Why We Can’t Have Nice Things—Part Three

Killing the Historically Successful Responses to Covid Poverty

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on December 12, 2025.

This is the last in a three-part series exploring how the U.S. created and expanded amazing social programs in response to the early months of the Covid pandemic, only to backtrack fully despite all the success.

Part One, available here, covered how and why politicians have convinced us that Americans do not support programs for housing, food, and healthcare—even though history and current public opinion polling show convincingly that we do.

Part Two, available here, discusses the dramatic, historic impact that Covid response programs like expanded unemployment insurance and child tax credits had—more people were safely housed and fed, and had access to healthcare. Who could not love this?

In Part Three, we answer that question: Corporations and wealthy individuals who are dependent on a population that is poor enough to take on sub-poverty-wage jobs—a dynamic that has been in place for decades—killed off these programs.

Jacobin published my article covering portions of these themes, especially Parts Two and Three. You can read the article on their site here.

PART THREE: “Get America Back to Work”

In Part Two, we reviewed how the Covid response programs achieved unprecedented levels of overall well-being. This angered corporations that rely on a desperate, hungry workforce, and landlords who count on their ability to get compliant courts to order fast, cheap, easy evictions.

The combined political power of these corporations and landlords is without peer. The National Association of Realtors is the nation’s top spender on lobbying : $86 million in 2024. The Chamber of Commerce is #2 --$76 million also in 2024. During the first three months of the national eviction moratorium, the National Association of Realtors dumped $33 million into a frantic surge of lobbying. In Statehouses across the country, the state affiliates of the National Apartment Association are often considered the most powerful lobbying forces.

The money talked. Over half of states’ governors withdrew from the federal unemployment support programs even before those programs were set to expire in September, 2021. In May, 2021, more than a dozen U.S. Senators and Representatives introduced the unsubtly named “Get America Back to Work Act.” They made no effort to conceal in whose interests they were acting. “The federal unemployment benefit has made it almost impossible for service industry businesses to maintain their workforce,” legislation co-sponsor Senator Lindsey Graham said. Those service industry jobs in Graham’s state of South Carolina pay an average $13.45 per hour in food service or $15.92 for care professions, often without full-time hours. For an adult with one child and full-time employment, compared to the state living wage is $36 per hour.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, Image by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

U.S. representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota insisted that “we need to stop paying people more to sit at home than work.” Congressman Johnson did not issue a companion call to raise South Dakota’s minimum wage, which is $11.50 per hour, less than a third of a living wage for one adult caring for one child in his state.

Congressman David Rouzer from North Carolina posted on Twitter a picture of a closed Hardee’s, saying “This is what happens when you extend unemployment benefits for too long.” Hardee’s restaurants in North Carolina currently advertise they are hiring workers for $12-15 per hour.

There was some resistance to the corporate campaign. “Floridians want to work—they just want to work at jobs that pay them a living wage,” State Senator Linda Stewart said in response to Governor Ron DeSantis withdrawing the state from supplemental federal unemployment benefits.

“If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers there is a simple solution. Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits,” Senator Bernie Sanders said. Research backed up this position, with analysis by Georgetown University faculty showing that unemployment benefits are more likely to support workers finding jobs that match their skills and expertise than to reduce jobless people’s work search efforts.

But the enhanced unemployment benefits were allowed to expire in September, 2021. The eviction moratorium ended in July 2021, and the Child Tax Credit expansion stopped at the end of 2021. The brief period where the U.S. resembled the economic and human rights approach of similar nations had ended.

The backsliding in quality of life was both predictable and tragic. Evictions quickly returned to their previous level, overall poverty spiked, and the child poverty rate doubled. The number of unsheltered homeless individuals increased. So did hunger. Billionaires again found people desperate enough to accept $13 per hour to deliver Domino’s pizzas and $12 per hour to work the third-shift grill at Hardees. So overall corporate profits went up, and profits for the landlord industry in particular increased.

The desire for cheap labor had successfully dismantled the Covid-era programs that had achieved historic success. But this was nothing new. In the mid-20th century, in order to compel destitute families to accept low-wage, temporary, difficult work in the fields, several states adopted policies that cut off assistance during cotton-picking and other harvesting season In a 1970 hearing of the Senate Finance Committee devoted to considering President Richard Nixon’s proposed minimum basic income plan, committee chair Senator Russell Long of Louisiana could not hide his personal concerns about providing economic supports to the working poor. “I can’t get anyone to iron my shirts!” he shouted.

Long was not the first to voice this frustration. In 1918, a proposed Greenville, South Carolina ordinance would have jailed Black women who were not employed. The reason for targeting this so-called “class of loafers,” per news accounts of the time? “It is exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them.”

The pattern continues.

When President Trump and Congressional Republicans passed the mid-2025 “Big, Beautiful Bill” legislation that will slash food supplements and healthcare to fund tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, a long list of corporations lined up to support the bill. Front and center were the usual suspects, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association, and the National Association of Realtors.

Amidst all the loud Trump talk of lower taxes, lean government, and rescinding green initiatives, some corporate firms quietly acknowledged that their support was motivated by a familiar goal: inserting a work requirement into the criteria to qualify for healthcare and food support will force more people into accepting low-pay jobs.

This is a sad, sad story. But there is an important silver-lining lesson: the Covid-era programs prove that the U.S. has the power to end homelessness, hunger, and deadly healthcare gaps. There will be a day when those programs expand again. And when that day comes, we need to be ready to make them permanent and protect them from corporate and wealthy sabotage.