What do you want the marginal rate to be? 1%? Just have a $1/month decrease in the subsidy for every $100/month increase in wages. Personally, I would prefer i

What do you want the marginal rate to be? 1%? Just have a $1/month decrease in the subsidy for every $100/month increase in wages. Personally, I would prefer if all welfare was unconditional and we did all of this tweaking through the explicit tax code, but that is an implementation detail. >The more generous benefits you want, the more you have to disincentivize work; What disincentives work is the marginal decrease in benefits. Assuming you have adequate funding, there is no need to increase the rate of marginal decrease. If you don't have adequate funding, then you will need to fund the increased benefits to the not-as-poor by decreasing benefits to the poorer. There is, admitadly, a decreasing marginal value of money that does behave like you are describing, but its effect is dwarfed at the level of income we are talking about.