The Council of Economic Advisers for popular vote loser Donald Trump released a report Thursday in which they declare that the decades-old war on poverty "is largely over and a success," and now it's time to go back to work houses. Not literally, but close. They argue for imposing work requirements on all safety net programs, including Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP), the first step to lumping all programs together as "welfare" in order to make it easier to undermine their popular support and cut them further.
They do it with some egregious cooking of the books. For example, the data they use to determine how many working people receive Medicaid comes from census data in 2013, before the Afforable Care Act's Medicaid expansion was implemented and when unemployment rates were higher. They "found that more than one-half of working-age, non-disabled beneficiaries of Medicaid, federal housing support and food stamps worked fewer than 20 hours per week in the month in which they received benefits from those programs." But that's not currently reality.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priority has exhaustively researched these issues and found that most people use benefits like SNAP as a supplement to low-wage, unstable jobs. They are the working poor.
That's true for Medicaid, as well, as the Kaiser Family Foundation has routinely found. Using the 2013 census data, the CEA says that "53 percent of adult, non-disabled Medicaid beneficiaries worked less than 20 hours a week." But in post-Medicaid expansion 2018, it's not true. KFF has found that 62 percent of Medicaid recipients have at least part-time jobs and that another 18 percent of Medicaid recipients live in households where someone is working. That's reality, but it doesn't help the narrative that Trump and his fellow Republicans have to establish to shred the safety net.
"It's all part of a carefully calculated strategy to reinforce myths about the people these programs help," said Rebecca Vallas, the vice president of the poverty to prosperity program at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, and "to smear these programs with a dog-whistle of welfare, in order to make them easier to cut."To be fair, the kind of people that are on Trump's Council of Economic Advisors believe the myth that everyone getting food stamps or Medicaid is a lazy shirker and welfare queen, with all the racist history behind those slurs.