dajafi wrote:Ross Douthat is sub-useless whenever the discussion veers toward anything having to do with sex or faith. But he gets the linkage between macroeconomic change and the well-being of communities and families to a greater extent than any other Republican I can think of, and almost every Democrat. Aside from the (qualified) kudos to that racist hack Charles Murray, this column kills it.

What we can do... is take modest steps, in areas where culture and economics intersect, to make it easier for working-class Americans to cultivate the virtues that foster resilience and self-sufficiency. Here are four such steps:

First, if we want the poor to be industrious, we should do everything possible to make their industry pay off. The current tax-and-transfer system imposes a tax on work — the payroll tax — that falls heavily on low-wage labor, and poor Americans face steep marginal tax rates because of how their benefits phase out as their wages increase. Both burdens can and should be lightened. There are ways to finance Social Security besides a regressive tax on work, and ways to structure benefits and tax credits that don’t reduce the incentives to take a better-paying job.

Second, if we want lower-income Americans to have stable family lives, our political system should take family policy seriously, and look for ways to make it easier for parents to manage work-life balance when their kids are young. There are left-wing approaches to this issue (European-style family-leave requirements) and right-wing approaches (a larger child tax credit). Neither is currently on the national agenda; both should be.

Third, if we expect less-educated Americans to compete with low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America, we shouldn’t be welcoming millions of immigrants who compete with them domestically as well. Immigration benefits the economy over all, but it can lower wages and disrupt communities, and there’s no reason to ask an already-burdened working class to bear these costs alone. Here the leading Republican candidates have the right idea: We should welcome more high-skilled immigrants, while making it as hard as possible for employers to hire low-skilled workers off the books.

Finally, if we want low-income men to be marriageable, employable and law-abiding, we should work to reduce incarceration rates. Prison is a school for crime and an anchor on advancement, and there’s a large body of research — from scholars like U.C.L.A.’s Mark Kleiman and Berkeley’s Franklin E. Zimring — suggesting that swift, certain punishment and larger police forces can do as much to keep crime low as the more draconian approach to sentencing that our justice system often takes.

I've read this three times now and can't find a single word I disagree with. (Maybe the implied premise that benefits create incentives against taking higher-paying jobs.) He's both identified the problem--one that the hardest-core folks on both the left and right simply refuse to see--and articulated a range of very sensible and politically feasible solutions. Admittedly, there seem to be many more right-wing oxen getting gored here--corrections policy focusing on punishment rather than rehabilitation, hating on immigrants, laissez-faire regulation of businesses that hire off-the-books, regressive financing of Social Security--than left-wing (immigration policy focused on family reunification rather than maximizing human capital).

dajafi wrote:That's much less true than it used to be; this was one reason why welfare reform was justified (even if it didn't always take an ideal form). I grasp the theory--this is what I researched and wrote about for more than a decade--but I don't think it often works that way in practice. Even the reactionary agency that runs public assistance here in NYC is pretty diligent about ensuring that the folks they're pushing into the workforce (without bothering to train or educate, ensuring that they show right back up at the welfare office six months later) receive the benefits to which they're entitled.

Also, if you're competitive for a "higher-paying" job, you probably have some skill that an employer cares about, and you'd be a fool not to leverage it. The one program I can think of for which this might not apply is Unemployment Insurance, where a highly skilled displaced worker might be a good deal better off staying on UI than he could get doing something much more menial.

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jerseyhoya wrote:George Norcross puff piece from the Courier Post

If he somehow does manage to turn Camden around a bit, it's worth him lining his pockets along the way

traderdave wrote:That said, I think same-sex marriage is probably pretty low on the list of priorities for most New Jerseyans.

slugsrbad wrote: