The problem has three heads and you can’t cut them all offHead one: to relieve poverty, benefits must be generous. The “welfare wall” isn’t the result of bad program design or lazy bureaucrats. It exists necessarily, because programs that mostly do relieve poverty, combined with rational thresholds for what constitutes poverty, must reduce benefits as people start to do better. (BTW a “negative income tax” or “guaranteed annual income” would do all three even better, making the underlying problem even worse though, on the plus side, far more visible.) Our challenge is to face this unpleasant reality and decide what balance to strike among known, unavoidable trade-offs.

Source: National Post October 28, 2020 09:56 UTC