copying my earlier posts:
[O]ur nation can readily reduce remaining poverty, especially among children. To accomplish this, we must focus on the main causes of child poverty: low levels of parental work and high levels of single parenthood.
In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week through the year nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.
The decline in marriage is the second major cause of child poverty. Nearly twothirds of poor children reside in singleparent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock.
Increasing marriage would substantially reduce child poverty: If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.
In recent years, the United States has established a reasonable record in reducing child poverty. Successful antipoverty policies were partially implemented in the welfare reform legislation of 1996, which replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).
A key element of this reform was a requirement that some welfare mothers either prepare for work or get jobs as a condition of receiving aid. As this requirement went into effect, welfare rolls plummeted and employment of single mothers increased in an unprecedented manner. As employment of single mothers rose, child poverty dropped rapidly. For example,
in the quartercentury before welfare reform, there was no net change in the poverty rate of children in singlemother families; after reform was enacted, the poverty rate dropped in an unprecedented fashion, falling from 53.1 percent in 1995 to 39.8 percent in 2001.....
If child poverty is to be substantially reduced, welfare must be transformed. Ablebodied parents must be required to work or prepare for work, and the welfare system should encourage rather than penalize marriage...
(and, two posts later: this is all on page 19 if you are looking for context)
well, given that the two best ways to increase child poverty would be to have their parents marry, and then have at least one of them work full time. Currently two-thirds of our poor children live in a single-parent household, and are supported by only 16 hours of work a week. an easy thing to say in an economy with 9.1% unemployment, I know - but that is a situation that will not remain forever. Government regulations which punish rather than reward marriage should be altered. Government regulations which present a higher barrier to hiring should be streamlined and revoked, and I would say the child-tax-credit should be expanded, even as the rest of the code is flattened in accordance with the Bowles-Simpson recommendations. A depressingly high percentage of our poor children will receive "education" only in the sense that they will spend a few hours a day in a school building; instituting school choice programs for our lower and lower middle classes would provide a powerful means for them to break the cycle of poverty by ensuring that their children receive knowledge, skills, and work ethics that will make them more competitive in the job market. Medicaid can be reformed to an HSA model, which allows the poor to maintain their access to healthcare while building wealth (and, incidentally, helping to provide downward pressure on costs). Indiana did this and the CATO (libertarian think tank) guys went nuts because they were worried it made Medicaid too good, and poor people wouldn't want to leave it for a "regular" plan.
Poverty in the elderly is a tougher nut to crack, largely because we have already tried to solve this with massive pyramid schemes, and those schemes have failed us. No matter whose "plan" you choose, the reality is that Medicare and Social Security expenditures will be reduced sharply off the baseline in future years. Social Security should instead be altered to a system that allows low-income workers to own their own accounts, which grow tax-free, and will let them retire financially independent. When I ran the numbers for a thread a few months ago, I found that simply by diverting 2/3rds of his FICA tax into a personalized account (the rest would go to continue to fund benefits for current retirees), a man who never earned more than $32,000 a year in his entire working life could nonetheless retire a millionaire. So, while for our current crop, the best we can do is reform Medicare to allow market pressure to push down cost while means-testing the benefits so that they aid the poor more while helping the wealthy less - for future elderly, we can do quit a bit.
virtually impossible to offshore a plumber. the problem you run into here is the unions, who seek to limit entry into the job-field in order to maintain higher prices.