David Brooks writes:
If you get outside the partisan boxes, there's a completely obvious agenda to create more middle-class, satisfying jobs. The federal government should borrow money at current interest rates to build infrastructure, including better bus networks so workers can get to distant jobs. The fact that the federal government has not passed major infrastructure legislation is mind-boggling, considering how much support there is from both parties.
Other shifts are more fundamental, but should be the signature themes of the next political era. First, the government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly. But it means, as Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute recommends, increasing wage subsidies when employers hire the long-term unemployed and issuing relocation subsidies so people in high unemployment areas can move.
Sorry, I don't find this "obvious," much less "completely obvious." The federal government did pass "major infrastructure legislation," the stimulus bill, with debatable results. And there's all kinds of infrastructure spending packed into the regular budget, including the $76 billion that the U.S. Department of Transportation spent in 2013. States and regional authorities, not just the federal government, can fund such spending. The Times itself has reported recently on the under-construction $3.9 billion new Tappan Zee bridge over the Hudson River, as well as the construction, for $3.6 billion, of a new main terminal at La Guardia Airport.
As for busing workers to "distant jobs," how would those long commutes affect families? Why not an alternative strategy that would deregulate housing construction, or reform zoning, to allow more housing near the jobs, or more jobs near the cheap housing?
And as for "relocation subsidies so people in high unemployment areas can move," I'm glad to see Mr. Brooks covering this idea, which I wrote about back in February. But Mr. Brooks, who at his best (which is not in today's column) is alert to the law of unintended consequences and and also sensitive to the need for humility when it comes to policy prescriptions, doesn't spend any time exploring the potential downside of this plan. As I wrote back in February:
people move to places with better employment prospects all the time, even without government subsidies. Others may worry about the dislocating effects on people who leave their families and friends behind far away in pursuit of a job.
Structuring the subsidy as a loan, as Senator Thune's amendment does, runs the risk of saddling individuals already loaded with debt with even more of it. A 1981 evaluation of a 1976 federal relocation assistance program found that some program participants, those who moved and then couldn't find a job even in their new home, were disappointed. The subsidies may encourage people to move to places that appear to be full of jobs at one moment — like Las Vegas in 2005 or Wall Street in 2007 — but are actually about to crash.
Again, that doesn't mean that these ideas aren't worth considering or maybe even doing. But declaring something "completely obvious" doesn't make it so, and is a poor substitute for a reasoned argument in support of a policy.