Conservatives Drift Leftward in the Plan to Rescue America
A national effort to transform workforce training would do more to boost the working class than subsidies.
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The run-up to the passage of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) last week showcased the leftward drift of American social policy among conservatives.
Democrats’ attempt to raise the minimum wage via the ARP was nixed by the Senate parliamentarian, but not before Sens. Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney and Sen. Josh Hawley proposed two Republican-friendly alternative minimum-wage hikes. And as the Democrats’ yearslong efforts to enact a child allowance gained traction as an ARP provision, it was met with Romney’s own child allowance proposal, “The Family Security Act,” which generated considerable second-order debates among conservatives, some of whom argued the allowance should enable parents to stay home from work.
These policy debates echo G.K. Chesterton’s century-old observation, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” A consensus has emerged among Washington policymakers, first on the left and now on the right, that working-class—and perhaps even middle-class—Americans need more financial buffers against the headwinds of globalization and large-scale capitalism. In what political scientists call “policy framing,” policymakers on the right and left have cast the boundaries of debate within the twin premises that working families are beset with stagnating incomes and the federal government should subsidize the difference between those incomes and whatever a living wage requires.
Within this policy frame, conservatives have embraced two typically progressive goals: the prioritization of security over opportunity (hence the name of Romney’s child allowance) and the elimination of mediating structures.
On the first point, right-leaning economic populists have argued the past few years for subsidies for wages, domestic firms, and child-rearing as protections against the failures of free markets. Upward mobility is rather absent from their proposals, as they seem to have surrendered to the view that people without the right degrees or training must settle for subpar hourly wage jobs.
On the second point, today’s economic populists do not share the concerns of conservative welfare reformers of the 1990s, who worried that cash payments were prone to misuse by recipients and to abuse by a federal government with too much power over individual recipients. Conservative welfare reformers in the 1990s replaced cash payments with block grants to states to remove perverse incentives and to allow states and localities to work more directly with recipients on a plan for improving their vocational prospects. They consolidated childcare funding into a new program to help working mothers and increased child support from absent fathers. Work increased, child poverty dropped, and stagnation gave way to upward mobility.
Working families need more help, but why have we framed our current policy choices so narrowly? Numerous studies show, unsurprisingly, that wages for working-class people rise when they earn certifications and training for good jobs. Surveys also show that working families are actually more bullish about the economy and the American Dream than the political class recognizes. Working-class people have aspirations, but the political class sees only the anxiety and despair it needs for its own political objectives.
What if we had spent more time the past five years prioritizing investments in people’s vocational prospects over income security? How would our policy frame look now?
A large-scale, national effort to transform our workforce training and certification systems would arguably do more to boost both working-class prospects than the government subsidy proposals we have been debating.
For instance, instead of child allowances to families that don’t need them, we could retool our current workforce system to supply every American who wants a better job with the information about the jobs with the best growth potential where they live and a subsidy to prepare for those jobs. The federal government could provide states with flexible funds to offset costs associated with training, such as moving, transportation, and childcare—everyday barriers that frequently prevent people from completing their training. Policymakers could make more benefits portable, such as health insurance, so that people could pursue opportunity without worrying about losing their benefits. Finally, Washington could condition federal aid from agencies, such as HUD and the Department of Transportation, on whether states and localities are keeping housing costs affordable by encouraging more housing supply, which benefits lower-income people the most.
The biggest problem facing working-class Americans is the degree to which they are cut off from opportunity. Supplying them with more money to help with the cost of living is noble at one level but incredibly shortsighted at a more important level—a level I suspect working-class Americans wish policymakers cared about.
The challenge for today’s conservative policymakers is not to make progressive policies sound more conservative. It is to prove Chesterton wrong by going in a better direction—one that working people also want.
Ryan Streeter is the Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
The beauty of a child allowance is that its lack of targeting reduces bureaucracy even if some of the recipients don't need it. Also, for those who don't need it, income and capital gains taxes can just take it back.
UBI experiments have shown that people know how to spend their money. If recipients need to move or buy a car or get child care, most will use UBI for that instead of a bureaucrat deciding that's the best way to spend it. There is a certain arrogance to trusting the rich to spend their money for their benefit but that the poor need a bureaucrat to decide it for them.
Finally, portable benefits are sorely needed. I'd say it's one of the best reasons to have universal health care.
"A large-scale, national effort to transform our workforce training and certification systems would arguably do more to boost both working-class prospects than the government subsidy proposals" The article does not support this with data, although it does contain good ideas about creating more accessible information about jobs in our society. What evidence is there the policies proposed in it will significantly reduce IGE? Are there enough well paying jobs and where are they located? And if successful, what will this do to rural communities? They have been hollowing out because of a lack of jobs, so unless the jobs the writer is writing about are located in those communities it's going to exacerbate community collapse.
This kind of lofty rhetoric sounds good in the abstract (upward mobility! dignity of work! job retraining! pursuing opportunity!) but if you take a moment to really consider what this would look like in practice, it becomes quickly apparent how ineffective and dehumanizing it would be.
The first problem is that it, by design, prioritizes paid wage labor over unpaid labor - namely, taking care of children and aging parents. Of course, people could retrain to become childcare workers or home health aides, but I think most families would rather have the wage flexibility - in the form of a child allowance, for instance - to take care of their own children and parents. But a job retraining program does nothing for those families.
The second problem is misalignment between interest/aptitude and opportunity. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the biggest sectors of growth to be in healthcare and food service over the next 8 years (https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-most-job-growth.htm). Let's for the moment put aside that most of those jobs available to high school-equivalent applicants have median wages below $30,000. Do you think your stereotypical middle-age industrial worker, after 10+ years of backbreaking manual labor, is going to be thrilled about the 'opportunity' to change diapers in nursing homes? Or that society really wants underpaid and disinterested retrainees to be the front-line taking care of our most sick and vulnerable?
The third problem is transition cost. Let's say someone has a goal in mind - they want to retrain to be a RN or a tradesperson, which are currently the most lucrative paths available to someone with no bachelor's degree. A nursing diploma or associate's degree in nursing is 2 years (BSN is 4 years), electrician and plumber's trainings run 3-5 years. Assuming you are a competitive applicant for these programs, you are still taking a significant hit to wages and benefits while you are retraining. And that assumes you are already living in an area which has those programs and opportunities available - the unstated quiet assumption in many retraining programs is that people will uproot their families, leave their social network behind, and move, which imposes a huge transition cost (the loss of unpaid childcare from family and friends, the financial costs of moving and getting a new apartment, etc.)
As an alternative: we give people the financial support they need to make the decisions that are right for them and their families. Some of them will probably pursue some form of job retraining, but they will do so in an organic and unplanned way that will increase efficiency and the match of aptitude/interest to vocation. The best way to promote the value of work is give people the opportunity to find work they consider valuable.