Developed countries like Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have welfare systems focusing on providing generous, accessible, and often unconditional support to people without work. These systems treat unemployment as a fleeting social condition and solvable economic issue while offering robust safety nets to prevent poverty. Even developing countries like Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa have financial assistance programs for the unemployed.
However, in the United States, things are different. There is a strong evidence that the American welfare system is work-biased in structure and principle. This means that tends to provide support only to those who work or those who can prove they are trying to look for work. Hence, while the surface-level intention is to incentivize participation in the workforce, critics have argued that the American welfare system is actually designed to benefit the rich.
What is Wrong With the Work-Biased Welfare System of the United States?
Evidence According to Existing Welfare Programs
An op-ed by Bob Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner which was published in The New York Times on May 2025 explained the attempt of the Republicans and the second Trump administration to slash Medicaid and SNAP benefits through requirements proving that the recipient either has work or is actively looking for work.
Supporting work-biased welfare aligns with long-standing ideological notions on individual or personal responsibility, limited government, and free-market economics. The usual rhetoric often frames work as a moral obligation while the actual implementation of welfare programs takes into consideration various gatekeeping mechanisms.
The work-biased American welfare system is not only embedded in political rhetoric but also in actual welfare programs. Both the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP impose mandatory work-related undertakings or related efforts like training or job search as eligibility condition.
Moreover, while the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the largest anti-poverty tools of the U.S. federal government, it only benefits people who are earning income from work. Americans without earned income are excluded. The same is true for Child Tax Credit. These programs are specific tax breaks or tax privileges on individual income tax.
American politicians, especially Republicans or conservatives, often assert that the best welfare is employment, thus framing work as a moral obligation and poverty as a failure of effort. This is the main reason why most welfare programs under the American welfare system are often designed to incentivize work and are provided with conditions.
Criticism of the Work-Biased U.S. Welfare System
A work-biased welfare system disregards people who are unable to work. These include personal caregivers, those with chronic illness or severe disabilities that render them unable to work, and individuals pursuing college degrees or vocational courses. It also fails to address structural unemployment and underemployment problems.
Progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann also underscored the fact that many American workers need government assistance because their wages are too low to cover basic living expenses despite working full-time. He argued that this is a deliberate policy choice to protect low wages for corporations and keep people dependent on benefits.
The workaround against welfare is increasing the minimum wage to meet basic living standards. A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that states that raised their minimum wage into the 15-per-hour range had about 33 percent less welfare participation rates than states with around 7-per-hour wages.
Hartmann reiterated the need to importance and benefit of raising the minimum wage instead of providing work-biased welfare programs. These programs are not designed to encourage work but to protect the interest of corporations by keeping labor cheap. The dollars spent on these programs are essentially a form of subsidies to business organizations.
Furthermore, instead of spending on welfare programs, both the state and federal governments are better off increasing corporate tax rates. The current work-bias in the American welfare system is less about promoting work and more about protecting the rich from remitting sizeable taxes while lining their pockets further through cheap labor.
FURTHER READINGS AND REFERENCES
- Hartmann, T. 3 June 2025. “Why Do America’s Workers Need Welfare? The Scandal Nobody Talks About.” The Hartmann Report. Available online
- Kennedy, B., Oz, M., Rollins, B., and Turner, S. 14 May 2025. “Trump Leadership: If You Want Welfare and Can Work, You Must.” The New York Times. Available online
- Winkler, M. R., Clohan, R., Komro, K. A., Livingston, M. D., and Markowitz, S. 2025. “State Minimum Wage and Food Insecurity Among US Households With Children.” JAMA Network Open. 8(3): e252043. DOI: 1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.2043