This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 4th, 2018.

I'm Keelib Brown.

The narrow conception of welfare in the United States focuses almost exclusively on raising incomes with cash benefits and other programs.

But spending some time on how government red tape raises the cost of living for low-income families could provide some dramatic

benefits for the poor without adding to tax burdens. Ryan Bourne is author of a new Cato

paper, The Cost of Living with with government out today.

The main point I'm trying to make in this paper is though

liberals and conservatives have different ideas about what causes poverty and some of the underlying factors that mean some people remain in poverty.

There appears to be somewhat of a consensus in terms of what we're doing to try to alleviate

it and you've just alluded to that. You know policies attempt to raise the

the incomes of the poor directly through things like cash transfers, tax breaks, minimum wage laws and the like, or try to raise the

pause disposable income indirectly by shifting expenditure on goods and

services to taxpayers through programs such as Medicaid for example. Now that can alleviate

poverty clearly if you give people money or you reduce the amount that

they have to spend on certain goods and services that does

help alleviate direct financial hardship and there's some good evidence of that.

We've seen over the years if you account for federal cash benefits, tax credits and

benefits in kind a big decline in the poverty rate overall over the last few

decades and recent workers suggested that almost all of the major spending programs

help reduce measured poverty substantially for some groups.

My argument here though is that this overwhelming focus on this income-based approach to poverty

has really left a huge blind spot for us which is that there are lots of

...