The workers in the vineyard

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, "You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right." So they went.

He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, "Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?"

"Because no one has hired us," they answered.

He said to them, "You also go and work in my vineyard."

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, "Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first."

The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. Especially that douchebag Rick Santelli from CNBC. But each one of them also received a denarius. When he received it, the overpaid, whining, miserable prick began to grumble against the landowner. "These men who were hired last worked only one hour," he said, "and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day."

But he answered him, "Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?"

I changed a word or two in there, but that word "envious" in the final question is holy writ. The perverse irony, of course, is that you're most likely to hear that word tossed about nowadays by exactly the sort of greedy, grumbling sorts described in the parable above. These are warped, stunted, soulless creatures who lie awake at night worrying that somehow, somewhere, some poor person might be catching a break that they didn't 100-percent deserve. Some poor family might be getting extra food stamps. Some poor mother might be using WIC to get the good cheese. Some family might not get kicked out of their home and onto the street when really they should have been responsible enough not to trust the professional realtors and bankers who assured them they could afford that house.

And these awful people -- Santelli and his fans who are consumed by this fevered jealousy of hypothetically "irresponsible" and "undeserving" poor people receiving help, relief or mercy -- then have the chutzpah to accuse those in favor of helping those in need of "the politics of envy."

Comments

[Sue]

I'm pretty sure that at least one of the gospels did call Rick Santelli a douchebag.

[Jessica]

I'm pretty sure that at least one of the gospels did call Rick Santelli a douchebag.

That was John. He had everything right, that one did.

[victoria]

it's the NRSV: New Revised Slacktivist Version.

[Lori]

One of the (many) things that has been working my last nerve is the way the douchebag contingent keeps talking about all these horrible people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford. The last time I checked one does not take out a loan of any sort. One requests a loan and is approved or turned down by the lender. In spite of what those stupid Lending Tree ads said, the borrower is not in control of the transaction. Absent fraud, any loan that starts out too large for the borrower to repay is the fault of the bank. During the recent bubble the banks managed to be at least partially responsible for some of the fraud cases because they weren't doing even minimal due diligence.

Santelli and all his fans seriously need to shut it.

[burgundy]

Not being already familiar with the parable, and having just read this article in the paper, I was anticipating a different ending.

Spansion laid off a third of its workforce, apparently without severance pay, and at the same time restored full salaries to its top executives (they'd gotten a 10% pay cut last fall.)

But it only gets called "class warfare" when it goes from the bottom up.

[Trevel]

I can, however, sympathize with the people who are barely struggling to stay off of food stamps, who have gone hungry to pay the mortgage for a tiny place that they can barely fit in, and who are understandably a bit angry that their neighbour with a larger house and a larger debt will get everything paid for. It's the story of the grasshopper and the ant, only the grasshopper gets a sexy girlfriend and some slaves and the ant is beaten and forced to serve the grasshopper.

I have trouble believing that Santelli is one of them, but I do feel sorry for the poor who, unlike the story given, get nothing and even what they have is taken away from them, for the horrid crime of not living beyond their means.

[Mnemosyne]

I can, however, sympathize with the people who are barely struggling to stay off of food stamps, who have gone hungry to pay the mortgage for a tiny place that they can barely fit in, and who are understandably a bit angry that their neighbour with a larger house and a larger debt will get everything paid for.

You know that's not how the program works, right? No one is getting their mortgage "paid for" by the government. They're getting to renegotiate the terms of their loans. They're not getting a free house courtesy of the government -- they're still going to have to pay the mortgage on it, even if the monthly payments are less.

Geez, no wonder people are up in arms if they actually think the government is handing out free houses to their neighbors! Maybe they should pay a little more attention to the news so they know what's going on and not what their friend's cousin's nephew's daughter said she heard Hannity say that Rush said.

[Lori]

Also, everyone benefits from having as many people as possible stay in their homes. No matter how irritated you are with your neighbors it doesn't help you to let them "get what they deserve" if that means that you end up in a ghost neighborhood with 50%+ of the houses in foreclosure.

[trevel]

Hyperbole

Although I have heard the "Just give them their houses" theory tossed around here and there. (I'm looking at YOU here, Mr. Jon Stewart.) -- I'm actually a bit baffled that "Let them refinance their mortgages" was ... well, not done by default, prior to crashing the whole system.

On the flip side, you're probably right that part of the problem is due to people believing that it's the hyperbolic version I used above.

[NNeko]

I'm afraid that the parable isn't quite up to the economic realities of the day. Let's try...

After the denarius had been distributed, the foreman went to the people who had been working since the morning and said "Hey, can I borrow a denarius? These folks who showed up in the 11th hour need a bit of help to pay all of the bills that they owe to... well, me..." and then he took the denarius because he was the foreman and could, saying "but it's for the good of society and at least you get to keep your outstanding credit rating!"

Not to entirely side with Santelli because there are worse things -- like a glut of foreclosures simultaneously freezing bank liquidity and devaluing the real estate market such that, oh say, China could buy up oodles of suburbs with the USFG debt that they've been accumulating off of our misadventures in Iraq. So even my revision doesn't capture the real big picture.

The real problem with the current "plan" is that it gives the impression of chaos, with chaos making people nervous. Wrong behavior may get rewarded or punished, while right behavior gets roundly ignored. But I can accept this inasmuch as worse results (mentioned above) are avoided, to which end Santelli and his ilk sadden me with their small-mindedness.

Going back to the original parable, the thing that has always bugged me about it was that it came off smug and short -- especially in a religion where people are told to do whatever they're doing as if for the Lord, taking the long view (rather than the day labor) approach. Really, what happens next? Do the folks who were working all day get steady employment because they're always first up while the 11th hourers run the contractor's risk of unsteady income? Do the all-day folks renegotiate for 8 denarius instead of just 1, given that the foreman is "generous"? Or, as it is written the same every time I read it, does the cycle just repeat itself and the truth of the matter is that the foreman is a piss-poor project manager?

[The Ridger]

Back in the old days banks made mortgage loans and then held them. Few actively tried to lend to people who couldn't afford it - remember? That was the joke: Only people who didn't need loans could get them. Of late, people made loans and then immediately sold them, so they didn't care if the borrowers could pay it back. They'd made theirs. Unfortunately, most borrowers still thought the lenders cared whether they could manage the payments...

Most of these people don't live in McMansions, any more than most people on welfare are driving Cadillacs and wearing diamonds.

[The Ridger]

And in the original parable, they all die that night and find they're in heaven. And the first bunch hate it because the second bunch is there, too.

[trevel]

I'm not entirely sure this parable is as direct a parallel as Slacky would like -- we've got a lot of people who were hired under the same terms and then were paid exactly what they'd agreed to, with the earlier arriving ones saying "Hey!" at the end when they didn't get extra beyond what they'd agreed on.

I'd liken it more to the Prodigal Son ("But Da-aad, that's MY inheritance you're spending on him!") -- or, if you prefer, the story of Jonah. ("Hey! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DESTROY THEM!").

"I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion."

[wintermute]

Hyperbole

So, when you said "their neighbour with a larger house and a larger debt will get everything paid for", you meant "their neighbours get a chance to renegotiate their mortgage to something they can afford before they have to live in a box"? Because hyperbole is best used with exaggeration, rather than saying the opposite of what you actually mean.

[HAWK-er Hurricane]

But it only gets called "class warfare" when it goes from the bottom up.

Posted by: burgundy
------------
"Class Warfare" is what happens when the lower classes shoot back. And that's a bad thing, because it interferes with the class slaughter that's the norm.

[bad Jim]

The landowner could simply have avoided the friction by paying the earliest workers first.

[Gotchaye]

This is something of an aside, but I've never quite understood how far-reaching that parable is supposed to be or exactly what lesson ought to be taken from it. Perhaps someone could explain it to me?

On the one hand, it does seem like the early workers are being ungrateful. On the other hand, if the landowner makes a habit of this, then he's something of a jerk. Suppose I fly to Africa in order to hand-deliver a lobster dinner to one starving child. While all of the other starving children might not be quite justified in complaining, and while my deed may be technically good, it's clear that I'm a tremendous bastard. My intuition is that I'd think worse of someone who did that than of someone who did nothing at all. Less ridiculously, if I have two ten dollar bills and two nephews standing before me, and I give one of them both bills, it's hard to call me a nice guy. Basically, the fact that no one has a right to complain doesn't mean that there's no injustice.

Also, in modern society we certainly don't believe that you can't complain about getting paid exactly what you agreed to. If I find out that a fellow employee is making much more money than I am for a given amount of work, I've got a pretty good case for discrimination (some of this may depend on my race/gender/etc and the other employee's race/gender/etc). And a 1200% difference in opening offer for people of equal qualifications is probably going to win me that lawsuit. So I don't know how meaningful this ought to be for more than very short-term contracts (where the payer's increasing interest in attracting a workforce justifies significant pay differences that would otherwise be unjust). But it seems to me that we certainly don't believe it just to give people different wages on a whim.

I gather from googling it that the idea is that God can let deathbed confessioners into the same heaven that lifelong saints get into, and perhaps that's so, but does it have much applicability outside of that?

[cjmr]

Completely and totally off topic--I'm signing off for Lent again this year, 'see' y'all in April.

Have fun. Don't do feel free to do anything I wouldn't do.

[hapax]

Gotchaye, the difference from your example is that the earliest workers aren't starving while the late ones are feasting. A denarius a day was a perfectly decent wage. Nor were the late workers slackers; they were *trying* to go to work, but no one would hire them. (Sort of like a lot of the people who are having trouble with their mortgage.)

I think the point of the parable is that nobody *deserves* grace, nobody *earns* it. Like the prodigal son's elder brother, we do what we we are supposed to because that's what we are supposed to do, and our reward isn't the party, but in living in close harmony with the will of our "father". If Dad chooses to rejoice with the brother who only clued in late, our proper reaction should be pity for the years he wasted in empty decadence (or begging for a job in the marketplace), while we had the pleasure of putting a good day's satisfying work.

But, like cjmr, it's time for me to take a few weeks off from blathering on about what *I* think, and spend some time listening for what I can learn...

[Reynard]

Santelli needs to quit whining, drink his Kool-Aid and eat his peanut butter.

[Mnemosyne]

Hyperbole

If you're going to try and claim hyperbole, you should probably not say what other people are saying in all seriousness.

I'm actually a bit baffled that "Let them refinance their mortgages" was ... well, not done by default, prior to crashing the whole system.

The problem is that the whole system was set up so that mortgages were sliced up into tiny bits and sold off to multiple buyers. If a homeowner got in trouble, no one knew who held the mortgage. A lot of homeowners went under because the bank they got their mortgage from no longer owned the mortgage and couldn't renegotiate it.

And when the bank could renegotiate it, the homeowner would often end up with the exact same unworkable payment once the bank tacked on all of their fees and penalties.

[angulimala]

Posts like this are exactly why I come back to this blog.

As for the lack of economic applicability, the parable is about grace and not economics so obviously it's going to have weaknesses but I found it amusing and somewhat clever nonetheless.

The truth is that there is a combination of people who took out loans in good faith and are now getting hosed and some who were actually "irresponsible" who took out second mortgages to indulge in unnecessary consumption. Then there were multipliers, like the CDOs, that "regular guys" had nothing to do with. Frankly, if this were JUST about mortgages then it wouldn't be that bad. The problem is that banks have multiple times their net worth in outstanding CDOs that are still in danger of becoming actual IOUs.

[Alan]

Ye gods, do I hate the parable of the Prodigal Son! To me, it has always, always been the story of a father who quite plainly loves one son more than the other and who condemns the disfavored son for daring to complain about it. I have never been able to derive any positive moral lesson from it which outweighs the bad taste left in my mouth by the treatment of the older son, both at the hands of the father and the author.

[The Devil's Advocate]

I gather from googling it that the idea is that God can let deathbed confessioners into the same heaven that lifelong saints get into, and perhaps that's so, but does it have much applicability outside of that?

The early workers were perfectly content with a denarius when the foreman first offered it as a wage, and only began to grumble when they saw the late workers getting the same pay. Their issue wasn’t that the denarius was a bad deal; they simply envied the other guys and felt gypped because desert took a back seat to mercy.

They got what they wanted. They got what they needed. But some other poor saps – guys who were still looking for work late in the day, perhaps for want of food – got “more.”

The reaction to this economic crisis is a good parallel: some people, whether by accident or fault, are having an impossible time meeting their current financial obligations. Their loans are being renegotiated at better terms to avoid default. Others, who weren’t facing foreclosure, aren’t getting the same deal – at least not without having to ask for it.

Instead of the financially steadier folks being happy they never faced foreclosure in the first place, more than a few of them – and not all on the brink of starvation, either – are taking this opportunity to bitch about how someone, somewhere, got “more.”

If any homeowner is scraping by for want of an easier payment plan, and refuses to approach the bank for a renegotiation at a time when lenders are particularly willing, and his reason for this is mere pride, then he has robbed himself. His neighbors – his fellow workers in the field – had nothing to do with it.

And likewise if a worker needed more denarii than one, he could have negotiated with the foreman on the basis of his own merit or need as opposed to because someone else got more than he thought they deserved.

[psul]

Not sure if everyone here is au fait with Tom the Dancing Bug (it may be syndicated in Fred's paper?). The description of Santelli's reaction has been attacked repeatedly in the "Lucky Ducky" strips from that comic - the rich pig/rodent continually envious of the poor duck being given the meagre compensation of rotten food or slave labour.

For those who don't know TtDB, there is a rotating roster of regular strips, ranging from hilariously surrealist to post-modern to scathing satire. "Lucky Ducky" falls on the less funny, more biting end.

It can be found on Salon or Gocomics.com, and the wikipedia page has a link to a large archive of old strips, including plenty that characterise this issue.

[Bugmaster]

Their issue wasn’t that the denarius was a bad deal; they simply envied the other guys and felt gypped because desert took a back seat to mercy. They got what they wanted. They got what they needed.

Well, the problem with parables is that they can be interpreted in many different ways. For example, there are lots of people today who are standing around, waiting for work. They're so desperate that they will work for any wage, as long as it means they can stave off starvation for their families for one more day. Renegotiation is not an option for them, because the supply of workers far exceeds demand, and thus they have no bargaining power. If you were one of these workers, wouldn't you be upset if you had to work all day in the hot sun for your denarius, and the guy next to you got his almost for free ?

Note that I'm not disagreeing with your actual point regarding homeowners and lenders; I'm merely pointing out that the parable does not necessarily support it.

[bad Jim]

The general problem is that a great many people deeply resent undeserving people benefiting from - what, not necessarily their own generosity, since they're not generally inclined to be generous - but from the very possibility that people not like us might get something they don't deserve, and certainly nothing that we don't already have.

I live in a very affluent Southern California beach city. Authentic authoritarians are rarely seen hereabouts. What we have instead are the insistently self-entitled: I need that parking place, God forbid that anyone get in front of me, I deserve my hulking urban assault vehicle, and it's always my turn at a stop sign.

It's never clear why, exactly, anyone is more deserving than anyone else, but it's abundantly obvious that a great many of my fellow citizens feel entitled to disregard the rest of us. Perhaps that's not as horrifying as the seething resentment of the unworthy that one might commonly encounter in less privileged venues, but they share the presumption that only some are worthy.

[Kit Whitfield]

Have a nice Lent, Cjmr and hapax! (And everyone else.)

Going back to the original parable, the thing that has always bugged me about it was that it came off smug and short -- especially in a religion where people are told to do whatever they're doing as if for the Lord, taking the long view (rather than the day labor) approach. Really, what happens next? Do the folks who were working all day get steady employment because they're always first up while the 11th hourers run the contractor's risk of unsteady income? Do the all-day folks renegotiate for 8 denarius instead of just 1, given that the foreman is "generous"? Or, as it is written the same every time I read it, does the cycle just repeat itself and the truth of the matter is that the foreman is a piss-poor project manager?

I was always taught the day was a metaphor for a lifetime; that the message was you'd get into the Kingdom of Heaven whether you were a lifelong Christian or a recent convert.

As a human story about employment, I'd assume one of the points it's making is that it's righteous to pay people according to need. As hapax and Devil's Advocate point out, the eleventh hour people aren't hanging around the taverns trying to extend their bar credit; they're waiting in the marketplace in the hopes of getting work and having bad luck in finding any. They've been 'standing there all day long'. These guys aren't scroungers; they want to work. They've presumably also got families to feed and rent to pay.

So getting paid short wages because they were hired late in the day through no fault of their own would be more bad luck for them, not as bad as no wages but still not great. They'd probably accept it because they had very little choice in the matter, but it's not impressive to take advantage of that. (I'm sure plenty of us have encountered bosses who do take advantage of the 'I need this job' situation to pay short wages and make heavy demands, and none of us like it one little bit.) What the vineyard owner (owner, not foreman) seems to be doing is respecting a work ethic and the need for living wages when he sees them, and refusing to exploit the eleventh-hour guys' earlier bad luck.

As a business model, frankly that's pretty sensible. Refusing to take advantage of someone when they're stuck is how you get employee loyalty; what's the betting the eleventh-hour guys will be the ones to help out when the vineyard owner's house burns down and he can't pay them? People generally appreciate decent treatment and want to pay it back. And if the early-hour guys are smart, they'll conclude that they should turn up tomorrow, because a guy who does right by others will do right by them: it isn't favouritism, it's just refusing to exploit bad luck, and if their own luck turns they may need a boss like that.

But even without tacking on that burned-house scenario, the guy is just trying to make sure everyone gets a living wage. We note that he keeps going back to the marketplace, after all; maybe he needs more workers and keeps underestimating how many he needs - though if he's that dopy I wonder how he got rich in the first place - but maybe he's trying to make sure that everyone has a job today. He has a vineyard, they don't, he can afford to spread some denarii around, they can't, and he's concerned for the wellbeing of his poorer neighbours. The guy's using what he has to run an employment program, and good for him.

By that logic, what he's saying to the complaining workers is, 'So ... you're saying you want these guys' kids to go hungry tonight?'

[Ian]

Have a somber, grim lent, I think you mean to say.

[Kit Whitfield]

Have a somber, grim lent, I think you mean to say.

Nope, I meant a spiritually refreshing Lent. Which is its own kind of nice. :-)

[Tonio]

The reference to granite countertops and extra bathrooms in the CNBC article reminds me uncomfortably of the old racist myth about non-whites allegedly wasting their money on expensive cars and TVs. My cynical side wants to believe that "undeserving poor" is a racist euphemism, and that may be true in some cases, but I suspect Fred is right that it's simple resentment.

[Kit Whitfield]

My cynical side wants to believe that "undeserving poor" is a racist euphemism

It's classist, and not a euphemism, but it predates racism in its origin. It was a concept used in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Britain to decide who should go into the workhouse . The contemporary phrase 'sturdy beggars', meaning the able-bodied unemployed, seems to have died a merciful death, but the concept is still around.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 banned all 'outdoor relief', meaning welfare, and laid down that if you got to a state of destitution, it was the workhouse or nothing. This basically meant prison or starvation, as conditions in the workhouses were designed to be as harsh as possible - including separating married couples and parents from their children as a matter of principle, very hard labour including for the children, and wearing a uniform marked 'P' for 'pauper' - so as to discourage scroungers.

Britain was almost entirely white in its population at that time, so racism didn't enter into it. It was just based on a profound hatred of the poor that preferred to take small children from their mothers and make them work like slaves than to run the tiniest risk that somebody, somewhere, might be getting a penny more than they deserved.

[Michael Cule]

"or, if you prefer, the story of Jonah. ("Hey! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DESTROY THEM!")."

No, that's not quite it.

It's more:

"Look, Lord I knew you weren't going to go through with destroying them. And given you're omniscient you must have known you weren't. I even told you beforehand you weren't. SO WHY D'YA HAFTA GET ON MY CASE ALREADY! CAN'T A GUY JUST GO ABOUT HIS BUSINESS WITHOUT YOU GIVING HIM DUMBASS MISSIONS? WHATYA GOT ALL THEM ANGELS HANGING AROUND FOR IF NOT TO CARRY MESSAGES? HUH? HUH?"

And the Lord spoke unto him and said: "Stop kvetching. Here, have a pointless parable about a gourd."

[Jake]

eleventh hour people aren't hanging around the taverns trying to extend their bar credit; they're waiting in the marketplace in the hopes of getting work and having bad luck in finding any. They've been 'standing there all day long'. These guys aren't scroungers; they want to work. They've presumably also got families to feed and rent to pay.

Except that that can't possibly be true. The farmer has been there every three hours all day. If the eleventh-hour workers wanted to work so bad, why didn't they go with him one of the first four times he came looking?

The moral I took from this story is that it's not your work in the field (good and/or Christian behaviour in this life) that gets you a denarius (into heaven), but rather the generosity of the farmer (grace of God). Which is all well and good if that's what you (want to) believe, but it does leave me wondering why the farmer bothers with the pretense in that case. Why not just show up at the marketplace once, give everyone a denarius, and have done with it?

[Kit Whitfield]

If the eleventh-hour workers wanted to work so bad, why didn't they go with him one of the first four times he came looking?

Because he didn't offer to hire them. It's described as a marketplace where employers approach workers, not the other way around, which makes sense; after all, until someone actually says 'Do you want a job?', there's no reason to assume they're hiring rather than just going to market to buy dinner. If workers approached everyone they saw, shoppers would feel harassed and it would add to the chaos.

You're assuming a landowner who knows in advance that they won't be hired. Otherwise he's liable to assume he's being a bad neighbour to bag all the workers first thing in the morning when other landowners may need workers themselves, rather than giving everyone a chance to sort themselves out before he intervenes.

You're also assuming a marketplace with every single person visible at every moment and their purpose immediately apparent - no stalls, no crowds of shoppers, nothing to get in the way, which doesn't sound like any marketplace I've ever seen. Marketplaces are busy, full of people there for all sorts of reasons. The parable says he 'he went out and saw others', and subsequently that he 'found' others, which implies that he didn't see them there before, or if he did he didn't realise they were looking for work.

Basically you seem to be assuming an empty forum occupied by no one except workers wearing T-shirts saying 'I'm looking for a job' and employers wearing T-shirts saying 'I'm hiring.'

Parables lend themselves to nitpicks, which means a degree of interpretation will always be there. The question is, what do you choose to read into them? Why choose to see an example of bad practice when you could see a fable about fine behaviour?

[MikhailBorg]

it's the NRSV: New Revised Slacktivist Version.

I would absolutely purchase a copy of that edition.

[Tonio]

It was a concept used in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Britain to decide who should go into the workhouse.

Kit, thanks for the background. My question was limited to the American usage of the phrase. When American political discourse began growing less tolerant of overtly racist language, some white politicians and voters began using euphemisms like "welfare queen." In that context, "undeserving poor" sounds like it refers only to poor non-whites, or more specifically, to common myths about those poor non-whites. Fred's analogy of dog whistles would fit for certain instances of euphemistic language, such as when Reagan's infamous use of "state's rights" in his speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

[inge]

The Ridger: Of late, people made loans and then immediately sold them, so they didn't care if the borrowers could pay it back. They'd made theirs.

Fairy gold loans. Turn back to dirt and old leaves under the sun.

Alan: Ye gods, do I hate the parable of the Prodigal Son! To me, it has always, always been the story of a father who quite plainly loves one son more than the other and who condemns the disfavored son for daring to complain about it.

I suspect that parable works better if you feel that living with one's family and working some kind of solid, reliable job is rewarding in itself and (mis)adventures in foreign lands are not an enviable pasttime. I have issues with that, too...

The Devil's Advocate: Instead of the financially steadier folks being happy they never faced foreclosure in the first place, more than a few of them – and not all on the brink of starvation, either – are taking this opportunity to bitch about how someone, somewhere, got "more."

It's the same with taxes. For all the complaining about minimum wage worker not having to pay (much) taxes, there are few known cases of a well-off complainer changing jobs to get those benefits.

[inge]

Tonio: Kit, thanks for the background. My question was limited to the American usage of the phrase.

Divided by a common language...

[Kit Whitfield]

My question was limited to the American usage of the phrase. When American political discourse began growing less tolerant of overtly racist language, some white politicians and voters began using euphemisms like "welfare queen."

But they're not using the phrase 'undeserving poor' at all in that context. They're saying 'welfare queen' instead. The concept remains, but the phraseology is different. To the best of my knowledge, the phrase 'undeserving poor' in modern American parlance is only ever implied, not spoken aloud. So unless I'm missing something, the 'American usage of the phrase' is non-existent at the moment. Not the concept, but the phrase.

Or are people still using it?

[Tonio]

Divided by a common language...

And by a "common culture." I suspect that people much wiser than myself have theorized that slavery corrupts everything it touches. Carl Sagan blamed it for the decline of science in ancient Athens. In America, the legacy of slavery includes poisonous attitudes about not just race but class, economics, and religion (meaning PMD and eschatology).

[Kit Whitfield]

But Tonio, are people still saying 'undeserving poor' in America? Now I'm all curious...!

[Geds]

I gave up on Santelli pretty much the first time I heard about him. It was entirely based on one phrase that I saw attributed to him. Something like, "Someone should tell Obama to look at Cuba. They used to have mansions and be rich, now they're all driving around in '54 Chevys."

I have a standing theory that any time I run in to someone who is only willing to accept a single-point origin for how things happen, especially if that single-point is one of the lesser explanations (Cuba's automobiles: Communism or 50 years of trade embargo? You decide...). I mean, I'm all for flowery rhetoric, but there's a definite limit. Disingenuous, obviously incorrect points seem like a good place to draw the line.

[Froborr]

I'm glad they're renegotiating. "Let them have their houses" is a terrible idea, as it transfers money from people who can't afford a house to people who can. It's a very, very regressive tax.

Frankly, the housing industry is *going* to suffer, and there's not much we can do about it. If we're going to keep anything like our current standard of living over the next fifty years, the single-family home is going to have to become a luxury, and suburbs and exurbs are going to have to outright die.

[Tonio]

To the best of my knowledge, the phrase 'undeserving poor' in modern American parlance is only ever implied, not spoken aloud.

I've heard that actual phrase only once or twice, but I have heard the antonym "deserving poor" used numerous times. And yes, the concept remains the same. I don't listen to the Limbaughs and O'Reillys so I don't know if they use the "undeserving" phrase, but that would be my expectation.

[J]

Did anyone else see this article here? It's supposed to be this horror-show about what happens in a First World economy when consumer spending doesn't grow. Here's some of the anecdotes and quotes that are, I guess, supposed to keep me awake at night:

"Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills."

"Sales of whiskey . . . have fallen to a fifth of their peak."

"And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990."

"Younger people . . . tend to be uninterested in cars; a survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car..."

"Young Japanese women even seem to be losing their once- insatiable thirst for foreign fashion. Louis Vuitton, for example, reported a 10 percent drop in its sales in Japan in 2008."

“I’m not interested in big spending,” says Risa Masaki, 20, a college student in Tokyo and a neighbor of the Takigasakis. “I just want a humble life.”

That last bit is telling. Fred, you're in journalism and/or morality: Explain to me why is Masaki-san viewed as being somehow the epitome of Everything That's Wrong and not, as seems transparently obvious to me, a perfectly prudent, well-balanced human being?

People spending less on expensive clothes, whiskey and cars (full disclosure: I subscribe both literally and philosophically to this magazine). ZOMG OH NOES!

And then there's the six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other-ness of the situation. Seems like Japan is exactly like us, only reverse. You can live in one of two societies:

-One in which people go consumeristly APE SHIT and buy everything imported, run up huge personal debt, and crash their economy

...OR...

-One in which people spend very frugally, base their economy on exports and then when society A stops importing anything, their economy crashes . . .

Now why I don't see Society A as being transparently superior to Society B? Seems like you end up in the same place but by different routes. Maybe Society B's even better. Which is worse? You have tons of cool stuff in your house but no steady employment and a groaning level of personal debt OR, you have very little cool stuff, no steady employment, but no appreciable personal debt.

I dunno, seems like Society B at least holds out the benefits of better sleep at night and cheaper moving expenses.

I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "You're undeserving; so you can't have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that's the truth.

GB Shaw Pygmalion

[wishing for a fifth of whisky now]

"Sales of whiskey . . . have fallen to a fifth of their peak."

er, was this meant to be funny?

[J]

Direct from Scotland.

[Kit Whitfield]

They used to have mansions and be rich, now they're all driving around in '54 Chevys.

Which 'they' is he talking about here? A nation's wealth is not just measured by the top five incomes, Santelli. The rest of us exist too.

I have heard the antonym "deserving poor" used numerous times

Ugh, ugh, ugh. When you think of what that concept did to real people that is flat-out horrifying.

even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills

Aaagh! Don't people realise that the environment will get above itself if they do that? There will be a revolution! Moss will kill us all! That's why there are floods and hurricanes; it's nothing to do with climate change, it's just the planet getting uppity!

Subdue it for everyone's sake!

And get back on the whiskey while you're at it! Your brain cells need culling or they'll overpopulate! Get in there and thin the herd!