The Policy of blaming working-class's morality.

“From the height of their privilege, economic experts discussed inflation as a matter of imbalance between demand and supply in the economy, ultimately boiling down to peoples’ moral deficiency. Having fought for and obtained higher wages, workers were unable to control themselves and indulged in extravagant behavior, evidenced by “conspicuous increases in unnecessary consumption of alcoholic beverages, sweets, chocolate, and biscuits,” as economics professor Luigi Einaudi sneered. With similar disdain, Maffeo Pantaleoni, pioneer of today’s mainstream economics, blamed inflation on workers who “live like pigs in their homes in order to waste the greatest part of their income in wine at the tavern.””
Clara E. Mattei · Escape from Capitalism, 13

My reflection In the 1920s, vice was increasingly understood as pathology. This marked a major shift: working-class problems that were once labeled as sins or sources of moral disorder came to be seen as diseases or signs of social and biological degeneration. The move from a moral to a medical framework expanded the reach of interventions. Instead of simply condemning individuals, authorities now used medical diagnoses to justify more intrusive interventions, including surveillance, exclusion, and criminological control. Ruth D. Harris (1991) demonstrates how the disease model of alcoholism became closely linked to working-class men, reinforcing stereotypes of the morally depraved and biologically degenerate worker. Similarly, N. Kamenov explores whether interwar policies around alcoholism and vice represented social medicine or racial hygiene, showing that the language and logic of social medicine could easily slip into the rhetoric of racial hygiene in this era. For example, by 1925, drunkenness was officially classified as a "Social Disease." Thus, these scholars show that medicalization did not remove stigma but provided broader justification for state intervention and control.
In mid-century, pathology becomes culture. A culture of poverty replaced biological defect with socialized defect: People experiencing poverty supposedly reproduce norms that keep them poor. As J. L. Roach and Orville R. Gursslin 1967 argue, there is less openly stigmatized vocabulary, but it could still reverse causality. Roach and Gursslin found the concept logically and empirically deficient because it often treated poverty as the result rather than the cause of social behaviors, without sufficient evidence that cultural traits alone explained persistent poverty. Their empirical review showed that structural factors like material deprivation, unemployment, and lack of resources played a much larger role, and they argued that the culture of poverty model neglected these variables and failed to account for the complexity of socioeconomic disadvantage. Consequently, they concluded that material deprivation deserved greater explanatory weight.
And today, culture becomes a mechanism. As Servaas Storm (2024) argues, "Wage-push inflation" and the "wage-price spiral" translate conflict over distribution into an apparently neutral causal chain: workers seek higher pay; costs rise; prices rise; restraint becomes necessary. The main argument for the wage-price spiral model is that when wages increase, businesses pass on these costs as higher prices, fueling further wage demands and creating an ongoing cycle of inflation. Proponents see this mechanism as a central explanation for rising prices in periods of strong labor demand. On the other hand, critics argue that this model oversimplifies complex inflation dynamics, often overlooks the roles of corporate pricing power and supply shocks, and tends to assign disproportionate blame to workers. In the pandemic-era debate, Bernanke and Blanchard’s weight dynamic model has been criticized for obscuring distributional questions and legitimating more monetary tightening than the evidence warrants. Alternative explanations, such as those by Ho‑fung Hung and D. Thompson, link inflation's rise and fall to the shifting balance of power between labor and capital, rather than attributing it primarily to wage or monetary dynamics. These scholars emphasize that broader structural and political factors can shape inflationary outcomes in ways the wage-price spiral framework does not fully capture.
The current US context makes the old rhetoric unusually consequential because the word "affordability" is politically central, while the underlying distributional story is easy to hide. As Pew's July 2026 survey showed, 29% of registered voters named the economy as the issue they most wanted congressional candidates to discuss, including 15% naming cost of living or affordability. Neither party held a clear advantage on economic policy. This opens a large rhetorical market for explanations that sound technical but assign responsibility too quickly. For instance, politicians may refer to “supply and demand imbalances” or cite the need for “market corrections” as reasons for rising housing costs, rather than acknowledging the effects of wage stagnation or corporate consolidation. Similarly, terms like “core inflation” or “transitory shock” are often used in debate, focusing attention on economic mechanisms while leaving underlying questions about income distribution unaddressed. These examples illustrate how technical language can obscure who benefits and who bears the cost in key political debates.
We live in a precarious era when the poverty side of today's USA is equally important. The Georgetown Center on Poverty and Equality reports that 43.7 million Americans experienced poverty in 2024. It emphasizes that joblessness, illness, family separation, and caregiving can push households into poverty; it also notes that the temporary expansion of the child tax credit drove a sharp fall in child poverty before the recession reversed much of the gain. These findings suggest that policy interventions like the child tax credit can directly and significantly reduce poverty rates, especially among children. The reversal of anti-poverty gains after the credit's expiration underscores the importance of sustained and well-targeted policies in addressing the root causes of poverty, rather than relying solely on short-term measures.