Giving Compass' Take:

• Brookings, American Enterprise Institute, and Opportunity America came together to create policy recommendations for restoring opportunity for the working class.

• How can funders help to get these policies implemented? Are these policies sufficient to create the change that is needed? 

• Learn about efforts to build communities in America's heartland. 

The 2016 election put the plight of working-class America front and center in American politics. A long-neglected and largely forgotten voting bloc thought by many to be shrinking to the point of irrelevance suddenly mattered, nationally and in every state. But more important even than the political consequences, the campaign and what followed shone a light on working-class communities, revealing a cluster of problems—economic, social, health-related—that had been festering for several decades.

Among our top proposals:

    • Make work pay by expanding the earned income tax credit to cover childless workers and experimenting with a new wage subsidy.
    • Require state and local agencies that administer government benefits to make a priority of getting recipients back to work.
    • Strengthen work requirements for some beneficiaries of means-tested government programs so long as jobs, training, treatment slots and other relevant services are available.
    • Reform unemployment and disability insurance to promote work.
    • Reform federal education spending to fund programs that teach students, college-age and older, the skills they need for the jobs of the future.
    • Mobilize communities to make the most of the job-creating investment we expect to be unleashed by the Opportunity Zone provision of the 2017 tax bill.
    • Make the child and dependent care tax credit more available to working-class families.
    • Create a new federal program to monitor and limit opioid prescriptions.

Read the full article about policy recommendations for restoring opportunity for the working class at American Enterprise Institute.