Review of "Making Work Pay Enough"

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This paper is a response to New Safety Net Paper 1, "Making Work Pay Enough: A Decent Standard of Living for Working Families" by Gregory Acs and Margery Austin Turner.

Gregory Acs and Margery Turner have written an informative and useful paper that targets one of the more important challenges in today’s economy: the gap between earnings and needs faced by many low-income working families. While I offer several criticisms of their presentation and ideas, I have little doubt that were we to implement their suggestions, the gap between what low-income families earn and what they need would be smaller.

The paper focuses on various extensions to the current system of what is often referred to as work supports, defined in Bernstein (2007) as “any publicly-provided income that either boosts the earnings of low-income workers, or helps offset the cost of a family budget component, including health care, child care, housing, and transportation.” Though Acs and Turner suggest extensions to various subsidies, including the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, their primary focus, as well as their largest substantive and most expensive idea, is for a new, $27 billion refundable tax credit for low-income owners or renters.

I offer some critical thoughts of this centerpiece of their paper below, but I first suggest some other thematic issues that deserve closer scrutiny.

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