giving presentations and having meetings. all set up higher telepresence robots. >> host: why is the company headquartered in new bedford massachusetts? >> guest: our founder and is co-founder are all from m.i.t.. they shared a common vision which was robotics and in venture capital services it was way too early 25 years ago to even dream of putting a robot in every home. >> host: in those 25 years of what has been the advanced months that you have seen? >> guest: i think 25 years ago it was a dream to think of practical robotics, robots that provide enough value for the price you have to pay for it.

so at that time a lot of the robots you saw were experiments from labs from m.i.t. and those were expensive robots worth tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs. now we have robots like rumba better in millions of homes and perform a daily chore every single day. a lot of acreage every day autonomously and it's done at a price point that the consumers willing to pay for any benefit from it. >> host: here is csb i-robot would be showing? >> guest: we don't have new products that we have moved that you can go by invitation to a private meeting. that is what we are focused on this year.

>> host: are you in the drone business? >> guest: we are on the ground there is a lot of ground to cover and we have decided to focus on that. there are a lot of companies going after the aerial vehicles and the drone parts and we think that is well covered at us and we are focused on ground robots. >> host: how did you get into this business? >> guest: myself? when i was staring out what to do with my life, iwas brought up in denmark is always going from lab to lab. >> host: usher training? >> guest: i was a computer scientist and trying to figure out what to do with my masters and i arrived at our robotics university of denmark and that my professor tammie kristiansen who has become a major figure in u.s. robotics. he is a professor at georgia tech and you can say was love at

first sight. when i saw the robot he was talking about is that this is what i want to do and i got into robotics this way. >> host: paulo pirjanian i-robot chief technology officer. this is "the communicators." "the communicators" airs every week saturday at 6:30 p.m. on c-span and again on monday on c-span2 at 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.. if you would like to see some of our previous programs go to c-span.org/communicators. next up with tv rumba program. catherine eban talks about a recent planning some poverty in

the united states and reports a growing number of american families are surviving on virtually no income. she is interviewed by representative gwen moore democrat of wisconsin. >> host: hello professor eden. >> guest: it's so good to be with you. >> host: it's fantastic to be with you to discuss your book "$2.00 a day" living on almost nothing in america co-authored by lisa schaffer. let me start out by thanking you for writing the book. >> was a labor of love. >> host: i think there are normative assumptions that most americans would not believe and i would invite them to read your book. first of all i think americans don't think that there are people who live off what the

united nations describes as extreme poverty in the world. they think that people who are extremely poor are these little children we see on tv starving to death and none the worst and they run out and get their check books so they can send them money. they don't believe people in the united states live on $2 per person per day. so that is one enlightening part of your book. 1.5 million families, 3 million children. another thing i think they won't believe is that most americans according to you in this book look at the general social survey saying that 60 to 70% of americans think that we ought to provide more support to the poor and yet when you say that we

need to provide more welfare assistance to them then people think that's not true. another normative assumption and why i'm so happy he wrote the book is that most people think of people who need help with support as folks that ronald reagan described. the woman with 80 names and 30 addresses. >> guest: she was quite a character and much of what reagan said about lizzie taylor was not true but years later when she was investigated she was quite an impressive criminal. hardly a traditional one. >> host: the most amazing

thing before you get into some questions is that people who are poor want to work. >> guest: they do indeed. >> host: i am on a daily basis looking at my colleagues with the notions that these are ne'er-do-wells, lazy people who don't want to work who are constantly lacking in personal responsibility and they don't want to work. they want to game the system and in your book you describe the eighth folks here come the 18 that you follow but the aid in this book and people who are connected to the workforce in some style dragger study. let's start with my first question. you start the book out by

describing, we talked about the welfare reformers touting the success of welfare reform and he said and i need some clarification on this, 68% of low income single mothers were employed after the touted welfare reform of 1996. then you said 75% of them were working at child poverty rates fell four consecutive years after 1996 and of course democrats and republicans were taking their victory laps and have been since then. talking about how well-off they were. then we have your book. tell us what happened.

>> guest: well, i just want to get a little bit of background so you know how i came to this. prior to welfare reform i traveled the country asking low income single moms, welfare recipients how they made ends meet. i my collective budgets from hundreds of single mothers and told the story in my first book about how welfare wasn't paying enough to survive so you had to work as well but you couldn't tell welfare because they would take the money. ever since then i've had this mental calculator going off in my head. after six years of asking people about their balance sheet is automatic and so i studied poverty for quite a while and then i went and studied urban families. so in 2000 i came back to the topic and i was in baltimore interviewing young adults and i

began running across households for whom there was no visible support. i remember a young woman in the throat calms you know baltimore you know it sits right in the shadow of the person they are. downtown is old a keynesian looking structure and alicia just had a baby about three weeks ago and we came into the house and she was visibly depressed. there was no food in the house. there was only a table with one broken chair and more worrying. >> host: a three -week-old baby. >> guest: three week old baby and she was having trouble supporting the babies had so i said i think we need to interview again because i was concerned about the baby and i thought maybe we could ring over some formula or something.

so again we gave her the $50 that we use that we pay people and lo and behold became the next day and alicia's heading out the door. her hair had been permed, looked terrific. she had gone out and gotten a new pantsuit and she was on her way out having that baby with mom to look for a job. there was formula in the house. what we realized i think in that little moment when i realized before i met the numbers guy who was the one analyzes the government survey on implementation i realize that not only was it possible that a group of americans were living on income is so low we did and as nation think was possible.

it had a magical power. if you have no cash in the developing world there is a rich barter economy that you can subsist on. it's not a pretty story and i have met -- a lot of transactions occur without cash. here we are leading capitalist nation and to not have cash is almost not exist and with that little infusion -- infusion of cash alicia felt this sense of efficacy that allowed her at least in some modest way. running into alicia we then followed alicia over the next two years watching her struggle. that was really the inspiration for this journey that is now let

us to four other cities and through a lot of number crunching to try to tell the story from a statistical perspective so we can get a national portrait of poverty but also in the deep inhuman way that we felt it was necessary to tell the story so americans could really think through what it means. >> host: do you didn't comment this $2 a day didn't interview the 1.5 million families that you say but you did make an effort to go beyond their urban experience. he went into appalachia and the delta, the mississippi delta and cities like chicago and cleveland and you the reference is one of my favorite cities in wisconsin to gather this data.

tell us what it's like to live on $2 per person per day and what we found with the recent recession is now in its effect formerly called food stamps were the only form of income that some people had any document that in this book so that people had s.n.a.p. but they didn't have money and so you sort of talked about the difficulties that provided even though we do know that that's the only income that presented. so could you tell us a little bit about this? >> guest: that's interesting.

half of the poor dude gets s.n.a.p. in the other don't interestingly enough although they are eligible. you can see in the s.n.a.p. administrative data of the exact same rise in household living without cash that we document so that's one interesting thing. you can just see this monotonic rise in welfare reform and the number of people with s.n.a.p. who were telling the food stamp office i have no income. >> host: which in a way professor edin, that works in our counter-cyclical economy. i say this to my colleagues all the time. this is a capitalist society and you know while it's not pleasant to have a great recession that we had in 2008 something we can depend on happening in the kind of economy that we have so when

there is no work we have a social safety net and s.n.a.p. serves up a social safety net to provide people with certain things. >> guest: we see that in a recession. with their statistical analysis we see the effective s.n.a.p. especially in the great recession. so if we counted s.n.a.p. as cash which you may or may not want to do for the reasons you know because you read the book and i can talk about it in a minute we cut them out -- the amount of two-dollar day poverty in half and you especially see that protective effect in a recession when there was no increase in poverty once you count s.n.a.p. and s.n.a.p. in many ways is the only social safety net we have left and it's incredibly important program. the reason i say you might not want to count s.n.a.p. as cash is when you don't have any cash in your kids need things for

school and they need a uniform and a need to backpack and a change of underwear you are going to need something fungible that part of s.n.a.p. is not fungible. families do trade and s.n.a.p. for cash to provide essential goods for their kids to keep the lights on and in jackson mississippi in the delta one of the only ways these hospitals can keep the air-conditioning on to sell the vast majority of their s.n.a.p.. what's the problem with that? s.n.a.p. doesn't cover all the family needs in any case to what you seem in cases where families are selling s.n.a.p. are three weeks out of the month when the family if they have anything is eating 7-cent packs of ramen for every mail and of course you can imagine the impact on

hypertension and obesity and so wand. >> host: diabetes. >> guest: diabetes, all that sodium. >> host: well, you know, so you did not find that it was just a matter of personal responsibility, or a lack of personal responsibility. you say in your book that quote a lack of personal responsibility blaming it on a lack of personal responsibility there are powerful and ever-changing structures and forces at play here and then you start talking about how service employers often engage in practices that they middle-class professionals would never accept it would set people up for

failure. so i wanted to know, so here we are. we have got willing workers, people who want to work according to you, people who don't want to go on welfare according to your book and we can talk again about one of your recipients who refuses to go down to the tanf office to apply for tanf and they want to work but you say the job sets people up for failure. can you talk about this? >> guest: one nice thing about having these government statistics as you can play the stories and the numbers off against each other so i did talk about ray mccormack in cleveland ohio who still will not go on tanf. she sees herself as a worker and during the time we spend in cleveland we began to ask who are the two-dollar day poor and

what can predict a spell of poverty? are these long-term dependents who have fallen off the welfare rolls or is there another story and what we found was remarkable. over the prior two years only 10% had claimed even a nickel from the tanf program. 70% during the last year, households had installed working in the labor market. our story is really one of people wanting to work seeing themselves as workers taking pride in that work status, thinking of welfare as something that's really unacceptable, something that violates their sense of who they are but yet the bottom of the labor market has become so degraded and employers are eking out efficiencies from labor

practices like on call, zero our contracts recommit called at any time but not guaranteed any contracts. you show up and you are sent home. >> host: adjusting time scheduling. can you give us some examples of this? >> guest: just-in-time scheduling is when you can predict what your schedule is going to look like for maybe more than 48 hours so if you are a mom with kids it's very hard to pair these jobs of parenting. the other problem with these jobs, the full-time zero our contracts is that you never know what your income is going to be so its it's impossible to plan. the unpredictability of works means it's very difficult to take a second job so working

double shifts becomes almost impossible when you can't predict what shifty will be on in the first job. >> host: hugh say to you -- they say to you our daycare worker or a waitress in a restaurant. you are to be on call for saturday afternoon so therefore you can't babysit or do hair because you have to be available to her mark in it they don't call you to work -- >> guest: you don't get paid exactly. >> host: z. can't predict your income and these are regular work practices by even some of the large employers. you also talked about people not having safe working conditions. >> guest: jennifer hernandez

has maybe the worst job in the book. she gets a custodial job after being homeless on and off for three years and finally lands this job. she has got these two little kids. she and both kids have asthma so she goes to work for chicago city and at first she's cleaning corporate apartment buildings and the work slows. winter sets in and suddenly the only contracts the company is pulling in our foreclosed houses on chicago's south side so of course there is no heat heat in the psalms, there's no power. they unlocked the door. there might be vermin and there. they never know whether this is being used as a shelter for wildlife and there's broken glass and they are expected to clean up these places.

they are hauling water from local restaurants. they are scrubbing in these frigid homes until the skin is falling off their hands and of course jennifer begins suffering from asthma because all of the molten toxins that she is exposed to in these homes so then she gets sick. the kids get sick and they end up in a cycle of illness -- he comes to work anyway but her employer says you are going to get the rest of the crew sick. you go home but the employer then punishes her by giving her less than full-time hours so by the end of her work day she's only getting half time hours. she knows it will take months to find another job so she leaves chicago so she will have time. she will have time to search for another job but meanwhile the whole family has been an and out of the hospital with these

repeated asthma attacks exacerbated by jennifer bringing sickness. >> host: they had osha and other protections and so on. wage theft. you talk about wage theft. that's something that we say if they had better character and they would accept for small responsibility and there are certain work supports. we know that they don't have the pension we know often they don't have health insurance but these are things that people don't take a bow. they just take the same working environment for granted. what is wage theft? >> guest: common practice is with hotel pay. you are told you have to clean the room before you clock in, so you have put in 45 minutes

before you are allowed to clot can and then you are paid minimum wage. these kind of practices were you are paid sub minimum wage or you are the fourth to clock in and clock out in ways that don't capture the full day you were working overtime but this also happened to jennifer at the spa where she was working downtown. she was working 10 or 12 hours a day and not being paid overtime. so wage theft is a huge problem in our country and it's something that is not often talked about. it's very real. >> host: let's talk about rings that middle-class families may be taking for granted or maybe not. personal days, sick leave. i want to talk specifically about the employee of the month.

the awardee that you talk about in the book cited for being the employee of the month. >> host: >> guest: she is an amazing woman. she has a beautiful little daughter and she works at kmart for years, loves kmart even though kmart never gives her more than part-time hours but kmart closes down a super walmart comes to the neighborhood so she searches and finds a job at walmart and again i can't emphasize how important work is in the lives of these folks. she decides she is going to memorize all of the bar codes on the purchase items because that's what takes the longest t. keon. she devices this method and by the way it's been so neglected

that by the time she's 19 years old she no longer has teeth so we are talking a deeply poor woman from a deeply poor family. anyway she reads the bar code numbers into the recording device on her cell phone and when she goes home at night she turns upon and endless repeat as she sleeps. she is able to memorize an amazing amount of information. she prefers the day shift because she likes to work hard and the night shift pays a dollar more but she doesn't like to be bored. she likes to be busy. she has so many medications to that she has a special place in the employee locker room to keep her meds. some time she's going to have to go and get her meds especially

are asthma meds but she's working and then she's living with extended family kind of an been an exploited date of situation where she is to turn over a lot of her pay in return for the use of a car. her pay is supposed to cover the use of the car and gas and of course she has just made that payment and she is just gassed up the car and just made the payment to the extended family member who is her landlord. she gets in the car on monday morning and there is no gas. she has no money left. she spent all her money paying the rent and doing all the other things so she is furious. .. m.

she calls her manager after winning employee of the month twice in six months, and he says, well, if you can't find a way to get to work, just don't bother. >> host: and she lost her job. >> >> guest: she lost her job. >> host: she lost a minimum wage job, and she didn't have a personal day that all of us can take for granted -- >> guest: exactly. >> host: -- if we were to have in this sort of emergency. >> guest: so there's no give. and that's another critical feature of these jobs, is you have people who have lives, you know, that require give. and you have a low-wage labor market that increasingly has no reason to give you give, because there's ten people lined up if or your job -- up for your job. >> host: well, you know, you talked a little bit, you talked a lot about the housing situations that people who are a part of this $2-a-day per person are subjected to. you say a lot of them double up

with other family members. , u with a family members. that ought to be the charm, yet some poor people who live with other poor people, they're able to share a pot and share a and -- share a house and make it. so what did you find in your research? >> guest: that can be true. family is the first line of defense, and we spend quite a bit of time talking about paul, who becomes the shelter in the storm for this extended family who are all in the pizza business together when this -- when all of the stores go bust at the same time. here's a whole family business that goes belly up, and i believe 2009, and everyone ends up at paul's house, and we tell the story about how this little two-bedroom home just -- on

lorraine avenue thousand -- on the west side of cleveland, crawling -- beds everywhere if met paul at a food pantry in cleveland, and he was there with 12 of his grandkids and i didn't realize there was another eight. that was a protected thing. we can contrast that, then to the story of what happened with jennifer hernandez when she doubled up with a relative in texas, where she had grown up as child and where her mother had grown up, and what happens with jennifer. and jennifer has how many pel doubleups, which which end in disaster. often times what seals your fate as a $2 a day poor person is you have some dysfunction in your family network, and that's part of the knock shoes stu that

creates the disadvantage. so her little girl is molested by george, and they flee, to a goodwill, that makes a bedroom for them out of an office because it's a men's shelter. and they go to the police, and of course the entire family turns their back on jennifer for reporting this uncle who manages a country club and -- she broke the family up, and we see a similar story with madonna harris and her little girl, brianne. they're doubled up with her father, and brianne in ends up

in a psychiatric ward after this other little girl just -- it's so humiliating to be this poor, and little brianna was just so ashamed. there's so many times in the -- been in a shelter three years before they land in this situation, that when this cousin taunts her and ridicules her, again and again, she just loses it. and then ended up spending a month in a psychiatric hospital. >> host: one of the things i found that is heart wrenching is when the mother had a much younger boyfriend/husband, and the much younger boyfriend-husband was an abusive partner and made her choose between him and one of her other kid, and made the mom put her daughter out. >> this is the story of tabitha,

the star of the book. she is this exceptional 18-year-old with such -- who is such a -- rye -- resilient. cliff is this -- >> host: yes, cliff. >> guest: there are five kids along with tabitha from dad one, who they divorced and she marries -- she gets together with cliff, and i believe they have nine more children, and cliff is a farm worker, down in the delta there. he works on-again-off-again as a poorly paid farm hand. he is a alcoholic and a drug addict, and just a brutally abusive -- and in fact, when you

good over there house you notice that half the windows are boarded up, because whenever they lock him out, he puts his fist and foot through the window and comes in. at any case the kids are always trying to defend their mother against cliff, and one day a big fight breaks out, and she runs to this sort of juke joint, convenience store, liquor store, down the road, and he -- the confrontation between tabitha and cliff, and cliff says to alva may, you have to choose, and she says, honey, why don't you go with a friend of yours for a while. >> host: well, i can tell you that when you talk about the need for money, i guess rent is

one over the things you can't pay for with s.n.a.p. >> guest: that's right. >> host: you can't pay for it without money. and you started out by talking about how a lot of your passion for this subject started with could cabrini green, your research in the project, and a lot of them were jubilant about then them tearing down a lot of the so-called projects because they were thought to be crucibles for social ills. we now are experiencing a real dearth in fastfoodable affordable housing and your book talks about in 2013, rents grew faster than inflation in every region of the country, by 6%, have been real income drop by 13%.

the housing and urban development data says we should spend mo more than 30% on housing that would include electricity and so forth. people are finding themselves even those who are not living on $2 per person per day, spending 50% to 70% of their income on housing. so, just by definition people who have no money are at risk for being homeless, for having to double up with unscrupulous relatives or move from couch to couch to couch, salvation army. talk about several of the people really using the library system to have a clean bathroom, to clean up in, and that is real struggle, having just some solid housing, so when you're part of the $2 per person per day who

group, housing really becomes one of the major struggles, and the ability to protect your family becomes impossible, and just having a launching pad to get to work. where do you -- what's your address? >> guest: we have chapter, as you know, called "a room of one's own" which is really what ray dreams of for her little daughter, and she fantasizes about the time when she'll have a place of her own and be able to get -- create a decked out dora the explorer room for her daughter with a princess bed and a poster and the special blankets and the canopy. this is her fantasy, this idea that some day i'll have a home of my own. it's true that rents have risen. we argue that the affordability

cries is as least as much about falls wages and rising rents, but the combination is toxic for families. so, to describe to you the son tell layings of the home ray -- constellation of the home ray was living in when we left her in the book. we have been in touch with her since. let me try to paint the picture. she is living in a neighborhood in cleveland called stockton. it's a poor white neighborhood on the west side. the house that they rented from an unscrupulous landlord was completely stripped of most of its wiring and copper pipes in the time between the old tenants moving out and they moving in. so, a scrapper came and the middle of the night and ripped everything out. they moved in, not quite realizing that they were

desperate -- they were desperate and the landlord, of course, refused to fix anything. so you have ray and her little daughter, you have george, this sort of unscrupulous -- kinds of unscrupulous guy who basically takes in ssi boarders and chen collects their checks in full in return for his -- >> host: when you say poor people become victims to real predators, landlords, employers, this whole subculture. >> guest: right. >> host: -- of people who take advantage of how vulnerable people with no money are. >> guest: yes. so she is with george. his wife, camilla, a change smoker, and then there's big art, an elderly man, incontinent, very sick. there's a young disabled couple

who both have profound mental disabilities, and then there's just two stray boys whose mother dropped them off one day for play date and doesn't come back. there's no running water so they have to go counsel to the basement and haul up water from a broken pipe. there's one outlet that still works up stairs so they're just cords running everywhere, creating incredible fire hazard. especially in a neighborhood where all the homes are built out of wood. so, exactly. this is the kind of mutual exploitation that goes on in the bottom when everybody doesn't have enough for anybody, and so the way to get by is to -- it's kind of the opposite of the image we have of the happy poor who are sharing and supporting. it's a much darker picture than that. >> host: so, you know, i just

want to get back a little bit before we wrap it up and sort of think about what -- where we ought to good from here and talk about the character of the people in the book. it was amazing you developed as much trust and confident with the people to admit they participatessed in informal economic, that they did things that were illegal or immoral, and of course, that sort of tracks with what a lot of people think about poor people anyway, that they're -- that they are lacking in character. i was wondering why we shouldn't judge them and say that it's their lack of personal responsibility and character

that got them in this situation in the first place. how do we connect their worthiness with their behavior? >> guest: so, one thing i think the book does that you don't often see is it -- we follow these families for several years each. we -- it was an incredibly intense experience, doing the research, and incredible privilege, frankly, but by sort of seeing these people as people, over a long period of time, really allowed you to understand the conditions under which they were willing to do something. so, you saw, for example, that jennifer, who only saw her food stamps, an act she felt was deeply immoral, when not doing so would have threatened the well-being of her kids. >> host: the lights would be turn out. >> guest: the only time she sold

food stamps for the large family, the hungriest family is when she had 'oidentify keep the electricity on. in this little town in mississippi, within six months the temperature had gone from nine degrees to 109 degrees. so, living without power in that kind of environment is not safe, especially when you have young children at home. so, this is a very important to the narrative because you don't want to take your subjects' words at face value. you need to watch and observe, and you need to ask the questions that you know people watching c-span or -- we have fox news here in the building or msnbc would ask, and you need to explore those things over time as you sort of watch and live

life with these folks. i think in the end, the reader can judge for themselves because they learn a lot about these people, but my sense as a rae searcher -- researcher coming out of the experience was a profound sense of there but for the degrees of god go i. of course, i would do these things if i had to ensure that my child wasn't ridiculed at school. >> host: right. exactly. well, i can tell you that some of the things that struck me were the conclusions, that you reached. obviously you thought that job creation was very important, and of course all politicians talk about, we need to create jobs

and create better jobs, obviously, raising the minimum wage, is an obvious solution, and your book really recites those data that suggest it doesn't destroy the economy to do that. but many of the folks here don't have the skill set, quite frankly, to take on the -- a new economy. you talk about the situation in the delta, and talked about how there's a lot of automated agricultural techniques and so a lot of the jobs that have been lost to technology, and it wasn't just that there were individual families that were poor. the entire community was impoverished by the dearth of jobs and money within that community.

so, i guess there are a couple of -- what do you suggest? i guess the conclusion you reach is that we shouldn't just go back to afdc. >> guest: that's right. >> host: you were very, very critical of the -- starting from ronald reagan through to ending welfare in 1996, very critical of people who you say didn't reform welfare, they killed it. >> guest: they did indeed. >> host: we don't have a social safety net with money. you describe all of these people but then you say, we shouldn't go back to afdc. >> guest: so, i think we learned a fundamental truth by talking to these people, and hearing how they think about the world. we do sort of pin the rise of $2 a day poverty or welfare

reform but none of our responsible depths think welfare is -- respondents think welfare is the answer. they want to work. they see themselves as workers in some way welfare reform created $2 a day poverty and also kind of made a bargain with people at the bottom. it said that if you -- the name of the act was personal responsibility and work opportunity act. if you engage in personal responsibility, we'll give you the work opportunity. so, as we showed, people have entered the labor market. they fulfilled their part of the bargain. but we have an unfinished revolution on the work opportunity angle. there is simply not enough work to go around. not just in mississippi but even in chicago, which is a boom town in comparison to mississippi. there's not enough work in johnson city, tennessee, or

cleveland, house, and certainly not enough full-time, full-year, stable work. automation is likely to make this worse. so, when a lot of economists look at this they say, well, maybe we should create a really rich unemployment system, but it seems to us that went against what our respondents wanted. they wanted to work. even if mary, in the last chapter from the delta, can't stand on her feet for more than 20 minutes, she doesn't want to be on ssi. she wants a job. and if you look around america, even though these folks are generally low skilled, there's so much work to be done. we don't have enough after-school programs. our streets are full of litter. the parks are not kept up. national parks aren't able to open all year around. our libraries are short-staffed.

we can't open our recreation centers. so, what we really call for is a radical rethinking of what it means to guarantee work opportunity, and we think that given american culture, given the fact that we're in a country where work equals citizenship and everybody buys that, that we need to find ways of connecting people with opportunity -- >> host: like the old work programs we saw back during the depression? >> guest: that's right. that's right. so, can we think about ways, either through system late employers and we have proposals how to stimulate the private sector to provide more of these jobs and the public sector to make sure that every american who wants to working get a job. now, we do say, we do need a functioning safety net there

always we time in which somebody won't be able to work for some reason. so, we need to restore tanf has a supple responsive guaranteed short-term way to address some of the conditions we see. >> host: it's just not tanf. just not structured correctly win. all of the complaints people have about afdc, it was safety net that worked like food stamps, or s.n.a.p. works, is that during the great recession, that is the time when we should have expected the tanf rolls to go up, and they didn't. and they didn't, one reason you really raised in your book is that we provide a block grant, flat grant of $15.5 billion for tanf, and because of the

so-called flexibility that everyone touts, about 11 billion -- did i read this right? >> guest: that's right. >> host: $11 billion goes towards the flexibility so there's a real perverse incentive not to actually provide the money to the poor. >> guest: that's right. >> host: you can balance your state budget with $11 billion. you can shore up your child cair system so people can do job search, which may not lead to actually finding a job. you can use this flexibility in ways -- and just simply divert the poor away from the benefits they -- thank you for writing this book. i guess i just wanted you to sort of wrap it up. i really commend this book to those in the audience, especially to those people who

are truly in search for a model that can ameliorate poverty. i commend this book to those hard-nosed folks who just believe that if welfare recipients would just get up off their dusty crusties, they could find work. sometimes there's no work. when there is work, it pays substandard wages, doesn't provide the work protection, and our housing policy really needs to be fortified, so i want to make sure, professor, in the last few minute wes have together, that you share with me any -- the takeaways we ought to get from this book that will help us, help me, people like me, with developing public policy going forward. we're probably going to

reauthorize tanf. what would you put out there if some of the main guide posts that we ought to do? >> guest: first, the biggest sort of proof of the dignity of these folks is that they do refuse to take tanf, even though they're eligible. they're too proud to go to tanf. i think that's really something. that they brand work as so important that they can't sacrifice this worker identity and go stand in that line that it stood in with madonna harris as she was convinced that they didn't give it out anymore. the main takeaway here is we have an unfinished revolution. welfare reform put a lot of people to work. that's a good thing. right? that's a very good thing. and the people themselves said that's a very good thing.