Leftover Turkey

I guess it's too late already.

Which of the following proposals from the bipartisan list released by Opportunity America ("Work, skills, community: Restoring opportunity for the working class") with cooperation from Brookings and AEI might not benefit "the working class"?

• Make work pay by expanding the earned income tax credit to cover childless workers and experimenting with a new wage subsidy. 
• Require state and local agencies that administer government benefits to make a priority of getting recipients back to work. 
• Strengthen work requirements for some beneficiaries of means-tested government programs so long as jobs, training, treatment slots and other relevant services are available.
• Reform unemployment and disability insurance to promote work. 
• Reform federal education spending to fund programs that teach students, college-age and older, the skills they need for the jobs of the future. 
• Mobilize communities to make the most of the job-creating investment we expect to be unleashed by the Opportunity Zone provision of the 2017 tax bill. 
• Make the child and dependent care tax credit more available to working-class families. 
• Create a new federal program to monitor and limit opioid prescriptions.

I guess it's the ones that look as if they're designed to loosen up the job market and keep wages from rising. I mean, what problem exactly does a member of their target population have

people with at least a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree living in households between the 20th and 50th income percentiles—roughly $30,000 to $69,000 a year for a household with two adults and one child. We include Americans of all races and ethnicities. A laid-off factory worker in Ohio or a Latina housekeeper in Los Angeles: when we look out across blue-collar America, we see more similarities than differences.

that's ameliorated by ordering somebody getting SNAP benefits to get a job or lose the benefits? That Latina housekeeper already has a job. Most working-age SNAP beneficiaries do. How does that laid-off Ohio factory worker get something out of being cut off of Medicaid unless he takes a minimum-wage gig?

I mean, let's say just because these are conservative proposals doesn't mean they're necessarily bad proposals. I don't like them, but that doesn't prove they're wrong. The 2017 tax bill clearly won't unleash any job-creating investment, since the companies it's meant for have decided to deal it to themselves in stock buybacks instead, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice. But this is supposed to be a list of proposals specifically to "restore opportunity" to a certain set of folks. How are they specifically designed to do that?

David F. Brooks ("The Return of the Chastened Establishment") is in love with this program, because of course he is:

The authors of this report dismiss the policy slogans coming from the extremes. Building a wall is not a policy. Universal basic income degrades the work ethic that is at the core of working-class life. Free college is a massive subsidy for the upper middle class.

Instead, the authors come up with a broad left/right agenda that 70 percent of Republicans and Democrats could support: wage subsidies, improved parental leave, work requirements for some federal benefits, child care tax credits.

I understand the argument about free college, at least in the slogan form: it's not well-targeted to the target group. It's not stupid and irrelevant like wall building, but it doesn't aim successfully where it's supposed to be aiming. Worry about "degrading the work ethic" is so Brooksy (how much do you get paid for your 1600 words a week, by the way, speaking of work ethics, and refusing every effort the editors make to get you to keep your formal commitment to do a blog and engage in social media?), but it's a kind of argument. But how do the "work requirements" help out what Brooks refers to as "families making, say, $50,000 a year" and obviously working as hard as they possibly can already?

What you get is a layer of society that has been denuded of institutions and social bonds. Working-class men have been dropping out of the labor force at alarming rates. A generation ago, working-class families were about as likely to be part of religious communities as affluent Americans, but now their participation rates have plummeted. A generation ago, working-class families were nearly as likely to be married as affluent people, but now only half the children in working-class families will be raised in adolescence by stably married parents.

As the White House helpfully notes, labor force participation has been rising pretty strongly since late 2015, mainly because there are more jobs for them to do. It started three years before wages finally started rising. If you take elderly people, mothers with young children, and people who can't find anything paying better than starvation wages and force them into the job market, what does that do to better opportunities for Brooks's $50K friends?

Why is it the government's job to create conditions that will make people want to join religious institutions? Why not let the religious institutions take responsibility for attracting them? Or if wealthy folks go to church and get married "stably" and non-wealthy folks don't, could it be because the non-wealthy are too busy worrying about money?

The answer is the same old thing. It's the 1996 welfare bill and No Child Left Behind. It's there to get votes from the people who hate the working class (and poor people). That's the reason for putting these items on the menu. It's extortion.

One of the core questions before us is this: Who is going to lead this country? Is it perpetual outsiders like Trump, with no governing or policy competence, who say the establishments have forfeited all credibility? Or are there enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways?

Who's been "chastened" by this recap of Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's most abject and humiliating attempts to appease their Republican enemies? Who's offering "new ways" of doing anything? Given the results of the election two weeks ago, is it really a time for Democrats to go back to begging for Republican approval? Throw this leftover turkey into the stockpot, there's no room for it in the fridge.