Reihan faces America’s economic predicament:
If the labor market position of less-skilled workers is going to get even worse in the coming decades, we have to think seriously about finding new ways to make work pay.
For example, we could try to streamline the various benefits federal and state governments have used to raise incomes at the low end to foster a more work-friendly approach to fighting poverty. Oren Cass, domestic policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, recently outlined such an approach in National Review. The basic idea is that while the non-working poor will continue to receive in-kind transfers, channeled through state governments, the working poor will receive cash transfers instead. Low-income households will receive support in either case, but they will receive support with fewer strings attached if they find and hold on to gainful employment.
University of Arizona sociologist Lane Kenworthy, author of the forthcoming Social Democratic America, has called for an expanded employment-conditional earnings subsidy that would rise in sync with economic growth. And in Switzerland, a coalition of activists are campaigning for a basic income, an idea that has been championed by left-libertarians, egalitarian socialists, and even a number of pro-market conservatives who see it as a less bureaucratic, more straightforward alternative to the welfare state. This basic income would not be employment-conditional, which raises the danger that it would encourage people to exit the workforce, as Annie Lowrey observes in the New York Times. But some still find the idea compelling.
The Dish 