High marginal tax rates tend to reduce labor supply. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some workers — Tyler Cowen has described them as “threshold earners” — target a certain level of disposable income and will work less in response to a lower tax burden. But if everyone works less, we could find ourselves in a bind.

I’d suggest that we need more labor supply rather than less, particularly at the low end of the income distribution. The male labor force participation rate has declined over the last thirty years, and one of the culprits, according to scholars from the left and the right, is high effective marginal tax rates for non-custodial fathers and ex-offenders.

One of the quirks of the subsidies offered under PPACA is that they increase implicit marginal tax rates for a wide range of low to moderate income households. Given that the effective marginal tax rates for many of these workers are already quite high, this seems like a mistake.

It’s great when people have more leisure time. The last five decades have seen a dramatic increase in leisure time in the U.S., thanks in large part to the improved efficiency with which we complete household tasks. But it’s particularly great when people choose more leisure time. And it’s not obvious to me that disadvantaged young men on the margins of the formal labor market are in the driver’s seat.

I support government involvement in the insurance marketplace. In particular, I like the idea of channeling dollars from the employer tax exclusion towards refundable tax credits that could be used for the purchase of catastrophic coverage. Federal and state governments could provide additional targeted assistance to low to moderate income households, e.g., a reformed Medicaid program built around block grants might help poor households purchase first-dollar coverage, or we could use a system of public debit cards for routine medical expenditures. This approach would, in my view, increase economic opportunities for vulnerable Americans and address some of the pathologies that exacerbate cost growth in U.S. medical care. This approach would be relatively inexpensive and would probably not reduce labor supply, not because it makes Americans poorer but because it would reduce the need for future tax increases and might even allow for a small tax burden. I see that as a virtue. But tastes vary.