You want social spending that helps the middle class work? Whatever happened to more spending on education. Sure, its spent inefficiently, but if you spent enough, you would have enough money to fully fund public schools AND allow choice without having to ration resources through bizarre standardized testing.
I wish it were that simple, but the US already floods primary education with excessive funding. We spend more than any other nation on K-12, except the obscure and wealthy micro-republics in Europe, like Luxembourg.
Most states have reduced collegiate funding, relative to tuition costs. The federal government could intervene with investment, but we really want to risk disrupting our elite private institutions? The average American would probably answer with an unequivocal "yes", but the elite politicians who attended those universities?
Furthermore, if we spend money on collegiate education, from where should we get funding? We've already hacked the military budget to pieces, and we have no assurance that higher taxes will be spent on collegiate education. If we need another $100B or $200B, it will have to come from elsewhere.
It seems like such policies face fixable political problems rather than problems with practicality. At this point, its not about the middle class calling the poor swindlin' peasants, its the very wealthy doing the same to the middle class. In the long run, it could be a very good strategy for populists who have been framed for the last 40 years as only supporting the very poor.
Further, maybe military spending should be revisited but there are other large infrastructures that could produce jobs and novel products.
AD might be right in that there is too much focus on what only the "47%" need but there are things that all of the 99% can benefit from. "Workfare" such as education (something whose waste must be solved but no one has the solution for), healthcare (Obamacare is basically the last resort to fix a system based on employment-based insurance. If Obamacare fails, gets cancelled or made irrelevant, the next step is either a system that mostly relies on subsidized private savings and credit (which is how I pay for the dentist now) instead of insurance, or a government run system, instead of insurance. I've also heard people talking about "free clinics") and spending on military and civilian projects.
An interesting study would be how much increased investment in social and physical infrastructure would reduce the need for transfer payments. I'm open to the fact that Republican policies such as replacing the healthcare and education system with a subsidized savings and loans system might work, but like all R ideas, if they worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Of course there is the TEA party/Right-Libertarian/paleocon idea that we should just give up because "nothing is working" and all we're accomplishing is waiving our rights, some legitimate concerns and some of which haven't been recognized as rights in this country for almost a century. Basically, their policy is "don't be poor or you will be sent to prison" though many of them say that in the mythical past, the "Godly poor" were "happy" and lived in the woods and had gardens.
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