The key is that the Federal block grant for each state is finite and does not vary depending on how much the state spends. If the state welfare program costs more the state must pay for the extra expense. If the state welfare program costs less then the state keeps the savings.

The required work for the able bodied has been powerful in moving people off the welfare rolls. But even more powerful have been the new incentives for state bureaucrats resulting from the finite block grants. Under the old system, where Federal funds were increased to match whatever the state spent, signing up new welfare recipients at the state level meant bringing more Federal funds to the state. But with the state itself paying for any extra expenses, or keeping any savings, state bureaucrats moved aggressively to get welfare recipients into jobs. The end result was that the number of welfare recipients under the old AFDC system was reduced by an astounding 60%.

This same system should now be expanded to the other Federal welfare programs across the board, most importantly budget-busting Medicaid, but also food stamps, housing subsidies and others. The states then could use all these block-granted funds for new welfare systems based upon work for the able bodied, bringing in modern labor markets to provide most of the support for previous dependents. Besides getting the poor into real world jobs, where over time they can climb into the middle class, the new system also can provide vouchers for private health insurance vastly superior to Medicaid, and even help with private home ownership vastly superior to public housing.

Ferrara also advocates personal accounts for Social Security, in which workers would save and invest part of their taxes in modern capital markets. These market investments would provide workers with a much better deal and higher benefits than the current, old-fashioned Social Security framework can promise, let alone pay. Such accounts are also enormously powerful in reducing government spending, because they shift huge swaths of such spending out of the public sector altogether and into the private sector.

These accounts could start by replacing Social Security retirement benefits. They eventually could be expanded at the choice of each worker to provide for private life and disability insurance to replace Social Security survivors’ and disability benefits. The accounts eventually could be expanded to cover the payroll tax financed portion of Medicare, producing an annuity in retirement that could be used to purchase private health insurance, which also would be a better deal than Medicare.

Such personal accounts would reduce Federal spending by well over 10% of GDP. At the same time, they would transform the payroll tax from a tax to a wealth-building asset owned and controlled within each family. What a revolution that would be for the personal prosperity of working people.