Despite passing a debt ceiling bill nearly a month ago, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is still stuck negotiating with Joe Biden on a deal to raise the debt ceiling that the president is willing to sign into law. A central contention of the White House is that McCarthy's deal — which tacks on $14 trillion onto the national debt in the next year, as opposed to a "clean" debt ceiling increase, which would add $19 trillion — contains unacceptable work requirements for recipients of Medicaid.

The GOP bill's requisite 80 hours a month of work (or work training) are half what the average American adult works, and it exempts parents, teenagers, and adults ten years younger than the retirement age of 65 (which, in turn, is more than a decade younger than the average American life expectancy). While, as a practical matter, McCarthy is likely correct to pursue such modest work requirements, those requirements in principle are far too modest.

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More than one in three Americans aged 16 years and older do not work. Our labor force participation rate is smaller than that of Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it's on par with Russia and Saudi Arabia, where women only gained the right to drive fewer than five years ago. The American unwillingness to work would constitute a national disgrace under any circumstances, but given our redistributionist wealth transfers from workers to the elderly, it's a fiscal security threat.

When the federal government first began to steal from the workers to fund novel vacations called "retirement," more than 100 workers were contributing to each beneficiary. By the turn of the century, the government was gleaning from fewer than four workers for each retiree, and as of 2022, just 2.8 workers fund each beneficiary. By 2035 at the latest, when Social Security insolvency will trigger a 20% across-the-board cut, the entitlement program will be reliant on two workers per recipient.

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McCarthy is not asking, as we hope he would in a vacuum, perfectly healthy and child-free Medicaid recipients to work a full-time job, just 20 hours per week. He is not asking able-bodied 56-year-olds to work a single minute for free or low-cost healthcare. (That is, free or low-cost for the recipients. You and I, dear reader, are footing the bill for parents, older teenagers, and elderly Gen Xers who wouldn't be required to work a day in their lives for Medicaid under the "conservative" McCarthy bill.)

McCarthy is operating under a grueling political reality, and even the most idealistic of conservatives can accept that the GOP debt ceiling bill is probably the best shot at fiscal sanity the nation can secure for a moment. But Republicans cannot give in an inch on work requirements as liberal and welfare-subsidizing as these, as any backtracking would mark the end, not the beginning, of restoring fiscal sanity.