John C. Goodman

In effect, Congress has decided to penalize marriage most at life stages when children benefit most from the commitment of more than one adult.

For young, low-income couples: Earn an additional $10,000, and it’s not uncommon to be left with half of that amount or less, even before counting the cost of items like commuting to work and childcare.

By contrast, when couples are past the normal child rearing age, Social Security is designed so that there are almost no marriage penalties and only marriage bonuses — in the range of $100,000 or more.

First, SNAP participants have very low employment rates, partly because SNAP disincentivizes work. Moreover, the share of SNAP adults who are capable of work has grown over time.

Second, compared to other groups of Americans not receiving SNAP—both high- and low-income—SNAP recipients exhibit much worse health outcomes. In 2018 (the most recent year of data), 65 percent of SNAP adults age 50-64 had been diagnosed with diet-related disease, and 42 percent were obese.

Angela Rachidi in testimony before the House Agriculture Committee, June 7, 2023.

On June 14, Bruce D. Meyer testified before the Senate Finance Committee on proposals to transform the child tax credit into a fully refundable child allowance.

Meyer first presented a summary of the historical evidence on tax and benefit changes for low-income Americans, showing that pro-work policies enacted in the 1990s (including the child tax credit) have reduced poverty dramatically, increased employment, raised living standards, and reversed a 30-year trend of rising single parenthood.

After World War II, mainstream economists offered a number of theories about what it would take to lift the underdeveloped world out of poverty. As an article in the Cato Journal showed, all these theories turned out to be wrong. Inequality among nations was greatly reduced over the last three decades as one billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty. That occurred because of greater respect for private property, opening up markets and participation in international trade. See Jane Shaw’s summary.

In her newest book, When Race Trumps Merit, Heather Mac Donald rejects the claim of “disparate impact analysis,” which posits, “any standard or behavioral norm which negatively and disproportionately affects Blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy” and must therefore be eliminated.

“During the late 1920s, the living standard of American blue-collar workers was far higher than 100 years earlier.  And yet almost none of the “progressive” ideas advocated by leftists had been put in place.  There was no minimum wage, no federal unemployment compensation, no OSHA, and labor unions were fairly weak.  In 1929, the federal government spent only a bit over 3% of GDP.”

Argument: the benefits of technological progress accrued to the elites (especially the Catholic church) and not to the masses. When conditions for the English working class did subsequently improve in the second half of the 19th century, it was due to the growing political power of the working class, as well as the growing importance of labor unions

The empirical literature tends to show that people are tolerant of highly unequal distributions of income. However, their tolerance is conditional on the perception that the distribution reflects merit, not privilege, and that social mobility is possible. 

Source:  https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-06/PA%20949_update-4.pdf

The world has seen dramatic, global human progress across a broad range of indicators in recent decades, but have those gains been widely shared? The Inequality of Human Progress Index (IHPI) measures material well‐being and seven additional metrics: lifespan, infant mortality, adequate nutrition, environmental safety, access to opportunity (as measured by education), access to information (as measured by internet access), and political freedom. Across all but two of those dimensions, the world has become more equal since 1990. Globalization and market liberalization over the past few decades have not only raised absolute living standards but also reduced overall inequality.