What is the earned income tax credit? It’s a refundable tax credit that functions as a low income wage subsidy. Here’s how it works:

The earned income tax credit (EITC) subsidizes low-income working families. The credit equals a fixed percentage of earnings from the first dollar of earnings until the credit reaches its maximum; both the percentage and the maximum credit depend on the number of children in the family. The credit then stays flat at that maximum as earnings continue to rise, but eventually earnings reach a phase-out range. From that point the credit falls with each additional dollar of income until it disappears entirely.

The link features a helpful graph that will give you a sense of how it operates and what it is set up to do. The EITC is just behind SNAP as the biggest welfare program aimed at helping poor families. It does a good job of that: “The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, using Census Bureau data estimates that in 2012, ‘the credit lifted 6.5 million people out of poverty, including over 3 million children’” (see also the Poverty Calculator breakdown of EITC’s effect).

So all in all, a helpful program. And yet all is not well in the world of EITC policy evaluation; at National Affairs, Lawrence Mead has some concerns. Claiming that the EITC has been ‘oversold’ — that is, that its pro-work effects have been inflated by unrelated improvements in employment which merely provided the illusion of a dramatic work incentive — Mead lodges the following complaints:

“Even among advocates of work requirements, however, confusion reigns regarding how public policy can best encourage lower-income Americans to seek work. Increasingly, many on the left contend that we need not enforce work through the heavy-handed means that characterized the ’90s welfare reform — requiring welfare mothers to enter the work force and empowering case managers to make sure they did. Many liberals believe that it is enough to subsidize wages for those of meager means, and that the resulting incentive will motivate them to seek work on their own…

The chief evidence for this view is the supposed success of the Earned Income Tax Credit in lifting work levels among welfare mothers during welfare reform. The EITC subsidizes the earnings of low-income workers, thus effectively raising their wages. But its success in “making work pay” and combatting [sic] poverty among Americans who are employed has too easily been confused with success in causing more Americans to go to work…

….Further, work incentives assume that non-working adults want to work and will do so when the payoffs improve. First-hand accounts of low-income life, however, suggest that regular employment is usually not an immediate priority. Poor non-workers typically want to work, yet their lives are not organized around employment, as is true for the better-off. Single mothers are absorbed with family problems, while many men make money off the books without holding steady, legal jobs. Everyone struggles with immediate difficulties, mostly in private life, rather than working regularly to earn income….

…there are ways we might reform it [the EITC]. The credit as currently structured has no hour threshold, for instance, and that could be changed…Another way to help the credit promote work would be to support state-level staff to reach out to eligible people and persuade them to put in the working hours needed to claim the benefit…”

The whole story here, as told by Mead, is this: the EITC helps poor people absolutely, by giving them more money than they would have otherwise. What it doesn’t do as effectively as it’s been credited with, however, is force them to work. Mead is emphatic: the poor just constitutionally do not desire work; they fail to organize their lives around work, and instead become absorbed with what he appears to view as ancillary in their condition — family, children, and so forth. Therefore, by Mead’s lights, the EITC could make itself useful to the rest of us by forcing more work out of poor mothers punitively: take away the EITC from people who simply don’t work enough hours, and employ staff to ‘encourage’ them to work enough hours to acquire it. Arbeit macht frei.

It’s quite notable that in the first half of his piece, Mead frequently references ‘welfare mothers,’ ‘poor mothers’, and ‘single mothers.’ But in the latter part of his essay, when he is offering ideas on how to reform the EITC to force more work, he doesn’t mention ‘mothers’ — only ‘women’ and ‘men.’ You can sort of imagine why that might be.

For one, the notion that poor mothers aren’t ‘working’ is ludicrous. Remember when Ann Romney’s job was much, much harder than Mitt’s? The hardest job in the world, by some lights, never ends. You put in nine months of your own flesh and blood, then twenty odd more years of the same, and it’s a twenty-four-seven occupation. I don’t think the Romneys were wrong about this; it’s clear that in-home labor is work: otherwise, you wouldn’t be paying someone else to do it when you can’t or don’t want to. But as it stands, childcare costs money, and so do laundry services, private chefs, and maids. Poor mothers, like all mothers, work.

You don’t have to take it from me. Consider the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray waxing sentimental about all the amazing things women do when they don’t have full-time jobs. Community vitality, he argues, rests principally with women who don’t work full-time, and who can devote themselves to family and friends more fully. Totally agreed; sounds great, wish we actually took it seriously.

And this isn’t a purely rhetorical point. If poor moms aren’t caring for their kids, cooking their food, and washing their clothes, someone will be doing it, and the poor mothers will be paying them — that is, if they can. But this certainly means that poor women who are trying to work up to the EITC threshold that Mead proposes are in a really, really screwed up position: having to pay some service to look after their kids while they try to make enough money to qualify for the EITC. So they’re bleeding money while not even making enough for welfare.

That’s dystopic in itself. But we should further ask: is it either good or right to discount the in-home labor mothers do? Why on earth would we value market labor over in-home labor, if we’re serious about this “hardest job in the world” rhetoric? Why would we want to force poor mothers to work — especially low-income jobs, the sort that are least accommodating to motherhood in general? The wise approach to me would be to say: poor mothers (even so-called “welfare mothers”) are already working; if they collect welfare benefits without putting in a particular threshold-amount of labor market hours, that’s perfectly fine, because they’re not indolent, just occupied with more serious things. Mead appears to want poor mothers to ‘organize their lives’ around working, but this should strike us all as an absurd reversal of priorities, and one without any clear social benefits, unless you are, as Mead is, really attached to labor market work.

Some people say this:

“Care for the poor should be handled by private institutions like the Church, because it is morally wrong for the state to coerce charity.”

I find it weird this is trotted out as conventional Christian political wisdom these days, and often given the flavor of tradition, as though this were always the order of things and we’ve only now departed from it. I’m not so convinced myself. To break this down into constituent parts:

“Care for the poor should be handled by (1) private institutions like the Church, because it is morally wrong for the state to (2) coerce (3) charity.”

(1.) “private institutions like the Church”

This part of the formulation is less about the identity of the Church and more about the methods the Church is presumed to have for funding her poor relief efforts. That is, I don’t understand people who argue the Church should be solely responsible for poor relief to be fixated so much on the institution as on its institutional limitations. In other words, they don’t think the Church actually has the teeth to get anyone’s money away from them, which is why they prefer it to the state. But we can test this hypothesis: do we all agree the medieval setup was better, when the Church ran  poor relief but absolutely could and did levy a compulsory tax? To quote a beleaguered professor I incessantly bother,

“The Church’s coercive role was seen, at least in the early modern Jesuit tradition, as part of a wider indirect temporal authority – indirect as exercised only for supernatural ends. That authority was part of a wider picture of the Christian community as essentially committed in respect of its temporal resources, both private and political, to the supernatural end.  And the obligation to pay tithes was very much part of this, enforced by both Church and by the state as the Church’s agent.”

Pink’s observation of the early modern period was even more true of the medieval, when the Church enjoyed even more widespread authority. (A few threads of which were arguably unpicked by the Black Plague and other developments at the close of the High Middle Ages.) Pink goes on, in his paper on Suarez and Bellarmine:

“Enforcement of the canon law on heresy, as of canon law on other matters, historically involved not just the Church, but also the Christian state. But this involvement of the state was understood by the Church of Hobbes’s time not as the state’s voluntary cooperation under its own authority, but as fulfilling an obligation on the state to enforce the Church’s authority. Christian rulers were bound by their own baptism not only to meet canonical obligations themselves, but to help enforce them on their baptized subjects.”

This arrangement aligns well with Giles Constable’s explanation of the Church’s use of state apparatuses to enforce tithing in the early medieval period in Monastic Tithes: From Their Origin to the Twelfth Century:

“In view of the well-established precedent for tithing, it seems unnecessary to seek any more specific of elaborate reason for the civil enforcement of tithes than the general concern of the early Carolingian kings for the interests of the Church and for uniformity of practice throughout their realm.”

Medieval kings, in other words, had a very special role in relation to the Church; I’ve written on this before. Sedulius Scottus, the early medieval Irish poet of distressingly little exposure, captured this well in On Christian Rulers, writing in part: “indeed, a King is notably raised to the summit of temporal rule when he devotes himself with pious zeal to the Almighty King’s glory and honor.” If you have the crown, in other words, you’re obligated to use your talents and abilities for the benefit of the Church just like everyone else is; for Kings, this means, in part, the civil enforcement of tithes. At least this was understood to be the shape of things then: so the Church, as a private institution, absolutely had within its authority the capacity to enforce a form of taxation.

But I doubt the proponents of this line of thought are much desiring a return to this — most are, in fact, completely scandalized by the idea. And I’m not stumping for it either. I’m just putting forth the reality of the option to emphasize that this isn’t about the Church, or even about the Church’s privacy as an institution; it’s about the perceived limitations on the Church’s capacities. If you wipe those limitations out, suddenly there’s no more preference for the Church. So this isn’t really a religious argument in total: it’s more of a political one.

(2.) “coerce”

Point of order: coercion is a normative term in this sense. It means the forced yielding of that which is rightfully yours. Christian wisdom holds that if the poor haven’t enough, then your excess is not actually yours.(Tithes aren’t yours either.) Augustine:

“But we possess many superfluous things, unless we keep only what is necessary. For if we seek useless things, nothing suffices…Consider: not only do few things suffice for you, but God himself does not seek many things from you. Seek as much as he has given you, and from that take what suffices; other things, superfluous things, are the necessities of others. The superfluous things of the wealthy are the necessities of the poor. When superfluous things are possessed, others’ property is possessed.”

“In this life the wrong of evil possessions is tolerated, and among them certain laws are established, called civil laws, not because they bring human beings to make good use of their wealth, but because those who make evil use of it become thereby less injurious.”

The law can’t force you to be good. But it can make sure your evil doesn’t inordinately destroy poor people. Some of these laws will be property laws, and insofar as they produce an incursion only on superfluity, they’re completely licit and you are not being coerced because what is being taken is not yours. Of course, since we’re only trying to produce order and a basic standard of living for everyone here, this doesn’t require we seek after all superfluity; just so much that all necessities are met.

(3.) “charity”

The strangest part of the whole argument. Let’s all say it together: welfare is not charity and welfare is not trying to be charity and there are many forms of poor relief which are not charity and that is all okay.

It actually took a while for caritas to be conflated with alms-giving. Eliza Buhrer does a good job of tracking the original translation of Paul by Jerome that gave us caritas in the sense that would eventually become charity — a few hundred years later. So the two aren’t synonymous: caritas is only the underlying spirit that can be expressed in material alms-giving. As John Henderson notes in Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence:

“Poor relief throughout late medieval Europe was supplied by a series of interlinking systems from the Church and State to the craft guild, confraternity and hospital to more informal networks of parenti, amici, vicini (‘kin, friends, neighbours’). Underpinning all these systems lay the highest theological virtue, Charity, which provided the moral justification for the preservation of peace and the maintenance of order and the Buon Commune.“

Buon Commune = common good, basically. Constable also notes in Monastic Tithes that tithes were also considered wholly distinct from charity, even though they were understood to be used for the care of the poor. The point here is that the theological virtue Charity (or caritas) is the justification for many different types of poor relief — but it is not identical to them, just as the justification for me being patient is the love of my neighbor as myself, though my patience is not identical to this love — merely a manifestation of it. Similarly, though we may see the State’s efforts to relieve poverty as a manifestation of the spirit of caritas, that is only because it is caritas that leads us to pursue order and justice. But when the state relieves poverty, it is not “charity” in the same sense as interpersonal alms-giving. And that is just fine.

Because interpersonal alms-giving and other interpersonal acts of charity will and should persist even though the state has a hand in the relief of poverty. One example: here in the USA, where not all people can afford healthcare, we see charities offering to pay for the treatment of children with cancer, we see charitable hospitals requesting funds on TV, we see campaigns for donations to individuals struggling to pay healthcare costs on twitter and facebook. But in the UK, where the NHS provides single-payer universal healthcare, you see charities offering to pay for families to stay at hotels near the hospitals where their loved ones are being treated. Point is: there are always needs to be met, even when a basic standard of living is provided via state programs. Christianity, as this little dip into medieval Christian history hopefully suggests, is a religion of fantastic imagination; there are all kinds of ways to help people out there, and the Body of Christ is pretty good at soothing its members. I don’t have any doubt that Christians will always be able to find ways to act in caritas, even with robust welfare states.

All of this comes to a rather modest point, which Christians in European and Latin American nations seem quite obviously comfortable with — there is nothing about Christian history or philosophy that inherently militates against any and all state relief of poverty.

Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

John Ashberry, “As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat”

There’s a kind of rhythm to life you can sense when you’re leading a horse by the halter, a pace made up of your steps and his steps and the great turning-over of things. One day it was the heat of buzzing summer and I was learning to mount a thoroughbred seventeen hands high using just the stirrup, and the next it was autumn, and I was waiting to see if my SAT scores were good enough to get me out of Texas.

A sense like that doesn’t come over you instantaneously. It is no sudden thing, knowing in a very conclusive and final way that the place you were born and raised is not a place you can stay. It takes you slowly, like the seasons, and if it didn’t you would doubt it. I would have doubted it, if it hadn’t come on like that, because in Texas, as in many places where a good many people still time their lives by the doings of the land, that which comes on quickly is more suspicious than that which moves steadily. The indebtedness of Texas to the seasons instills, I sometimes imagine, that old Burkean conservatism: slowly, slowly.

But it had been in me for a long time. There were things that I loved. The way my hands looked, red-mottled with stings and nettles, after digging for easter eggs among Texas thistle and dry yellow grass on my uncle’s farm; the acrid smell, sulfur-and-sweat, of many fourths-of-July, which became for me a time of great expectation; the way that autumn was presaged by the arrival of football season, where the brown of the pigskin and the burnt orange of UT allowed the leaves to change in response, never vice-versa. I can’t tell anymore how much of this is fantasized.

I know a point eventually came where it became clear to me the things I loved were more easily uprooted than the things I didn’t, and shortly I understood that this was the way of things in Texas: you are always weaker than the grind. So I left.

* * *

The first thing is, I didn’t initially want to leave. I wanted to get deeper into it. I have told you about this before. It wasn’t an especially successful plan. The places I could find to fit in were open corridors to the outside, just vestibules to conduct yourself in before you could be expelled. One of these places was debate: to a person, not one member of our varsity debate team now lives in Texas.

Which is a little curious: Texas is known for having an especially brutal and involved debate circuit. Certainly my experience was formative; nonetheless I wondered even while I was there how a place that so thoroughly disliked its intelligentsia could produce such intense commitment to thought. ‘It’s because everybody’s trying to get out,’ someone told me, ‘and you can get scholarships for debate.’ It did feel that dire: like football for losers, my teammate said, and without celebration.

But debate is still marginal there, both in the competitive highschool sense and in the broader intellectual sense. Not much is actually debated. Next year, Texas will still lead the nation in executions. Little will be said about it. Medicaid will not be expanded, and poor people will die:

“As Howard Brody, director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities, has shown, 9,000 Texans per year will die needlessly as a result of our failure to expand Medicaid. However, because dying patients are often too sick, exhausted and wracked with pain to protest, UTMB and states like Texas aren’t forced to reckon with the consequences of their policy decisions.”

Texas will still call itself business-friendly, and its very fine suburbs will grow and sprawl like annexes of Disney Land, where everything appears to be halfway between real and fake. Many of them will come with zoning restrictions that restrict subsidized housing and targeted building codes intended to keep black people out. Residents will speak fondly of these places, and people will move into them in droves. High school parking lots will gleam with pickup trucks, and they will construct simulation town squares, all brand new, Anthropologies and Sephoras and J. Crews and Ann Taylor Lofts, and some of the boutiques in between will sell jewelry with a longhorn theme. Journalists will write about the ‘complacency factor‘ in Texas gubernatorial races as though it weren’t a longstanding and much-celebrated institution.

But all is grist that comes to the mill. Texas is the stickiest state there is. Whatever it is, whatever your complaint, it’s just the way of things there, like the heat. There’s not much that can be done about it. And why try to change it now? You can push, but it’ll push back, probably push you out. I realized nothing good would come of me staying, and I left: all is grist that comes to the mill.

* * *

Yet marvelous is our world:
Crossing a field with a horse and wagon,
You drag yourself to the train,
Which tears like a demon over fields,
Depositing you into steerage;
You’re borne over water to downtown New York –
And that really is my only comfort,
That they won’t bury me in you –
My home, my Zlotshev.

Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, “Zlotshev, My Home

So it comes about that leaving wasn’t really your choice; you left because you weren’t right for the place, but you didn’t decide that, it did. It just sent you where it wanted you, somewhere else. In this way you never really blend in wherever you go. You are forever in Texodus, you are living in Texile. Somebody in exile is always looking back, waiting for the return call, or dreading it.

It is strange being an ambassador for Texas, because whenever I am asked about it I feel compelled to defend it. Every time I go back I am almost enchanted: there’s a certain parking garage in Fort Worth you can stand at the top of and see the courthouse where my parents were married and the hospital where I was born, and the silver snake of highway straight ahead leads, if you follow it, all the way to my house. The glare of the sun blazes out the distance even though the land is flat for miles. You forget where you are, and it doesn’t much matter. It will get you where it wants you to be.

The question becomes whether or not the politics are separable from the place. Sometimes my mom suggests I come back because, she says, the cost of living is so low there. But the cost of living in Texas is really very high, just not for the wealthy and white: “In 2010, the poverty rate in Texas was 14.4 percent. The rate dropped to 10.8 percent for non-Hispanic whites but soared to 27.1 percent for blacks and 24.8 percent for Hispanics, according to the Census Bureau.” Texas ranks fifth in income inequality, among all the states. Whether it costs you much to live there, figuratively speaking, will likely depend on which side of that divide you find yourself on.

And then there is the slowness of things, the recalcitrance of them. What can be done about any of this? It doesn’t seem much. You’re not above the grind, and the grind moves the seasons and the time and the shape of all things. In the Bible the doomed cities Sodom and Gomorrah are called ‘cities of the plain’, which I think of every time I come in on some late flight to DFW, and see the whole expanse of Dallas and Fort Worth laid out flat on the prairie, lights and grids, long perimeters of highway. Lot’s wife was turned to salt for looking back at Sodom, because you don’t look back at someplace you’re leaving unless there was something about it that you loved.

* * *

It isn’t clear until the end whether or not you were let down in the right place, or how you would know if you were. It’s one thing to be settled down somewhere you’re comfortable, it’s another to wind up somewhere the good in you can make the space around you a little better. That’s the final test, the real requirement. Otherwise you’re just spending time. In New England I have done things I’m proud of, set up programs and worked with particular organizations and hopefully affected lasting improvement in some people’s lives.

But the haunting sets in. What is it to have left the place in most need to do good somewhere else? And after you have left, established yourself someplace else, is there any real possibility of coming back, remorseful, to try to carry out what it now seems you were meant to all along? Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it.

“…When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived.”

Slowly the whole scope of the story is revealed. And I would want to go back there and do better than I did on almost every count, if it weren’t for the slowness of my understanding that leaving was probably not the right thing to do. The ebb of it, the way it sets in over the course of many months over many years, tells me that the regret has a certain Texan signature, a flavor of that old, Burkean conservatism. It’s a regret one is meant to live with, not a regret one is meant to immediately aim to redress. It comes somewhere in the rhythm of things, though I don’t know where.