The eligibility requirements tend to slice right through the population that need those services, so you're getting very, very poor people who are eligible for Medicaid, and people who are still struggling economically but don't quite make the cut - and that makes them extremely resentful of the people who do receive assistance, and also the fact that those struggling people have to pay taxes into the system to help out people really just one notch below them. This is basically happening all the way up to the solid middle class, well above 50% of the population.

Jacobin's Meagan Day connects the political class's bipartisan fixation on incrementalism and means testing of social programs to a larger, decades-long attack by capital on labor power, its 20th century gains for the working class, and the very notion that government provide services and security to its citizens.

Meagan wrote the recent articles The Bureaucratic Nightmare of Incrementalism and Targeted Social Programs Make Easy Targets for Jacobin.