"During the most active period of the Industrial Revolution, from 1795 to 1834, the creating of a labor market in England was prevented through the Speenhamland Law." Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944
The Poor Law Reform of 1834 ended the Speenhamland System and did away with "the right to live" in England. Outdoor relief was withdrawn from the unemployed and a "market" for labor was created.
Conservatives in America often compare Medicaid and programs like SNAP to the Speenhamland System. Some include the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Dealing with the problem of poverty has been a central concern of first English and then American governments since at least the 18th Century.
Speenhamland is especially difficult for me. Polanyi thought the effects of outdoor relief and aid in lieu of wages on the rural population of England after the commons were enclosed were devastating, reducing the rural population to pauperism. With the government providing a subsistence level of income, wages fell to zero. The repeal of the Speenhamland system forced the rural population to sell their labor on the open market. Those who could not find work in the countryside or in the city died of starvation, but in the long run the supply of cheap, mobile labor fueled the Industrial Revolution.
Are our solutions to the problem of poverty in America dooming future generations of the poor to an abject, Speenhamlandish existence? Are there better alternatives?
I need to think about programs that directly benefit children.
Clearly, the Trump budget and tax bill will hurt, not benefit children.
The CTC modestly rises in value but does not extend to the poorest non-working parents; the EITC survives intact but faces new anti-fraud screening.
SNAP and WIC cuts, plus Medicaid work rules, remove automatic safety nets that have proven strongest at reducing child food insecurity and developmental delays.
Head Start funding slow-downs and CPB defunding hit two of the few evidence-backed interventions (quality preschool and educational television) that improve long-run earnings.
Linkage to SNAP means children bear collateral damage from adult work rules, echoing 19th-century concerns that the poor law punished families to discipline working-age adults.
So the Trump package turns more of the child-focused social safety net into conditional or self-financed support (tax credits, charity or private streaming subscriptions for programming, for example) and shrinks the unconditional, federally funded pieces. For conservative architects like the Heritage Foundation, that is the whole point; for antipoverty advocates, it breaks several of the rungs that help children climb out of poverty before they ever enter the labor market.
Cuts or administrative hurdles to SNAP, WIC, Head Start, and PBS attack the very in-kind and developmental programs that research shows yield the highest long-run returns for poor children—leaving a landscape in which the tax code offers slightly more help, but day-to-day supports for nutrition, early education, and learning are squeezed.
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:
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.
Heritage’s Project 2025 handbook doubled as a résumé book; dozens of its contributors took posts in the second-term agencies drafting the bill.
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.
I need to think about other views of Speenhamland and the Poor Law Reform.
