counterpart, the self-made businessman who bootstrapped his way out of poverty — to justify their reactionary economic project. That project, which is driven by the dual aims of dismantling the “welfare state” and slashing taxes for the rich, has never been particularly popular with voters on its own terms. So conservatives have long cloaked it in populist rhetoric and presented it in terms that obscure class lines and turn working people against one another.
Every time Republicans have tried to chip away at the safety net or shower the rich with tax breaks, they have invariably deployed the familiar tropes of the idle welfare recipient and the industrious “job creators” who owe all their success to a superior work ethic.
It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans have fallen back on the old playbook to defend their widely unpopular reconciliation bill. In the months leading up to the passage of the “big, beautiful bill,” President Trump and congressional Republicans worked hard to spin it as “pro-worker” and “pro-family” legislation, despite the fact that it includes the biggest rollback of the social safety net in a generation. It is also forecasted to leave millions of Americans without health insurance or critical food assistance in the very near future.
To push back on the accurate perception of the bill as a massive giveaway to the rich, Republicans have argued that the legislation not only benefits all Americans through tax cuts, but only hurts those “undeserving” people who abuse safety net programs. “The One Big Beautiful Bill protects and strengthens Medicaid for those who rely on it — pregnant women, children, seniors, people with disabilities, and low-income families — while eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse,” read a “fact” sheet released by the White House shortly before the bill passed this month that was riddled with falsehoods. According to the White House, the reconciliation bill “protects Medicaid for the truly vulnerable” and will only remove the undeserving from its rolls, specifically “illegal aliens.” In fact, undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for Medicaid.
The “welfare gamer”
On top of their usual xenophobic drivel, Republicans have dusted off the well-worn myth of the lazy moocher living off of public largesse. Fifty years after Ronald Reagan helped popularize the racialized myth of the “welfare queen,” Republicans have updated the avatar of the undeserving for the digital age. “You don’t want able-bodied workers on a program that is intended … for single mothers with two small children who is just trying to make it,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. “That’s what Medicaid is for, not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”
Since then, Republicans have leaned heavily on this caricature to justify the strict new work requirements for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that will drastically reduce the number of covered Americans. “If you are able to work in America, well then you should not be sitting at home playing video games and collecting a check,” declared Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who was echoed by many other Republicans.
Conservatives like Johnson and Boebert have insisted that only the truly “undeserving” — i.e. undocumented immigrants and unemployed couch potatoes — will lose their health insurance or SNAP benefits due to the new work requirements. But even if one were to grant their dubious distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, the simple fact is that around two-thirds of people on Medicaid already do work, while those who don’t usually have a good reason for it, whether it’s caregiving for a relative, disability, school or simply the inability to find work.
The cruel irony is that these new work requirements will disproportionately hurt those who do qualify. A preview of this came in Arkansas when it briefly introduced work rules into its Medicaid program in 2018, leading a quarter of the enrollees to lose their health insurance without increasing the employment rate. Most who lost their insurance were “working or exempt but unaware that they needed to show compliance or kept from doing so by administrative barriers.”
In practice, the new requirements will lead many of the so-called “deserving” to lose their health insurance and food aid. Factoring in the financial burden that will result from the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, one analysis from the non-partisan Budget Lab at Yale found that the bottom 20% of Americans will see their annual income decline on average by 2.9% (about $700), while those in the top 1% will see an increase of 1.9% (about $30,000).
Regardless of the actual impact, Republicans have wagered that selling their cuts to Medicaid and SNAP as measures to discourage idleness and ensure the long-term viability of the programs will limit the political fallout. Polls have shown that a large majority of the public, including half of Democrats, support work requirements for Medicaid when described in Republican terms. Yet this support collapses to just a third of respondents when they are given more context and informed that most Medicaid recipients already work, and that many would be at risk of losing their coverage due to the new requirements. The extent of the political backlash will depend largely on how persuasive Republicans are in selling their narrative to the public — and how effective those on the Left are at countering it.
The conservative work ethic
If progressives hope to push back on conservative arguments about the “undeserving” and “idle” poor, it helps to understand just how deeply rooted these ideas and attitudes are in America. The distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor is not a recent development. It dates back to the earliest American colonists, who were famously hostile to all forms of “idleness.” The settlers brought with them from Stuart England a belief that poverty mostly stemmed from the laziness and moral failings of individuals. In 17th century England, elites often distinguished between the “incompetent” poor — those who were unable to work because of disability or old age, and therefore deserving of charity — and the able-bodied poor, who ostensibly chose not to work. In reality, many of the “laboring poor” were unemployed or underemployed due to enclosures and other major disruptions in the British economy.
For many of the original exponents of the Protestant work ethic, the only things that the able-bodied poor deserved were discipline and punishment. One of the more notorious examples of this punitive approach came from John Locke, who argued in his essay on the poor laws that the growth of poverty across England had resulted not from “want of employment” but from “the relaxation of discipline and corruption of manners.”
The proper cure for indigent idlers was to put them to work so that they would no longer live like “drones upon the labour of others.” The English philosopher proposed that all “idle vagabonds” be “maimed” and sentenced to “hard labour for three years” at a house of corrections. For those found guilty of counterfeiting passes required for begging, Locke recommended lopping off their ears and shipping repeat offenders across the Atlantic to work on the plantations.
Locke’s draconian proposals reveal the dark side of the Protestant work ethic, which at times produced cruel laws that effectively criminalized poverty and punished working people who were already at the mercy of an emerging capitalist economy. Yet conservatives and apologists for capitalism have never held an exclusive monopoly on defining the work ethic. In her 2023 book, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take it Back, philosopher Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates the contested history of the concept, which has been utilized by both conservatives and radicals to advance very different agendas over the years. “Much of history can be narrated as a contest between progressive and conservative versions of the work ethic,” writes Anderson, who argues for the Left to reclaim the idea that has long shaped American life.
In Anderson’s telling, theorists from the “progressive” tradition have historically sought “economic arrangements that emancipate workers from groveling subordination to superiors,” while also redirecting the critique of “idleness” from those at the bottom to those at the top. In this sense, progressives are more aligned with some of the original promoters of the work ethic who condemned the “idle rich” with as much fury as the “idle poor,” such as 17th century Protestants Robert Sanderson and Richard Baxter.
Sanderson denounced “gallants” who thought they “need not labor due to birth, breeding, or estate,” opining that the “lowest worker deserves more than they,” while Baxter affirmed that the rich were “no more excused from service and work of one kind or another, than the poorest man.” These influential theologians condemned the predatory rich with similar ferocity, denouncing monopolists, usurers, hucksters and big landlords — the “voluptuous great ones of the world” — who “tread on their brethren as stepping stones of their own advancement.”
In contrast, Anderson notes, the conservative work ethic is distinguished by a “harsh orientation toward ordinary workers and the poor, and an indulgent one toward the ‘industrious’ rich — those who occupy themselves with making money, either through work or investment of their assets, regardless of whether their activities actually contribute to social welfare.” Among today’s conservatives, reverence for the so-called “industrious rich” has morphed into the outright idolatry of wealth and those who possess it.
Justifying cruelty to the poor
The Republican Party, despite all the recent noise about its makeover into a “party of the working class,” remains committed to serving the interests of big business and the wealthy few, as demonstrated by the “big beautiful bill.” While the Puritans were deeply ambivalent toward wealth and condemned all forms of rapacious and predatory behavior by economic elites, today’s GOP sanctifies money-making as the highest calling, regardless of the social, economic or environmental consequences. Nobody embodies this spirit more than Donald Trump, whose entire business career was built on gaming the system and extracting wealth from workers, taxpayers and renters.
In an interview defending the reconciliation bill and its work requirements, Speaker Johnson cited a “moral component” to the changes. “If you are able to work and you refuse to do so,” he said, “you are defrauding the system. You’re cheating the system.” While preaching discipline to the poor, conservative moralists like Johnson are perfectly content to give billionaires like Trump and Elon Musk a free pass to exploit workers, pillage the planet and prey on working-class communities. This is evidenced by a provision found in the bill that cuts funding in half for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency responsible for policing financial frauds and scams committed by businesses that prey on the vulnerable, such as payday lenders.
The dismantling of the CFPB, which the Trump administration has already begun, will ultimately hurt the very working people who Republicans claim to represent the most. Conservatives who preach the virtues of hard work readily condemn the poor for their alleged moral failings yet show little concern about the predatory lenders or crypto scammers who profit off of their desperation.
In Trump’s America, the work ethic has become a convenient myth for the wealthy to justify their exorbitant fortunes and vast levels of inequality. The best way to counter this ugly perversion of the work ethic, according to Anderson, is for the Left to reclaim it as their own. That means going on the offensive against the “idle” rich of an ever-expanding rentier class that busies itself “with lobbying for state favors, hoarding opportunities, tyrannizing workers … and more generally extracting health without adding value.”
A version of this story first appeared at Truthdig.
Conor Lynch is a freelance writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has been published in The New Republic, The Week, Salon, and elsewhere.
