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As part of his general push to reign in the Imperial Executive and make the Legislature the focal point of policy, Ryan is leading the House GOP to releasing broad-ranging policy proposals, intended to drive the GOP agenda for the next few years. Yesterday was the release of the Welfare Reform / Addressing Poverty section.
I'm planning on taking part of my afternoon and reading through the more in-depth version.
I'm planning on taking part of my afternoon and reading through the more in-depth version.
...[T]he main theme of his “Better Way” welfare-reform agenda, outlined in a draft document released on Tuesday, is linking the benefits to the pursuit of work and the skills that lead to work. This is sound policy: If the ultimate goal of our assistance programs is not to help individuals and families to a state of economic independence, then there is only one alternative: indefinite and perhaps lifelong dependency. It’s one or the other.
An important feature of Ryan’s proposal is that federal funding for state and local agencies would be restructured in such a way that these organizations would be financially rewarded for moving their clients to work rather than being punished, as they are today, for reducing their beneficiary head counts. Likewise, the perverse situation in which welfare recipients who earn income lose benefits — leaving them in effect working harder for no real economic gain — would be reformed. Subsidies still would be phased out, but in a less aggressive way that leaves individuals and families better off for work. Some of those perverse incentives (sometimes called the “welfare cliff”) could be offset by an expanded Earned-Income Tax Credit. That program has problems (mainly improper payments), but it is one of our most successful anti-poverty measures, precisely because it rewards work rather than punishing it. ....
A final but critically important aspect of the approach Ryan is outlining is the devolution of program design and implementation to state and local governments, which under his approach would enjoy broad discretion in experimentation — with successful experimentation being financially rewarded. Ours is a very large country and one that is heterogeneous in important ways not truly captured by our platitudinous notions of “diversity.” What works in eastern Oklahoma is quite likely to be different from what’s effective in Chicago or Los Angeles....
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