Back to work
Of course, raising the minimum wage is not the only, and certainly not the most efficient way to increase the value of work. There is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which rebates employer and employee payroll taxes to low-wage workers, and which Eli Lehrer and Lori Sanders of the R Street Institute described in these pages (“Let’s Move,” February 10, 2014) as providing “virtually perfect incentives. . . . [I]t’s also entirely portable . . . [but] remains quite modest.” There is also a negative income tax. I leave it to others to devise ways to make work pay more, the funding to come from the savings in the benefits programs or from part two of a conservative back-to-work policy: accelerated growth.
