My column for Forbes.com was a bit of a jumble this week. I started with the disturbingly high number of Americans relying on food stamps before transitioning to two articles in the latest issue of National Affairs that offer smart plans for increasing work effort. The articles, by Robert Stein — who has collaborated with National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru — and Charles Blahous, are well worth reading. I really didn’t do either article justice, but you can find them at the National Affairs website.

In “Social Security and Work,” Charles Blahous of the Hudson Institute offers a series of incremental reforms that will make Social Security more work-friendly. To encourage older workers to remain in the workforce, Blahous recommends eliminating the Social Security payroll tax after 45 years of work. He also calls for capping the growth of the non-working spouse benefit, which is far more generous to affluent one-earner couples than to low-wage single working mothers. In “Taxes and the Family,” Robert Stein, a former Treasury Department official, outlines an overhaul of the tax code that would dramatically ease the tax burden on working parents by replacing all existing tax breaks for children with a streamlined $4,000 per child credit that can be counted against income and payroll taxes. Note that Stein is not proposing a refundable credit that will be paid in excess of taxes owed in the form of a check. The only way to benefit from this child credit is to work. To fund these changes, Stein proposes eliminating all itemized deductions except for pared-back deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations. In effect, affluent childless households in high-tax states would pay more while families with children would pay far less. As college tuition and access to good school districts grow ever more expensive, and as the opportunity costs of child-rearing for two-earner couples also increase, raising children has become a bad bet for middle-class strivers. Stein offers a way out of this trap that rewards work and the investment parents make in the next generation. Blahous and Stein aren’t offering panaceas. Their essays offer smart incremental reforms that will make the welfare state friendlier to job growth. These reforms won’t end worklessness. But they do offer steps in the right direction, and a potential roadmap for President Obama’s conservative critics that goes beyond saying no.

But on the food stamp question, I made a separate point.

On Sunday, Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff of The New York Times published a shocking report on the 6 million Americans who receive food stamps and no other income. The numbers have increased dramatically as states like Florida and Nevada endure the most painful economic downturn in living memory. Yet these numbers don’t tell the entire story of life on the edge of poverty. DeParle and Gebeloff are careful to note that at least some food stamp recipients live in households with illegal immigrants, who are not eligible for food stamps and who might have other sources of income. They also make a passing reference to under-the-table jobs. As the cost of hiring increases, a large and growing number of workers are turning to the shadow economy, free of burdensome taxes and regulations but also free of the security offered by the economic mainstream. This shadow economy has long scarred America’s poorest neighborhoods. Now it is spreading to middle-class neighborhoods felled by the housing bust. Worklessness, which is to unemployment what homelessness is to looking for a new house, is threatening to go mainstream.

For the left, the solution is to offer more cash assistance. I argue that this is a mistake.

As the political theorist Judith Shklar observed in American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, earning a wage has long been considered the core source of public respect in American life. Those who earn are considered valued members of the community. Those who do not are considered shirkers–something less than full citizens. Shklar hardly considered this an American virtue, but she did see it as an American reality. And it has persisted up to the present. Indeed, it helps explain the populist anger that increasingly defines our politics. The real danger of American worklessness is that it threatens to create enmity between those who work and those who can’t or won’t. One could imagine an expansion of the safety net that “solves” the problem identified by DeParle and Gebeloff by making cash assistance more generous and widespread. But of course this is no solution at all if what we really care about is self-respect and the mutual respect that makes a society flourish.