1. I just retweeted @BreeNewsome quoting this tweet with the very correct indignation that in a time of crisis, people like Tim Scott are more worried about preserving economic precarity than actually helping people. Let me put this in some historical context.
2. The American welfare system, such as it is, has been based since the colonial period on the distinction drawn in the Elizabethan Poor Laws (Elizabethan as in Elizabeth I) between the worthy and the unworthy poor.
3. The very idea is a fiction: that there are "worthy" poor who are poor despite themselves (mostly disabled people, and the temporarily unlucky) and the "unworthy" poor who are poor because they are lazy.
4. As I say, this is not a good way to think about poverty, if for no other reason than because nobody is purely "worthy" or "unworthy" because any sort of poverty -generates- disability and further difficulty in working.
5. Indeed, as the late great welfare historian Michael B. Katz argued, any system that relies on this distinction will necessarily fail even by its own standards. You simply cannot draw a stable line between the worthy and unworthy poor!
6. And yet the distinction has survived through hundreds of years of capitalism and proto-capitalism because it's really useful to employers because it forces people to work if they want to eat (while keeping the "worthy poor" just alive enough to work later if they can).
7. Disaster is interesting here. One thing that makes a disaster a disaster is that it creates lots of poor people who did not used to be poor, thanks to some external force. In other words, it creates a huge number of suddenly worth poor.
8. That's why, as Michele Landis Dauber (apparently no longer on twitter?) showed in her book, the US federal government has given disaster relief since the earliest days of the republic: because disaster victims are the worthy poor.
9. It's also why, as Dauber showed in her chapter on letters to FDR during the Great Depression, victims of disasters of capitalism (like the Depression) have sought to portray themselves as disaster victims, rather than in some other category of poverty.
10. But--here's the crux of it--this makes disaster a really dangerous moment for people who want to maintain the worthy/unworthy distinction. If everyone is claiming disaster relief, how do you make sure it doesn't go to people who are unworthy?
11. So in today's terms, how can you make sure that federal Covid relief money goes only to the worthy poor--that is, people who would not have been poor absent the pandemic--rather than the unworthy poor--that is, people who were already poor "by their own fault."
12. One way of doing this is to fight like hell to limit what "disaster relief" will look like. Here's an example from my book, about the congressional debate over relief for a fire in Salem, Mass, in 1914 that destroyed a lot of factories and rendered people jobless. 
13. Another way to do it is to give differential aid--that is, give less money to poor people than to rich people. After the Halifax Explosion of 1917, for instance, the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee bought furniture to replace that which was destroyed.
14. So they investigated how rich a family was before the disaster, judged at how nice their furniture was based on that, and gave richer people nicer replacement furniture. That is, by policy, they replicated and worsened preexisting inequality.
15. A third way of making sure no unworthy poor person "cheats" and gets aid to which they're not entitled: make the aid so crappy for everyone that it's the worst alternative. This is what Tim Scott (to go back to the start of this thread) wants.
16. That is, make relief payments so small and useless that they won't help anybody. (There's actually a term of art for this that comes from the 19th c., but I'm blanking out on it. Can some other welfare historian help me out here. Least situation? Something like that.)
17. And here's where we come back to Michael Katz's argument that any system that tries to separate the worthy from the unworthy poor will necessarily fail.
18. If you try to make disaster relief so limited that nobody will take it instead of working--if you're so worried about "cheats" that you cripple the system you're building--you just end up with no relief system at all.
19. That is, of course, what the United States has traditionally chosen: to be so concerned about "cheats"--poor people who get more than they "should" because they're poor for the wrong reasons--that we just have an inadequate welfare system for its own purposes.
20. And that's what, I guess, we're doing now. The federal government is going to give one-time $1200 checks; it's so stingy for the sake of being stingy that it won't succeed at its stated purpose of relief and recovery.
21. The phrase I was blanking out on in tweet 16 is "least eligibility." Big thanks to @MatthewBorus for reminding me.
22. While I’m at it, and because I hear that some people are doing a lot of reading right now, let me give you a reading list if you want more on this. (Note that lots of book distribution centers are shut down right now, so you should buy an ebook from your local bookseller.)
23. In the order I cited them: Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse indiebound.org/book/978046503…
Michele Dauber, The Sympathetic State indiebound.org/book/978022692…
Jacob Remes, Disaster Citizenship indiebound.org/book/978025208…
Michele Dauber, The Sympathetic State indiebound.org/book/978022692…
Jacob Remes, Disaster Citizenship indiebound.org/book/978025208…
24. One more post-script. I don't know why I couldn't find her on twitter earlier today, but Michele Dauber indeed still here, at @mldauber.
