The Kroog Vs. The Poverty Trap

Paul Krugman on GOP Rep. Paul Ryan's austerity budget, 2014 edition being a load of crap:

How so? Well, Ryan et al — conservatives in general — claim to care deeply about opportunity, about giving those not born into affluence the ability to rise. And they claim that their hostility to welfare-state programs reflects their assessment that these programs actually reduce opportunity, creating a poverty trap. As Ryan once put it,

"we don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."

OK, do you notice the assumption here? It is that reduced incentives to work mean reduced social mobility. Is there any reason to believe this as a general proposition?

The answer of course is "no".
 

In fact, the evidence suggests that welfare-state programs enhance social mobility, thanks to little things like children of the poor having adequate nutrition and medical care. And conversely,of course, when such programs are absent or inadequate, the poor find themselves in a trap they often can’t escape, not because they lack the incentive, but because they lack the resources.

I mean, think about it: Do you really believe that making conditions harsh enough that poor women must work while pregnant or while they still have young children actually makes it more likely that those children will succeed in life?

The answer to that is no as well, but that's why Republicans immediately jump from this national policy argument to individual shaming and blaming of the single mother in question and respond with some increasingly awful variation of "She's the one who doomed the child to a lack of social mobility.  Bitch should have either kept her legs closed or married the kid's father.  Why should the taxpayer pick up the tab for that bad decision?"

And then these moral beacons of caring nod and shrug and pat themselves on the back, because Tough Love.  We can never have a debate over the fallacy of "hard work = success" because we're too busy stuck in the fallacy of  "unmarried women having sex = cause of all social ills".