David Riemer, posted on January 7, 2026
The Urban Institute recently published a microsimulation analysis of a work-focused anti-poverty package developed by David Riemer and the Community Advocates Public Policy Advocates Institute in Milwaukee that showed dramatic reductions in the U.S. poverty rate. Riemer, a senior fellow at the Institute, spoke recently with Spotlight about the package and the Urban micro-simulation, which found the U.S. poverty rate would have been cut by more than 50% if implemented in 2018. The transcript of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Great to meet you, David.
I’m very pleased to get reconnected to Spotlight and to meet you. I feel pretty strongly, and I hope you’ll agree as you go through the data, that this work-based model is both unique in its structure and its impacts.
Why don’t we start by walking through the seven steps you outline in your model, and you can also take us through some of the major benefits that you believe will result from it.
Sure. Well, it’s a seven-part, work-based policy package. And I go through it in a sequence that parallels basically three ideas. One idea is to make work available to people who don’t have it at all or are underemployed and want more work. The second set of policies address the question of making work pay. And then the final set of policies involve providing an adequate income for people whom we don’t expect to work because of a disability or who’ve retired in older age, which means basically they’re living on Social Security in part
So, making work available. The single proposal here is to basically bring back the kind of program we had in the new deal with the Civilian Conservation Corps or with the Works Progress Administration, which would be to create a federally financed jobs program where people could do useful work, or in some cases work in the private sector. They would use these jobs to work for up to 40 hours when it’s combined with part-time work. The idea is, if you want 40 hours of work and you don’t have it either because you’re totally unemployed or you’re underemployed, this would be a way to work doing something useful. But with all the incentives focused on helping people move into the regular economy, this program is not meant to trap people the way the welfare system sometimes traps them.
It’s meant to create an incentive. One way it does that is it pays the minimum wage, which would be higher, which I’ll get to in a second, but not more than the minimum wage. Also, the job slots are not permanent; each particular job slot would last no more than roughly 30 weeks and after that people would have to take a hiatus from this program. If they truly couldn’t find work for a lot of different reasons, they could come back and get a different job. But the point is, they wouldn’t be in a permanent position that they could get too comfortable with. They would have to take measures to get a regular job.
That’s the first policy. The second, third, fourth, and fifth all involve making work pay. One would be simply to raise the minimum wage. The Urban Institute micro-simulation model we used chose 2018 as the year to focus on and we chose $13.75 as the minimum wage for that year, which would be about $17.50 in today’s dollars. There’s also a provision to raise the sub-minimum or tipped wage proportionately.
The next policy to make work pay would be to make some pretty important changes in the structure of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The first is to have the credit based on individual earnings so that two people would get the credit based on their own earnings. That eliminates the marriage penalty because there’d be no economic advantage to living together but not being married.
A further change would be to increase the value of the credit so that the maximum amount is $4,000 for a worker. And then for the first, and for the second dependent child, it would be up to $2,500. So, it’s 50% of earnings capped at $4,000 per worker and capped at $2,500 for child one and child two. And then it phases out and the phase out is complete around $80,000. And then the third change to the EITC is that half of the credit would be provided to people on an as-you-go basis per month with the balance being a lump sum. This was tested with the expanded Child Tax Credit.
The next policy we recommend would be to basically bring back that Child Tax Credit that we had in 2021. Technically it’s not based on current earnings, but we know that the overwhelming majority of people who get it are in fact, current earners or were current earners, or will be current earners. So, I think of this as largely a supplement to earnings and we’ve added some potential features to emphasize that.
We also then recommend providing universal childcare and I do it through a mechanism that I’ve never seen anyone else do, although we use similar mechanisms for the Affordable Care Act, for example, and, that is to provide what I call a childcare purchasing account for each lawful U.S. resident. And then they could allocate the dollar value in that account to a qualified childcare provider that’s been certified by the state. If they don’t use the money, they don’t get to keep it as cash.
So, then we move on the last two policies, and they’re very simple. One is to raise the SSI (Supplemental Security Income) benefit to say, we’ll give you enough money to live above the poverty line and a minimum Social Security benefit set at 190% of the poverty line.
And what about the potential impacts David?
The biggest impact that the Urban Institute calculated, and it stands out boldly in their report, is that each one of these policies standing alone does a little bit to reduce poverty but it’s only when you get them together, when they interact with each other, that they produce these dramatic results.
This package would have cut the poverty rate in 2018 from 11.4% to 3.1%, a 73% reduction. That’s 27 million fewer poor people—and if you look at the policy package’s impact on the American population as a whole, it would increase the number above 200% of poverty by 51 million people. It’s a huge number. The policy package would increase the number of people who were employed by almost 7 million people. Some of that are people taking these transitional jobs, but a larger number are people who are incentivized to move into the regular labor market.
David, is there an overall price tag for the whole package?
They estimated it was $807 billion had all this been the law in 2018. And that number is a net as there are accompanying offsets in spending, especially in means-tested welfare programs. There are also significant gains in revenue because the people who are gaining employment are paying taxes.
What comes next for these ideas? Are you getting interest from Capitol Hill or elsewhere?
I think there’s a lot of interest in the individual policies. Clearly, there’s support for raising the minimum wage, as almost half of the states, including a lot of red states, have raised it. Some states, including some red ones, have raised their own EITC and Child Tax Credits, and childcare is really big in the news. It’s not just a far-left idea. I hope to be sharing the word in D.C.