Afternoon Must-Read: James Pethokoukis: Time for the American Right to Declare Peace on the US Welfare State

…both in terms of GDP and jobs, is unacceptable, the safety net’s performance is encouraging. The pain from the Great Recession, as bad it was, would have been far worse for middle- and low-income Americans if we were still in a sort of 1920s, Coolidgean world that many on the right these days seem to long for…. Now declaring peace isn’t the same thing as surrendering to the status quo…. But the welfare state needs thoughtful and thorough reform. And that doesn’t mean just slapping arbitrary spending caps on federal programs and block granting them back to the states…. Edward Glaeser would alter the EITC by making it a clear and transparent wage subsidy to all workers making less than $9 an hour…. There are lots of other center-right ideas out there: expanding the child tax credit, providing lump-sum bonus payments to unemployed workers who find a job, relocation vouchers to the long-term unemployed in high-unemployment areas, premium-support Medicare reform, expanding healthcare access through tax credits and well-funded high-risk pools…. The safety net isn’t going away, nor should it, but it will need to look a different tomorrow than it does today…