THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The history of public assistance for those in need in this country has had its ups and downs through the years, but one point has remained constant. Any public assistance should only go to those who were deserving according to criteria that has shifted over time.

Assistance to needy Americans has grown at a gallop since the mid-1980s, giving a hand up to the disabled, the working poor and married couples with children. At the same time, though, government aid directed at the nation’s poorest individuals has shrunk.

“Most observers would think that the government should support those who have the lowest incomes the most, and provide less help to those with higher incomes,” Robert A. Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in a forthcoming article in the journal Demography. “But that is not the case.”

Mr. Moffitt found that government assistance for families whose incomes flutter just above the poverty line nearly doubled from 1983 to 2004 after taking inflation into account. The numbers look very different for those scraping along at the bottom, generally unemployed single mothers with children. Their benefits declined in real terms by about one-third.

During the Great Recession, assistance to the poorest briefly expanded but has since fallen back, he said, and there is no indication that the long-run trend is shifting.

“There’s been this emphasis on rewarding workers and people like the elderly or disabled who are considered ‘the deserving poor,’ ” said Mr. Moffitt, referring to a revival in recent decades of age-old attitudes toward those at the bottom of the economic ladder. “If you’re not working, the interpretation is that you’re not trying.”...

Experts emphasize that they do not want to pit one needy group against another. “The working poor deserve some help; there’s no way I want to cut any of that,” Mr. Moffitt of Johns Hopkins said. “But there’s a group here that’s being left out.”

Distinguishing between people who deserve public generosity and those who don’t dates to colonial times, but the idea has found powerful champions on both sides of the political divide, including Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the influential new Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The move away from giving more aid to those in abject poverty can be traced, in part, to the campaign to “end welfare as we know it,” promoted by President Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential run and accomplished in 1996 when the system was overhauled.

The program he created, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, imposes time limits and work rules on recipients. And when a state’s allotted budget runs out, poor families are turned away.

“It got rid of welfare cheaters,” Sheldon Danziger, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, said of the Clinton-era changes. “But we forgot about people who want to work but can’t find anybody to hire them.”

Curiously, the concept of weeding out the undeserving originated with religious leaders who based their positions on moral grounds. Moral grounds that their Jesus would have condemned. It was the transfer of the burden to the wealthy of the community that made work a requirement. Work that was often impossible to find because of the actions of the wealthy. But by applying even the meanest of means testing to eliminate some of the burden, the wealthy or the state could wrap itself in sanctimonious self righteousness and sleep well at night.