Econ Comments & Analysis
Real Clear Markets | To Make Welfare Work, Hand It To the States
Nearly $20 trillion has been spent since the War on Poverty began 50 years ago, and the poverty rate has barely declined. In a new paper published by the Manhattan Institute today, I suggest that giving states flexibility to design their own welfare programs would catalyze state-based reforms designed to shift people out of poverty and into the workforce. This flexibility, combined with capping federal welfare funds to states at the rate of inflation and the number of people below the poverty line, could save billions of dollars a year.
Washington Post | The risks of the new dynamic scoring rule
ON ITS face, there is nothing particularly mischievous about the budget accounting rule that the House of Representatives adopted last week. It simply calls for the two nonpartisan bodies that keep score on fiscal matters, the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, to “incorporate the macroeconomic effects” of “major” tax or mandatory spending legislation when they develop official cost estimates: That is, analysts are supposed to factor in the wider impact on growth, employment and inflation and how that might feed back to make the budget deficit larger or smaller.
