JAN. 14, 2014 - New York Times

Last Friday at the Food Bank for New York on 116th Street, I caught a glimpse of the many shapes of need.

With a few hundred dollars, 25-year-old Ayesha Depay could afford the lessons she needs to pass her road test and get a driver’s license, an indispensable tool for the job she craves leading recreation programs for children.

Nadine Robinson, 43, a former receptionist at Sony Music Studios who has been working for $9 an hour as a home health aide, could use the money to get a step ahead of the relentless stream of bills, pay down debts and rebuild her credit.

A 53-year-old security guard I talked to declined to provide his name, embarrassed perhaps that he was sleeping on friends’ couches, working barely enough hours to “keep my head above water.” He had so many potential uses for extra cash he couldn’t pin any one down.

For all their differences, these men and women shared one crucial thing. Despite incomes low enough that if they had been parents they would probably have qualified for substantial government cash assistance, they received little if any support. What drew them here was the chance to participate in an antipoverty experiment started by the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity to test what would happen if the government were to help adults without children.

To perform the investigation, proposed by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and supported by his successor, Bill de Blasio, New York City contracted with MDRC, a nonprofit social policy research organization, to track 6,000 low-income single adults who do not have direct responsibility over children — from never-married childless women to divorced fathers who don’t have custody of their children but are obligated to pay child support.

Half of them will receive a bonus payment every year intended to replicate the main features of the earned-income tax credit. The other half will serve as a control group.

The hope is that the tax break will do for singles what it has achieved most successfully for single mothers: shoring up workers who suffer a drop in earnings and encouraging work by subsidizing the meager wages that have become the hallmark of the American service economy.

The test is one of the first concrete acknowledgments that the longstanding American economic belief that the job market alone can provide for the needs of nearly all workers may no longer be valid.

Needy children are innocent, worthy recipients of assistance. And for all practical purposes, that means aiding the parents, often single mothers, who care for them. But childless adults have been historically barred from most government support, from Medicaid to welfare.

From the 1930s well into the 1970s, most mothers were eligible for aid to families with dependent children only when the man was out of the home. “People from the welfare office came around looking for evidence of a man,” said MDRC’s president, Gordon L. Berlin. Today, low-income noncustodial fathers who can’t afford to pay child support are still not considered deserving of assistance. And they can go to jail for not paying up.

But the labor market is not doing its job the way it once did. Earnings of male high school graduates fell by nearly a fifth from 1979 to 2012, after inflation. For men without a high school diploma they declined by almost a third. Women’s wages have held up somewhat better, but are also declining for the least educated. Partly as a result, poverty among workers has increased faster over recent years than for working-age Americans without a job.

The future is not promising. According to projections from the Department of Labor, nine of the 10 occupations that will grow fastest over the next decade pay less than the median wage. Six pay less than is needed to keep a family of four out of poverty.

If the taboo against helping the able-bodied made sense in an era when a job guaranteed something approaching a reasonable living, its case is far weaker today.

The earned-income tax credit is the largest cash-transfer program in the United States, costing some $61 billion in 2010. It provides up to $3,305 a year to low-income working families with one child and up to $6,143 for those with three or more.

Combined with the much smaller child tax credit, it lifted one of every 15 children out of poverty in 2012, according to an analysis by Kathleen Short from the Census Bureau. Without it, the nation’s overall poverty rate would be 19 percent instead of 16 percent, under the Census Bureau’s comprehensive Supplemental Poverty Measure.

And it has encouraged single mothers to work. After the big expansions of the earned-income tax credit in 1990 and 1993, the labor supply of single mothers grew by 16 percentage points, reaching roughly 87 percent in 1999.

Like raising the minimum wage, broadening the tax credit could help workers earn their way out of poverty. “This is a promising thing to test,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard who has been collaborating with MDRC on the design and evaluation of the experiment. “It is a pro-employment sort of way to make work pay.”

Proposing more government aid in these bruising political times might seem like a waste of time. The New York program will bump the maximum annual benefit for singles to $2,000 for three years — from a maximum under the federal earned-income tax credit of $496. And it will phase out much more slowly.

Extending New York’s credit to some 13 million singles without qualifying children across the country would cost roughly $15 billion a year, according to a calculation by Cynthia Miller, who is head of the project for MDRC. Chances are that wouldn’t sit well among congressional Republicans, who have called for cuts to food assistance and are opposed to reinstating the extension of emergency jobless benefits.

Still, the earned-income credit has proved enormously popular on the left and the right. President Ronald Reagan called it “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”

N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chief economic adviser to President George W. Bush, recently recommended the earned-income tax credit over a higher minimum wage as the better tool to increase the earnings of the working poor.

Some criticize the credit, however, saying it subsidizes employers by allowing beneficiaries to accept a lower wage. As a consequence, they argue, the tax break ends up hurting low-wage workers who do not qualify for it.

This argument, which could bolster the case for a higher minimum wage, could also strengthen the case for spreading the tax credit’s benefits more broadly. And a broader credit could serve another rare bipartisan cause: improving compliance with child support laws.

“We have a robust child support enforcement system,” said Maria Cancian, a professor of public affairs and social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What we’ve been less successful at is enabling low-income fathers to earn enough to support themselves and afford child support obligations.”

Another potential benefit, said Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy and management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, would be to encourage young disadvantaged men into jobs and away from crime, making them more desirable as marriage partners and reducing the number of children born to teenage single mothers.

“Family structure is both a consequence and a cause of poverty,” Professor Edin told me.

The fundamental reason to support wages goes beyond children, however. In a nutshell, for the American market economy to remain viable, being employed must, one way or another, provide for workers’ needs.