All Research
Journal Publication
Policies to Help the Working Class in the Aftermath of COVID-19: Lessons from the Great Recession
By Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin C. Corinth, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and…
Blog Post
Turning Back the Clock on Welfare Reform
The 1996 welfare reform law replaced an open-ended cash welfare system with a work-based program that imposed time limits on benefits, required able-bodied adult recipients to engage in work or training, capped federal funding, and increased state accountability. Following the reform, welfare caseloads fell sharply, employment among single mothers rose, and poverty declined as earnings increased and pro-work benefits like childcare and refundable tax credits expanded. Recent policies providing unconditional cash benefits for families with children and increasing food stamp benefits reverse key elements of that work-based framework by providing substantial assistance to households without requiring employment or activity on their part.
Report
Reforming Tax Credits to Promote Child Opportunity and Aid Working Families
Reducing poverty should focus on not only short-term income support but also expanding opportunity and promoting upward mobility. Unconditional cash transfers risk discouraging work, marriage, and other behaviors associated with long-term economic mobility. Proposed reforms to the earned income tax credit and child tax credit would strengthen work and marriage incentives, better target tax relief to working- and middle-class families, and create “success sequence” savings accounts that build assets for children from low-income families who meet education, work, and family formation milestones.
Report
The Conservative Case Against Child Allowances
Child allowances would provide unconditional cash payments to families with children as a strategy to reduce child poverty. However, such policies risk increasing unemployment in single-parent households and could weaken work incentives, potentially worsening long-term poverty and reversing gains made since the 1990s welfare reforms. Evidence on these effects is mixed, but historical experience suggests that work-oriented policies contributed to large increases in employment among single mothers and substantial reductions in child poverty. Alternative antipoverty policies that build on work-based reforms may therefore reduce poverty while posing fewer risks to employment and family stability.
Op-Ed
Democrats’ Stealth Plan to Enact Universal Basic Income
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily expanded the child tax credit by increasing benefit amounts, making the credit fully refundable (that is, payable without regard to earnings for the first time), and distributing payments monthly. The effect was a child allowance providing monthly government benefit checks to parents regardless of work—a de facto universal basic income for parents. That temporary policy shift moved away from the framework established by the 1996 welfare reform law, which ended the widespread payment of work-free welfare checks.
Blog Post
‘Child Allowances’ Revive Welfare as We Knew It
The 1996 welfare reform law replaced the failed Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with a system of block grants and time-limited benefits tied to work or training. Those reforms contributed to higher employment and earnings and lower poverty and welfare dependence among single-parent families. Notably, that law ended the individual entitlement to monthly welfare checks for nonworking parents. Proposals to expand the child tax credit into a monthly child allowance without a work requirement would effectively restore that entitlement, reviving key features of the failed former program.
Book
How To Educate an American
In the years after A Nation at Risk, conservatives’ ideas to reform America’s lagging education system…