I said:
A number of conservative thinkers have compared some of the social programs in the United States to the Speenhamland system in 18th Century England. Who are those thinkers and writers? What US programs and laws do they compare to Speenhamland? What effects on Americans do they say are similar and which laws and programs do they propose to repeal in order to end "Speenhamland" in America?
ChatGPT said:
How the “Speenhamland” analogy has been used on the U.S. right
| Thinker / source | U.S. law or program they liken to Speenhamland | Ill-effects they say the program reproduces | Repeals/roll-backs they recommend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Martin Anderson – White-House memo “A Short History of a ‘Family Security System’ ” (Apr. 1969) | President Nixon’s proposed Family Assistance Plan (guaranteed income / negative-income-tax) | • “Pauperization of the masses” — wage subsidies become a ceiling not a floor. • Encourages idleness & fraud. thecorrespondent.comcambridge.org | Urged Nixon to kill the bill; the plan died in the Senate. |
| Henry Hazlitt – Man vs. the Welfare State (1969) & Nat. Review essays | Any guaranteed annual income / NIT plus 1960s cash welfare (AFDC) | • Depresses market wages, swells relief rolls. • Replicates Speenhamland’s “bottomless” cost spiral. papers.ssrn.comcambridge.org | Scrap proposals for a GAI/NIT and repeal federal cash-assistance programs, leaving only locally-financed, strictly limited relief. |
| George Gilder – Wealth and Poverty (1981) | Great-Society welfare complex (AFDC, Food Stamps, housing aid) | • “Moral pauperization”: subsidies to non-work, illegitimacy, crime. • Employers shift cost of low pay onto taxpayers. thecorrespondent.com | End open-ended welfare entitlements, substitute work requirements & private-charity support. |
| Charles Murray – Losing Ground (1984) | Same Great-Society programs + early Medicaid expansions | • Welfare behaves like Speenhamland by making non-work the rational choice; breaks families. thecorrespondent.com | Let most means-tested programs expire, or (later in In Our Hands) replace them wholesale with a flat universal grant funded by ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC/TANF, SNAP & housing aid. |
| Robert Rector & Edwin Rubenstein – Heritage & Social-Contract papers (2009) | Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) | • Modern Speenhamland “wage subsidy.” • Holds wages down, rewards employers of very low-skill labor, fuels illegitimacy & immigration fraud. thesocialcontract.com | Phase out or cap the EITC, pair tight work-rules with lower immigration and a higher market wage. |
| Kevin D. Williamson – National Review column “Chaos in the Family…” (2016) | SNAP, SSDI, EITC & Medicaid expansion | • Creates small-town “dependency archipelagos”—exactly the rural stagnation Polanyi blamed on Speenhamland. etd.ohiolink.edu | Shrink or time-limit the programs; tell able-bodied adults to move to where the jobs are instead of subsidising immobility. |
Common threads in the conservative “Speenhamland” critique
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Wage-subsidy logic – All the writers stress that programs topping-up earned income (or replacing it outright) let employers pay less while taxpayers fill the gap, just as parish relief did after 1795.
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Moral hazard – They echo Malthus/Ricardo’s 19th-century charge that “outdoor relief” bred larger families, idleness, and vice; the modern version is incentives to single parenthood, long-term unemployment, or opioid-era disability.
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Fiscal “bottomless pit” – Rising caseloads and benefit levels are portrayed as evidence Speenhamland’s cost-spiral is repeating.
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Preferred remedy: contraction, not reform – With the partial exception of Murray’s later flat-grant plan, these authors call for outright repeal or strict caps/work-tests rather than redesigning subsidies.
In short, the Speenhamland story supplies conservatives with a ready historical parable: wage-or-income supplements meant to fight poverty can entrench it instead. Their policy prescription is consistent—scale the supplements back (or scrap them) before they entrench a new American “universal pauperism.”
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ChatGPT said:
1. The Speenhamland analogy is still alive on the contemporary right
| Year | Author / outlet | Where the analogy appears | Targeted U.S. policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Kevin D. Williamson, National Review (“Chaos in the Family…,” Mar. 2016) – later republished in his essay collection Big White Ghetto | Warns that rural “wage-top-ups” like modern welfare recreate the “pauper traps” of Speenhamland | SNAP, SSDI, EITC |
| 2018 | Edwin Rubenstein, The Social Contract (“EITC and Low-Wage Jobs”) | Calls the Earned Income Tax Credit “our own Speenhamland” that lets firms pay sub-par wages | EITC thesocialcontract.com |
| 2018 | Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker & op-eds | Uses Speenhamland to argue wage-subsidy schemes can hollow out productive work | Proposals for Universal Basic Income and large wage subsidies amazon.comcqpress.sagepub.com |
| 2018 | Arnold Ahlert, Patriot Post column “UBI: The Nanny State on Steroids” | Presents Speenhamland as historical proof that unconditional cash breeds dependency | City-level UBI pilots, federal GAI ideas patriotpost.us |
| 2019-20 | Robert Rector & Heritage Foundation backgrounders | Brand the EITC a “modern Speenhamland wage subsidy” that depresses pay and fuels fraud | EITC, proposals to expand “refundable” credits heritage.org |
2. Trump’s 2025 budget-reconciliation bill (“One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) and welfare rollback
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The bill slashes SNAP and Medicaid and grafts strict work-hour and documentation rules onto both programs – a move Heritage’s Rector explicitly urged as a way to “finish repealing Speenhamland.” Guardians of the analogy therefore see the work-requirement language as a partial victory. theguardian.com
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EITC: lawmakers did not cut the credit. Instead the bill creates a Treasury certification program and anti-fraud task-force aimed at duplicate or ineligible claims – the only EITC-related section of the law, scored as saving $15 billion over ten years. No benefit levels or phase-in schedules change. bipartisanpolicy.org
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Bottom line: the bill mirrors the 1834 Poor-Law reforms not by touching wage subsidies, but by tightening relief for the able-bodied poor and making food and health aid “less eligible” than low-wage work.
3. How influential is Kevin D. Williamson?
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Former roving correspondent at National Review, now national writer for The Dispatch; regular on conservative podcasts and a half-dozen books to his name. He is main-stream inside the conservative-intellectual ecosystem, not “fringe,” though his acerbic style puts him outside the cable-news pundit circuit. en.wikipedia.org
4. Where do Murdoch, the Koch network and Peter Thiel sit?
| Actor | Welfare/“Speenhamland” stance | Influence on 2025 bill |
|---|---|---|
| Rupert Murdoch (Fox News / WSJ) | Editorial line hammers “dependency culture” and cheers SNAP/Medicaid work rules, but rarely uses the Speenhamland label. Commentators such as Charles Payne echo Heritage talking points. | Fox coverage helped build grassroots GOP support for stricter work requirements; no EITC focus. |
| Koch network (Americans for Prosperity, Cato, AEI scholars) | Long backed the EITC or larger wage subsidies as market-friendly, pro-work alternatives to minimum-wage hikes; thus they tend to reject the Speenhamland analogy. | Koch-aligned groups lobbied against outright EITC cuts; they were comfortable with fraud-control language that survived. theguardian.com |
| Peter Thiel | Has flirted with Universal Basic Income experiments and argues tech productivity can finance cash transfers—the opposite of the anti-Speenhamland view. | No evidence of direct fingerprints on the 2025 bill; his philanthropy is aimed at long-horizon tech and geopolitical projects, not welfare reform. en.wikipedia.org |
Other voices: populist senators J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio invoked the “Speenhamland problem” in floor speeches to justify work rules, while think-tankers at American Compass (e.g., Oren Cass) continue to warn that wage subsidies without productivity policy will repeat the English mistake.
Take-away
Conservative warnings about “re-creating Speenhamland” remain a lively trope, but Trump’s newest law only half-answers that call: it pares back in-kind welfare while leaving the EITC—the chief modern wage subsidy—largely intact and merely tightening compliance.
I said:
ChatGPT said:
Short answer: almost never.
Since the 1960 s the American writers who invoke Speenhamland have aimed almost exclusively at means-tested, tax-financed transfers (AFDC/TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, the EITC, housing vouchers and the various guaranteed-income or UBI proposals). Classic unemployment insurance (UI) is financed by an earmarked payroll tax and—crucially—requires recent work histories, so the analogy that “taxpayers top up low wages and subsidise idleness” doesn’t quite stick. As a result:
| Where the Speenhamland analogy shows up | Target of the criticism | Anything about UI? |
|---|---|---|
| Martin Anderson memo to Nixon (1969), Hazlitt (Man vs. the Welfare State, 1969), Gilder (Wealth & Poverty, 1981), Charles Murray (1984 → 2006), Robert Rector/Heritage (2000 - 2024), Oren Cass (2018) | negative-income-tax proposals, AFDC, SNAP, EITC, Medicaid expansion, UBI pilots | No |
| Kevin D. Williamson, National Review (2016) | SNAP, SSDI, EITC; “dependency archipelagos” | No |
| Edwin Rubenstein, The Social Contract (2009–18) | EITC “wage subsidy” | No |
What has been said about unemployment insurance
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Conservative policy shops attack the pandemic UI expansions (PUA + $600/$300 bonuses), calling them the “most flawed, wasteful, and damaging” Covid programme and blaming them for labour shortages. heritage.org
The Heritage papers, however, make no reference to Speenhamland; they frame the problem as bad “replacement rates,” fraud and lax work search—not a wage-subsidy trap. -
Libertarian economists (Cato, AEI) likewise criticise duration and generosity, but again without the Speenhamland story. Their remedy is to shorten benefit duration, tighten job-search rules, or shift to individual savings accounts—not to abolish UI.
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A handful of academics describe Speenhamland itself as an early form of unemployment compensation (e.g., Boyer; Blaug). Conservatives rarely cite this scholarship and it has played no role in current repeal campaigns. booksandideas.net
Bottom line for your question
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Unemployment insurance is largely spared. The modern “Speenhamlanders” focus on non-contributory aid they believe subsidises low wages or non-work. Payroll-tax-financed UI looks (to them) more like a private insurance pool than a poor-relief scheme.
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Pandemic bonuses were an exception. Critics said the $300–$600 add-ons recreated a temporary Speenhamland-style disincentive, but they did not call for repealing the underlying UI system.
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No serious GOP or Trump-era bill has tried to roll back regular UI. Trump’s 2025 reconciliation law tightened SNAP and Medicaid and ordered anti-fraud audits of the EITC; it left UI untouched.
So the answer is: the Speenhamland analogy has been wielded almost solely against welfare and wage-subsidy programs for the poor, not against unemployment insurance itself, except for a few one-off jabs at the extraordinary Covid-era supplements.
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ChatGPT said:
Who in the Speenhamland-debate universe actually moves the needle with Donald Trump?
| Rough tier of influence | Why they matter to Trumpworld | Fresh evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Rupert Murdoch & Fox/WSJ empire | • 24-hour message amplifier to the MAGA base—Fox remains “a pure MAGA propaganda organ,” and its hosts and bookers seed the talking points Trump repeats. • Fox personalities supply staffing and policy ideas (e.g., Stephen Miller in 2016, Laura Ingraham & Pete Hegseth on cabinet short-lists again). | A May 28, 2025 analysis notes that even while the Wall Street Journal editorial page is souring, “the Fox echo chamber has been key to … populating the Trump administration.” prospect.org |
| 2. Heritage Foundation (Project 2025) – incl. Robert Rector | • Wrote the 900-page “Project 2025” blueprint; dozens of its authors now hold second-term posts. • Rector’s welfare papers supplied the work-requirement language that ended up in Trump’s July 2025 reconciliation bill. | CBS found that many of Trump’s first-100-day executive orders “closely align” with Project 2025. cbsnews.com The House Oversight Subcommittee highlighted Rector’s testimony while pledging to “work with the Trump Administration.” oversight.house.gov |
| 3. Charles Koch & the AFP network | • Major donor ecosystem behind the push to lock in Trump’s expiring tax cuts and strip regulations. • AFP’s $20 million field campaign gives GOP legislators air cover, and Koch staff draft much of the tax language. | Guardian scoop on Koch’s January 2025 “herculean” pro-Trump tax drive. theguardian.com |
| 4. Peter Thiel & the PayPal-Mafia tech bloc | • Direct pipeline on personnel: fellow PayPal alumnus David Sacks named “AI & Crypto Czar”; Thiel protégés land at DoD, HHS, SEC. • Shapes crypto-friendly, light-regulation tech policy that Trump now touts as a growth plank. | Reuters on Sacks appointment (explicitly links Sacks to Thiel and Musk). reuters.com |
| 5. Oren Cass / American Compass cohort | • Not inner-circle, but has Vice-President J.D. Vance’s ear on tariffs and industrial policy; cited by Rubio and Commerce nominees. • Provides intellectual ballast the White House uses to defend protectionism against Koch-style free-traders. | Politico interview notes Cass as “an ally of top administration officials like Vance and Rubio.” americancompass.org |
Who doesn’t really sway Trump
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Kevin D. Williamson – A long-time Trump critic; listed among Republicans who opposed Trump even back in 2016. No public contact with the administration. en.wikipedia.org
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Charles Murray, George Gilder, Edwin Rubenstein, Martin Anderson, Henry Hazlitt – Quoted by conservatives for the Speenhamland parable, but they have no staffing, funding, or media leverage over the current White House (Anderson and Hazlitt are deceased).
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Koch vs. Heritage vs. Thiel? They occasionally clash (Koch lobbyists saved the EITC that Heritage wanted trimmed; Thiel’s crypto wish-list irks AFP’s inflation hawks), but Trump plays each off the others and takes what he needs (cash, policy text, or PR).
Bottom line:
In the Trump-era fight over “modern Speenhamland,” the institutional actors matter more than the individual pundits. Murdoch conditions the mass GOP audience; Heritage writes the boiler-plate and supplies staff; Koch money keeps the tax-cut machine humming; and Thiel’s tech network delivers personnel and niche policy. The headline conservative essayists—Williamson, Murray, et al.—shape debate, not decisions.
I said:
ChatGPT said:
That’s right—within the set of writers / institutions who invoke “Speenhamland” to attack modern welfare policy, Heritage has the clearest, proximate line into Trump-era decision-making:
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Direct policy text. Robert Rector’s long-running papers on work requirements and wage-subsidy “traps” supplied language that showed up almost verbatim in the 2025 reconciliation bill’s SNAP and Medicaid sections.
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Staff pipeline. Heritage’s Project 2025 handbook doubled as a résumé book; dozens of its contributors took posts in the second-term agencies drafting the bill.
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Hill outreach. Heritage briefed the relevant House committees while the bill was being assembled, positioning its Speenhamland framing as the historical rationale for tightening aid to the able-bodied.
By contrast:
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Murdoch/Fox amplify the themes to the base, but they rarely frame them explicitly as “Speenhamland,” and they don’t draft statutory language.
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Koch-aligned groups actually defend the EITC, so on this particular issue they sometimes counter Heritage rather than reinforce it.
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Thiel and tech-world allies shape crypto/AI policy, not welfare reforms.
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Essayists like Kevin D. Williamson or Charles Murray influence the broader intellectual climate but have no comparable institutional machinery or staffing footprint.
So, if you’re ranking the Speenhamland-focused voices by practical leverage over Trump’s welfare policy, Heritage indeed sits at the top of the list.
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