Doolittle (Stanley Holloway) in “Pygmalion”
Tomorrow 1.3 million out-of-work Americans will lose their long-term unemployment insurance as the GOP made ending the program a condition for a budget agreement. Democrats, distressed over the ruinous effects of the sequester, made a Sophie’s choice agreement with Republicans and agreed to cut the unemployment insurance program rather than social security and Medicaid.
Given how the GOP’s righteous rhetoric about the poor has been getting worse and worse, we need George Bernard Shaw’s Alfred Doolittle to puncture their cloying sanctimony. I’ll explain how this works in a moment.
First, however, let’s hear some of this sanctimony. Here’s Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in a statement that received a nomination for “worst quote of the year” on the Chris Hayes MSNBC talk show:
I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers. When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy.
Paul Krugman spells out Paul’s underlying premise:
The G.O.P. answer to the problem of long-term unemployment is to increase the pain of the long-term unemployed: Cut off their benefits, and they’ll go out and find jobs.
And then Krugman asks the obvious next question:
How, exactly, will they find jobs when there are three times as many job-seekers as job vacancies? Details, details.
As we look at those receiving insurance, let’s clarify who they are. These are people who used to have jobs and now do not. In other words, they are not slackers but workers who want to work. Furthermore, one can only receive unemployment insurance if one is actively looking for work, which means that unemployment insurance actually spurs people to keep looking, rather than giving up in discouragement.
But one needs to be careful when debating with Rand Paul. Here I’ve allowed him to goad me into making distinctions between deserving and undeserving poor. Paul throws out one caricature—the poor as seen by John Galt—and I respond with another—the poor as Oliver Twist or the Cratchit family. What gets lost is the three-dimensionality of human beings. This is where Shaw is useful.
For him, it’s simple: if you have money, you play various games to try to keep it and, if you don’t, you play other games to try to get it. As he sees it, a moral argument such as Rand is making (“middle class morality”) is simply one of the tools that the rich use to maintain a sense of superiority over the poor. Alfred Doolittle, who forthrightly describes himself as “one of the undeserving poor,” undermines such superiority with his frank talk:
What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth.
Doolittle has appeared on the scene because he senses that there’s some money to be made with Higgins taking on his daughter as an education project. When Higgins, shocked, asks, “Have you no morals man,” Doolittle unabashedly replies,
Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.
So as we discuss unemployment insurance, can we at least move beyond seeing it as a morality play? People need the money to eat, pay the rent, and continue to look for jobs. The jobs aren’t there right now but the economy is picking up so there may be jobs in the future. We’ve never ended the program before when unemployment was this high and to do so will cause hardship, whether the recipients are deserving or undeserving. Ending the program will also cost the country 300,000 jobs, since the money right now is functioning as an economic stimulus. The country can afford the money. Enough with sermons about the lazy poor.
