A useful way to think about policies targeting opportunity is to consider those that can address near-term opportunity barriers and those that address longer-term barriers. Near-term policies address opportunity deficits with negative effects on people’s economic circumstances today, such as the absence of gainful employment opportunities or the effect on living standards when inequality contributes to stagnant paychecks. Long-term interventions, such as quality preschool or improved access to higher education, can enhance the future opportunities of children.

Near-term opportunity enhancers

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Running a full-employment labor market: Extensive evidence shows that lower-wage and minority workers are disproportionately helped by tight labor markets. This implies an important role for the Federal Reserve: In balancing its dual mandate of stable prices and full employment, it must be careful not to tap the economic growth brakes (i.e., raise the benchmark interest rate it controls) too aggressively. The recovery appears to finally be reaching some places that have thus far been left behind, so absent clear evidence of inflationary pressures, the Fed should proceed with caution. It also implies a role for fiscal policy to help create more labor demand where it is lacking, as with my next policy suggestion.

Investing in infrastructure: It is widely agreed that underinvesting in maintaining and improving the nation’s public goods is harmful economic policy. Our water treatment and distribution systems need almost $400 billion in investments over the next 20 years. More than half of the nation’s public schools need to be repaired, renovated or modernized; the average age of the main building of a public school today is about 44 years. Roofs, windows, boilers, and ventilation, plumbing and electrical systems need to be fixed, upgraded or replaced.

And, of course, in the near term, infrastructure investment can create employment for blue-collar laborers, making it a particularly strategic investment in parts of the country with too little labor demand.

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Direct job creation: Although Congress often tries to help left-behind places through targeted tax credits, such incentives have a poor track record. The problem is that these policies are simply too indirect. If we want to help places with too little labor demand, we must consider direct job-creation policies, meaning either jobs created by the government sector or publicly subsidized private employment. Infrastructure ideas, such as renovating our stock of public schools by directly creating temporary jobs, fit into this space as well, but I say we set up an employment fund that supports national service jobs on an ongoing basis and includes a flexible funding stream that can ramp up in economic downturns.

Health care and other work supports: Another important way to help less-advantaged people get in and stay in the labor force — and to tap entrepreneurial opportunities — is to ensure a solid system of work supports, with health care as a standout example. Extensive research shows significant, positive labor supply effects from the earned income tax credit (EITC, a wage subsidy for low-wage workers), and policies that support working parents, especially help with child care, have been shown to raise women’s ability to join and stay in the labor force.

Helping small manufacturers join global supply chains: In an earlier piece on this page, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and I argued that policy should target smaller manufacturers from areas with displaced workers, helping such firms modernize and find their way into the global supply chain. Expanding the Commerce Department’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) would help in this space, although note that President Trump’s “skinny budget” zeros out the MEP.

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Invest in renewable energy: Bob Pollin et al. find that a combination of market incentives (carbon limits and taxes) alongside public and private investment in renewable energy would improve environmental and employment outcomes. In terms of public investment, they call for retrofitting publicly owned buildings, initiating green infrastructure projects (e.g., building out a “smart” grid), implementing procurement policy such as supplying the U.S. military with renewable energy, and expanding federal research and development into renewable energy development, storage and distribution. They estimate that their investment agenda (private and public) would generate 2.7 million jobs.

Apprenticeship programs: Economist Robert Lerman makes a strong case that apprenticeship programs, or work-based learning, can be highly effective in connecting young workers with limited prospects to good jobs. Public policy can help (and is doing so in some states and other advanced economies) through grants and credits to employers who start apprenticeship programs, as well as spreading the word to the broader employment community. Lerman writes that “expanding apprenticeship offers a long-term, evidence-based strategy that increases productivity by increasing skills at very modest cost to the government. Apprenticeships combine serious work-based learning and classroom instruction usually lasting two to four years, aimed at mastering occupational and employability skills, and leading to a recognized credential.”

Longer-term opportunity enhancers

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Research on the various safety-net programs finds lasting impacts. When poor families with young children get extra income, Medicaid, nutritional support or a housing voucher, once those children hit adulthood, they have better earnings and educational and health outcomes compared with young children who didn’t receive such interventions. And every $1 spent on early-childhood education results in about $8.60 of “benefits to society … about half of which comes from increased earnings for children when they grow up.”

There’s bipartisan support for significantly increasing the value of the EITC for childless adults. Low-income childless workers are eligible for only a very small credit; e.g., a full-time minimum wage worker would be eligible for a credit under $50 (and workers under 25 are ineligible for the wage subsidy). Proposals to significantly increase the value of the credit would lift hundreds of thousands of workers out of poverty and bring millions closer to the poverty threshold.

Increasing the EITC is sometimes promoted as a substitute to higher minimum wages. But Robert Greenstein points out that proposals to raise the minimum wage and the EITC should not be viewed as substitutes; their designs have several complementary attributes, and it will take both to raise living standards and boost opportunities.

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Strengthening the child tax credit, which excludes the first $3,000 of a worker’s earnings from consideration, is another useful way to help poor families with young children. That can be accomplished by either “making the current CTC fully refundable for families with a young child or by creating a fully refundable supplement to the CTC just for families with young children (an option that is more expansive because it boosts the tax credit for all families with young children that receive the CTC, not just those at lower-income levels).”

Much could be done to reduce the opportunity killer that is our criminal justice system. Michael Mitchell and Michael Leachman recommend state-level policies that can reduce the negative effects of incarceration rates: trimming penalties for low-level felonies, many of which fall disproportionately on minorities; reexamining sentencing laws; reducing sentences; and more. Congress could accelerate such progress with legislation allowing federal judges to impose sentences below the mandatory minimums when warranted. Expanding “fair chance” hiring practices such as “ban-the-box” (which allows those with records to not reveal them in initial interview stages) have been found to yield positive results.