What Would Biden’s Father Say About His Son’s War on Work?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

President Biden often talks about how his father used to tell him: “Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity.”

It’s ironic, because on Mr. Biden’s watch, a war on work is gathering momentum.

Working Less Is a Matter of Life and Death,” is the headline over a Sunday New York Times editorial. It relies on a newly published study by a World Health Organization and International Labor Organization team that claims working more than 55 hours a week “led to” 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016.

Neither the editorial nor the World Health Organization report on how many deaths might be attributable to people not working enough. Yet that is relevant information. Without it, the public health message becomes “work less,” rather than “find the golden mean of moderation between working too much and working too little.”

At this point, the World Health Organization has zero credibility. Syria, a regime that routinely bombs hospitals and uses chemical weapons, was just elected to the WHO executive board. The WHO is to blame for what the Wall Street Journal calls the “Wuhan Whitewash,” a report that downplayed the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic and that instead pushed the far-fetched idea that the virus got to China via frozen food.

Yet the WHO war on work is aligned with recent American public policy. Over the past 20 years, the civilian labor force participation rate has plunged to 61.7% from 66.9%. Some of that is the demographics of baby boomers retiring, but some of it reflects shifting priorities and choices.

President Biden’s proposed higher tax rates would punish those who work hard. Instead of subsidizing work via the earned income tax credit or incentivizing work via welfare time limits, domestic policy increasingly pays people not to work, through programs such as expanded unemployment and the expanded child tax credit.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently announced it would offer “$500 no-strings-attached monthly payments” to 120 households. The announcement press release said, “Cambridge joins a growing number of direct-cash pilot projects across the country.” It named Baltimore, Maryland; Paterson, New Jersey; Oakland, California; Madison, Wisconsin, and 13 other cities.

The group behind the experiments, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, has a statement of principles that says, “everyone deserves an income floor through a guaranteed income, which is a monthly, cash payment given directly to individuals. It is unconditional, with no strings attached and no work requirements.”

This delinking of welfare payments and work requirements threatens to reverse one of the major bipartisan achievements of the 1990s, the welfare reform enacted by President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Urban Democrats are leading the war on work, but Republicans, too, have enlisted. The Trump administration created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program that provides payments to, among others, parents who stay home to supervise their child’s remote learning.

President Trump, in his State of the Union address in 2020, said, “I was recently proud to sign the law providing new parents in the federal workforce paid family leave, serving as a model for the rest of the country. Now I call on the Congress to pass the bipartisan Advancing Support for Working Families Act, extending family leave to mothers and fathers all across our nation.”

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Sohrab Ahmari adapted from Mr. Ahmari’s new book “The Unbroken Thread.” Mr. Ahmari, a Catholic and op-ed editor of the conservative New York Post, appreciatively quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words about the sabbath: “he who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil.”

I try to honor the sabbath and I admire Heschel, but without commerce or toil on the other six days, the sabbath is just another vacation day, not special at all. The Bible talks about observing the sabbath, but it also talks about working the other six days. Psalm 128 says people who eat from the work of their own hands are happy.

It’s great that Mr. Biden can, by quoting his father, convey that, as the president put it May 18 during a visit to Michigan, a job is “about respect. It’s about your place in the community.”

Republicans have been intermittently good at explaining how Democratic tax increases erode incentives to work, but they haven’t quite risen to the task of explaining the war on work as an attack on basic American values like industry, upward mobility, self-reliance, human dignity, earned success, and the pursuit of happiness.

Newt Gingrich used to frame the choice as “food stamps versus paychecks,” which is stark, but getting close.

Joe Biden’s father died in 2002. For America to thrive in the decades ahead, it will need more messengers, in both parties, who can articulate why a job beats “no-strings attached” cash payments, family leave, or extended unemployment.

Never mind the World Health Organization and the Times editorialists: the real threat the country faces isn’t overwork, it’s the rising percentage of Americans who aren’t working at all.

________

Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.


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