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police to gather things like location, information or serial numbers of not just a specific targets phone all target phones, but all those in the area. >> i can think of one particularly gruesome homicide we had a couple of years ago where while the case was resolved by itself our information, that was basically broke the case. we would have never found the suspect but for the historic self-doubt information. >> watch tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. >> booktv is live beginning at 7 p.m. eastern at politics & prose bookstore in washington for race in america, a panel discussion with authors and educators about race relations examining the relationship between police and the african-american community.

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again. >> ahead, live coverage of the debates on c-span, c-span radio app, c-span.org. monday september 26 is the first presidential debate live from hofstra university. on tuesday october 4, vice presidential candidates debate in virginia. and on sunday october 9, washington university in st. louis hosts the second presidential debate. leading up to the third and final debate between hillary clinton and donald trump taking place at the university of nevada las vegas on october 19. live coverage on c-span2 listen live on the free c-span rig out or watch anytime on-demand at c-span.org. >> we are live at the kid institute as their hosting to panel discussions on the 20 anniversary of the 1996 welfare law we doing the goals of

welfare reform including economic mobility and poverty reduction. panelists expected to suggest improvements to the law. live coverage beginning shortly here on c-span c-span2. >> we were going and get started. i know there's a lot of folks still waiting to come in. my name is michael tanner, senior fellows at the cato institute. i want to welcome you to the kid institute for this discussion of welfare reform 20th anniversary. it was 20 years ago today that sergeant pepper called the band to play. and 20 years ago bill clinton

signed the well for those been well for bill. [inaudible] -- finally ended up with a bill he did sign. i think one of the things we failed to remember is just out controversial this bill was. there was protest even as he signed it, there were people outside the white house who were protesting in chance of one, two, three, four stop the war on the people of poor. three members of his own administration resigned in protest because it was signing this law. there were all manner of dire predictions, "the new republic" wrote an article about have it would be family breakup and wages would decline and would be millions of people thrown into poverty. there was a famous study by think tank in countless said 1 million additional children would be cast into poverty in

this law passed. it was very controversial when it passed. and we saw, mentioned people on the left were sort of predicting also do terrible things would happen. and on the right people were talking about this being a new era, that the entire framework of social welfare policy had shifted. we were moving away from welfare to work, for example. that we were changing the attitude of something that kept people independent, the idea that charles murray had talked about in losing ground, the were moving away from that entire epic of welfare into something very different that was going to reduce spending, move people off the rolls, get people into work, the people chance to self-sufficiency and radical change what it meant in america.

the reality i think is that neither one of those predictions came true. we have a couple of panels that are going to talk about this a little bit later. one that will look back on what happened in the past and sort of measure the goals of welfare reform against what actually has been achieved and then will take up another bill that is going to look at what we can do from here. what's the next up and welfare reform, what lessons can we learn from the past and apply them to the next generation of welfare reform. to really fantastic people whom you're going here for the what i'd like to take a few minutes before we begin to sort of come if i can can put some of this in context, maybe set some of the stage, raise a few questions that hel i hope you we think abt and maybe our panelists will touch on as we move forward, and kind of think about what welfare reform has actually meant it in one of the important things i

think to recognize is that welfare reform touched on a very small portion of what welfare or the social welfare safety net in the united states actually is. i mean, welfare reform has actually have always been a profound was a bit chilly, it is not than that, temporary assistance for needy families and a couple of small programs but there's actually more than 100 federal antipoverty programs of the various sizes and kind. 70 of those programs actually provide benefits to individuals, benefits to individuals, that you give them cash benefits or more commonly what's called incoming benefits which is something like housing or food stamps or health care or something for people to actually receive cash but receives the other kind of benefit based on whether or not they are low income.

that's a huge federal social welfare bureaucracy, and it spends a lot of money. those hundred plus athlon poverty programs cost the federal government last year about $695 billion. and if you throw in state and local spending which is another $280 billion, we are close to spending a trillion dollars every year fighting poverty in this country. you can't say that we don't try a lease in terms of dollars come if you're measuring input into fighting poverty, we have a fairly high number of inputs. we are spending a lot of money fighting poverty in this country. i do want to keep this in perspective though, because whenever i start about how much money we are spending fighting

poverty, people get the idea that somehow that's where the money is in washington. that it is all being wasted on poor people and to get a lot of very negative press around at some of the right wing radio talk shows let's go crazy but these numbers every time i pointed out. i just want to keep it a little in context year, the amount of money we spend on welfare for the poor is dwarfed by the amount of money we spend on welfare for other people. the amount of money we spent on welfare for the elderly, for example, it is far, far greater than the amount of money we spent on welfare for the poor. corporate welfare, over $100 billion a year we spent on corporate welfare which some of those upset people the same way that welfare for the poor upsets people. and, of course, then there's welfare that is hidden in a military budget as well. we need to keep all these other types of welfare sort of in context or in mind as we move forward and start talking of welfare. the reasons or reducing welfare

are not simply a matter of we're spending a lot of money. the reason for reform well for is much more are we helping the poor. it's not just a question of money. if you want to save money, if that's all we care about is let's reduce spending on programs, there's a lot of other places we can go to just reduce money. let's look at the quick question, studying the overall discussion at the welfare reform work. i want to basically look at as welfare reform in terms of spending. you can see this line right here. this is welfare reform. if you look at the context, spending of welfare, federal and state spending for both rising prior to welfare reform. since welfare reform has continued to rise, in fact made even risen faster. so we're spending more money actually fighting poverty since welfare reform than before

welfare reform became. these are all in constant dollars was this is not just a reflection of inflation. this is spending more money on antipoverty programs. those 100 plus programs i was talking about. even if we somehow held tanf with this block grant study and it is declined in real terms, what we've done is simply shift spending to other programs, particularly to the entire programs rather than cash programs. we would away from giving people cash and increased giving people the types of benefits, housing, medicaid which is the biggest of all these programs, job training programs, education programs, food stamps and so on are altogether. the same time, the question comes up what we have done in terms of poverty. again this blue line is when welfare reform kicks in. the top line, the light blue

line that goes across, that is the official poverty rate from the census bureau. the other lines are the spending which continue to rise. what you see is that immediately after welfare reform, declined comment measured by the official census measurement, poverty rates went down. but then as a graduate has begun to move back up again, went up quite a bit with the great recession, has no level of a little bit again but over all it's still rough they where it was, although it back to the beginning of the war on poverty and see that the official census bureau poverty measures have not moved a whole lot. one quick caution period nobody i know of left or right believe the official census bureau measure is a good measure of poverty. i think defined in s. agreement is about as bad a measure as you can find the doesn't cover

either benefits or taxes. i talked about this shift from cash benefits to in kind of benefits. the official census number doesn't count in kind of benefits. it only counts cash into the let's say someone below the poverty line and they received free housing, they get food steps to a number of the type of government benefits that actually raises the standard of living above the poverty line. the official census of would consider them still to be poor. it also doesn't cover taxes sake of someone who is above the poverty line as far as their income of their take home pay would taken below and we consider them not poor. it's just a bad measured all the way around. much better are some of the alternative poverty measures. the census bureau has its own alternative measure to a number of social scientists have developed measures as what takes these benefits into account. i think they do a much better job of measuring poverty.

one we like particularly here is the myers sullivan supplement poverty measurement and would look at that because it does take into account the valley of non-cash benefits that individuals receive. once again this is the brown line of the measurements you see and again after what we see there was a trend downward from the war on poverty downward. there was a trend downward in terms of poverty, and that trend continued after welfare reform, sort of the same what is going on before. it's not that welfare reform taken end of the sudden decline but welfare reform doesn't seem to interrupted that decline. that begins to level out around 2000 becomes flat thereafter. doesn't seem to pick up particularly in terms of recession either but seems to been fairly flat going forward. at the same time, spending continued to increase.

what you see is that you don't necessarily see marginal improvement in the poverty rate compared to marginal increases in spending. we continue to spend more money and don't necessarily receive a big bang for your buck in terms of reducing poverty level. we also did not see any other bad things that were predicted out of welfare reform in the since i don't see any spike of a million more people fall into poverty. in terms of all the bad things that were supposed to happen, don't see that happening. but don't see any huge good things it. don't see people moving out of poverty, don't see marginal increase in terms of productivity for the spending either. i want to move away from the numbers of the i want to look at what people think about poverty and about welfare system can about welfare reform. here i'm going to look at a

survey this came out that was done by the "l.a. times" about with our friends from the american enterprise institute. they asked for example, in fact of government antipoverty programs had and asked people who were below the poverty level, the actual port which is a great idea asking the poor how they feel about programs for the poor. we tend to neglect that. as well as people who are above the poverty level. one of the interesting things is people said what made it worse, 40% of poor people thought the welfare system makes poverty worse. so that was at just the people who this is supposed to help don't think a whole lot is helping them. among poor people the numbers at its made a big improve and allies, 8% think it's making the system better. so clearly if you go to the people who are supposed beneficiaries other welfare system, they are not all that fond of it. they don't think it's all that great. in fact, when you ask them,

benefit gives people a chance to stand on their own two feet and get started again, which is what i think we want to see, gives people an opportunity to rise up, or do we think it's likely to make independent, if you ask the poor, 41% of the people who are in poverty think that welfare encourages people to remain dependent. only 41% thinks it gives them a chance to get out. that's an awful high number i think in terms of people who were poor, who don't think that welfare benefit them. who think it encourages people to stay in poverty. doesn't help people to get out of poverty that we think it should. we also asked come if government, if money was the object come if government was willing to spend whatever it took, we often hear that. if we only spent more money the if this program was only bigger.

if we only had another program. if $1 trillion was bad enough, if we all spent 2 trillion or whatever. 71% thought no, even if government spend an unlimited amount of money it would not necessarily do away with poverty. when asked who had responsibility for getting them out of poverty, very interesting that government, only 31% of poor people themselves thought that government had the responsibility to help them get out of poverty. if you look at the poor themselves, 13% the family, 11%. the church, 24% to private charity, 11%. people basically don't want if they are poor to rely on the government. they don't think it does a particularly good job.

so if we are spending more money than ever before, not seeing any particularly good results, and even the big beneficiaries think we're doing a bad job and we should be looking elsewhere, one has to wonder if this is been a huge success. let me close with some questions that i think everyone should keep in mind. and also held maybe we'll see some of the touched on in the pentagon but just something to think the audience generally should be looking at. one of these is what is poverty? how we think about where the people are poor or not will have a great deal of impact on what we think we should do about poverty. should we talk about absolute poverty in an applet number we don't want anyone to fall below?

are we talking no one should starve? i know some folks have other think tanks talk about everybody has a telephone and cell phone and so, therefore, there is no poverty in america. but is that really true? is that we want to measure? we are not south sudan, you know. iis that really how we want to measure poverty? on the other hand, a lot of places measure relative poverty, how poor our people compared to rich people? a measure of inequality are but a few choose that you were never in the poverty. if you doubled everybody's income, it would be a wonderful thing in terms of the poverty. think of all the people you get out of poverty. it wouldn't change relative poverty at all, would you? so the question is when we talk of these programs, when we do welfare reform, when every

government program designed to lift people out of poverty, are we targeting absolute poverty or are we trying to deal with relative poverty in trying to make people more equal? is inequality the issue, or is poverty the issue? and which of those should we be targeting in terms of our program? along the same lines, what is the goal of a welfare program, welfare reform? this is simply to reduce deprivation? are we trying to make poverty less uncomfortable? are we satisfied if someone is too poor but they don't go hungry? seems to me like it's a good thing to do if we can reduce deprivation come if we can stop people from starving. i'm all for that it should within rest on our laurels and say we accomplished what we set out to accomplish? or should we instead be trying to reduce poverty itself?

do we want to have fewer poor people? do we want to have people less dependent on government? do we want to increase mobility so that people who are born for other children who were born poor are able to rise out of poverty? and if you want to do the latter, are we a couple shin bet with the programs we have? did welfare reform do anything to accomplish that? actually look at some of the work and won't find his economic mobility is pretty much where it was before welfare reform. for that matter before the war on poverty itself. so have we really done anything in terms of helping to get people out of poverty with welfare reform, or with welfare to begin with? i think we also need to look and raise the question in terms of designing a programs around what

we think is the reason why people are poor. this was a huge debate within the welfare reform debate. are people poor because of structural issues? does it have to do with our economy and the way out economy works? is that what causes poverty? is it because of the legacy we have in this country of racism and sexism, and lord knows where treated people of color and women deplorably over the history of our country. what impact does that have on why people are poor? or is poverty something that is caused by culture or individual behavior? is it that people have made bad choices in their life? we know, for example, if you drop out of school you are much more likely to be poor. if you get pregnant and you're not married you are much more likely to be poor.

if you don't have a job, you're much more likely to be poor, and so on. how much of that is due to choices that people make? personally i think it's a little bit of both of these things. i think that you can't deny the structural problems in our society of race and gender and so on. but i also think people are not, they do the agency. they are not blown about by the wind totally deprived of choice, totally unable to make decisions in their life, totally subject to the structure of society. people are able to make their own decisions. they are free agents. they can make choices to make a difference in the lives. and some people were born under the worst of circumstances rise above them. on the other hand, is much as we can say that people make bad choices sometimes, it's impossible to place those choices outside of the context in which they are made.

you cannot take an inner-city african-american child who has to live with all that goes on in terms of lousy schools and police abuses and joe racism everyday in society and say, okay, now is the time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. i don't think any of those things is true, but in terms of welfare reform it matters a great deal, which of those two things you emphasize if you emphasize structural problems in society, you go one way in terms of reform. if you emphasize the behavioral choices and the incentives that are created by welfare in terms of behavioral choices, if you pay someone not to work, they are less likely to work. that makes a difference as well. how do you merge those things? part of that is with a long running debate that goes all the way back to the poor laws and beyond, about the deserving and

undeserving. we all want to people we think deserve our help, widows and orphans and so on, historically. but we also people we think, well, they could we not be poor at the only did things, behave differently. i don't know if we want to help them. as we walk by them on the street all the time here in d.c. that goes all the way back, talk about help widows and orphans but dirty vagabonds as they were called then, could be with out of town for baking. welfare reform -- bagging. a lot with how you saw those things. you see people who are poor as for that because other behavior but because of circumstances outside of their control or did you see poor because they did things in ways that contributed to their own poverty. and how do you respond to that? do you incentivize, to change incentives, you try to change behavior?

how do you respond to all that? i think that matters a great deal in terms of how you look at welfare reform. and finally there's issues outside of welfare that i think we need to address if you could have an impact on welfare reform. criminal justice reform. i don't think there's any possible way to deal with poverty in this country unless you deal with the criminal justice system and its abuses. the fact is if you still millions of young black men out of society because they are in jail or on probation, they have a criminal record that makes it impossible for them to get a job, they are constantly harassed, you're not going to be able to reduce poverty. what about education? the fact that our public school system is a failure in the inner-city and doesn't educate millions of children, that is more responsive to the teachers union and the special interests than it is to children and

parents trapped millions of children in poverty. jobs and economic growth, we know that less than 3% of people who work full-time live below the poverty level. there really is no better way out of poverty, know better welfare reform and getting a job. so do we have tax policies and regulatory policies that encourage jobs, or do we drive them down? do we tax them out of existence of? deregulate in ways made it harder july. occupation licensing decision can't regulations been thousands going to cosmetology school -- [inaudible]

>> there it goes you're okay. are we doing what we can in our society to create an environment? [inaudible] and then finally how are we addressing the labor issues in our society with race, gender, and so on? prevent equal opportunity in society.

when we talk about welfare reform, and we look at success and failure, i think we need to look at the larger content. what were we trying to do? what can we accomplish? what did we failed to accomplish? and what did we can address at all? .. c-span is broadcasting this live

so we also hope to follow you there. with that i will take a couple questions. one over there and your second one and one more after that. >> thank you for a very interesting talk. i want to present a very short argument. when i hear you talk, i kind of hear that there has been a shift in absences from absolute poverty toward relative poverty. what about a permanent income redistribution system, in other words a way for people to get out of poverty. we are keeping them where they are and we are giving them income that they have not earned through their own work simply for ideological reasons. i want to hear your take on that. >> i do think there is an issue, the question is if we shifted away from the welfare and more

toward and it quality -based income, there's little discussion of poverty on the campaign trail and there is a lot of discussion on of the quality and inequality in fairness. some of that might be just changing votes because poor people don't, by and large, vote they can say they got a raw deal rather than talking about how are going to redistribute down the incomes gail. i do think that shift in emphasis does have consequences. it's more about how do we tax the rich rather than create opportunity for the poor. i think that's the wrong way to be looking at that. i think -- i have no interest in

the quality. i have no interest in the rich. i have a lot of interest in the poor and how we can help the poor become rich. that's ultimately the goal. >> it's my understanding that originated with tommy thompson in wisconsin and this is federalism as it originally intended where the states are the laboratory and all the states had a welfare problem so in wisconsin he created a provision that passed in a lot of people borrowed from a including the federal government and is one of the problems that we have gotten away from the federalist system and that we all borrow from the different things they come up with. >> even before welfare reform, the clinton clinton administration had embarked on a trend of granting waivers to the states in order to experiment more. tommy thompson was one and

michigan had a lot of other experience. there were a number of experiments going on around the country a lot of which was borrowed and put into the welfare reform bill. that's where i think experimentation would be good again, in the sense that neither the left or the right has had a good track record at doing what we really want to do which is getting on that letter of upward mobility. i think we need to do a lot more experimentation to see what works and what doesn't work. i think having more experimentation, the the danger is giving money to states without any metrics is just allowing them to spend money or to shift money from one program to another or things like that without any real measures. i think if you point to give them the money there has to be some sort of measures, reducing poverty rates, things like that, that will actually achieve something. i will take one last question in

the back. that's yours. then i think we will move on to our next panel. >> what does the federal and state spending line look at when you take out state related spending and that gives us a good picture? >> steel rising but slower. the various health program, particularly medicaid is a large portion of that. we did strip out medicaid funding for the elderly and making that determination. were talking just the healthcare that goes to low income individuals, not including elderly people in nursing homes. we did strip that out and that appeared to be a little more fair on that. part of that is the healthcare that's rising everywhere is also meeting this. you are seeing increases across the board in these programs as well. with that i think you all very much. we are going to take about a two minute break and then i will turn it over to my colleague who will guide you through the next

panel. you can follow us on twitter, i'm with the cato institute, thank you all very much. [applause] [inaudible conversation]

, one. >> welcome to the cato institute on this the anniversary, the 20th anniversary of welfare reform. my name is vanessa brown and i am an analyst here at cato. i'm delighted to have our audience here in person as well as those that are joining us through television or internet as my colleague mentioned, for those who are live tweeting the event it is # welfare 20th if you want to tweet us there. also very happy to be joined by our panelists here who i will introduce to you in a moment. first let's introduce the topic.

as we know from michael tanner's opening remarks, the, the 96 welfare reform law was a comprehensive overhaul of welfare law. it dramatically improve the cash and food programs in the united states and replaced aid to families with temporary assistance to needy families and it had a few features that made it better. it granted states greater latitude in designing their own program and it provided incentives to states to create goals around teen pregnancy among other things. addicts of the welfare reform predicted that it would drive low income families into poverty

and it would keep them there. advocates on the other hand insisted that welfare reform would move them into permanent jobs and thereby increase sufficiency as well is mobility and strengthen families among other things. at the 20th anniversary of welfare reform, we are going to ask whether any of these things actually happened, how does welfare reform live up to its promises? did it affect family structure, health, child achievement and individual economic independence? did it provide an adequate safety net, particularly during the last decade of economic turmoil? without further ado i'm going to introduce the individuals who will answer those very questions today. let me just, hold your applause to the end if you would.

heather is a senior fellow in the center for labor and population at the urban institute. she is also a national panelist expert with two decades of experience conducting nonpartisan research on a wide range of programs and policies related to the well-being of families including food stamps and other supports for low-income family. we also have ron on my right who is a senior fellow in the economic studies program and codirector on the center of children's and families of the brooking institution. he is the author of work over welfare, the inside story of the welfare reform law robert is a managing editor at the american conservative where he moved after a decade in journalism that included stints at national interest, the washington times,

national review and real clear policy. he is also a contributor at family studies where he has written about welfare reform. finally we have scott winship. he is the fellow at the manhattan institute. previously he was a fellow at the brookings institution and earlier a research manager at the economic mobility project at acute-care double charitable trust. he has testified before congress on poverty and joblessness among other issues. let's give each of our palace a warm welcome and then we will turn it over to heather to start it off. [applause] >> good morning so we are here

to talk about welfare reform turning 20. was it a success, failure, incomplete failure, incomplete and what is turning 20 is the welfare for needy families. some pieces are older and some are newer but it's turning 20 and that's what i'm going to focus my attention on. we know candace shifted major responsibility to states instead of entitlement funding. we know that after canonist, caseloads plummeted. they had been falling shortly before reform and they felt much further afterward. we also know employment among single mothers increased increased after welfare reform. now we need to get to the questions that you raise. did welfare reform help people move from welfare to work? did it improve economic

self-sufficiency and is it still relevant today. i want to start with something about welfare reform and what it did. i think it helped shift the focus. the reason is it came about in part because of a mismatch that limited recipients ability to work and change the norm in which more and more mothers were working outside the home. some of the changes leading up to welfare reform started to address that issue but both the changing norms and canonist supported that norm. when i talk with welfare recipients now i hear people say , this is a quote from someone i spoke to recently, i would give anything and trade all the canonist i could ever get for a stable job.

other people in the room said absolutely, amen. people recognize the economic, social and psychological benefits of real work. a combination of that, strong economy, the expansion and other factors contributed to an increase in employment in the early years following the implementation although those gains were lost. the rate of single mothers increased to match those of childless women. once they got in tandem, they fell in together. i just want to discuss and say that most of what i'm talking about will be looking back and what we've learned from the lesson. looking ahead i think the safety net of the future needs to change again to fit the nature

of work. it's become more unstable and unpredictable for both men and women and those fundamental issues need to be matched up again with our welfare reform. welfare reform did not improve economic sufficiency for three reasons. it reaches few needy families, it doesn't effectively help people get and keep jobs and it did not provide a safety net during the recession. let's look first at the issue of reaching few needy families. we know that 1.6 million families in the average month in 2015 received assistance, 15 received assistance, that is down from 4.4 million in 1996. what is 1.6 million? is that too many, is that not

enough, is it a right amount. a better number to look at is the number of people who are poor who are receiving support. what receipt is that in 1996, 68% of poor families received cash assistance. that has fallen to 23% of poor family receiving cash assistance in 2014. the gao report shows in the early years following the first decade, from 1995 - 2005, the 2005, the decline was due to nonparticipation of eligible adults. it wasn't that people had too much earnings and therefore there were no longer eligible, it was that people were eligible but not receiving it. almost 40% of cases today are child only cases. when we look at the 23% of poor families receiving assistance and we see that 40% of those are

child only cases, it's a pretty small piece for families. this national picture masks variations by states. there are's 12 states to serve fewer than one in ten families and is more more states every year in that category. then for those who do receive assistance, that cash assistance can be essential for making the difference in their life but the benefit amounts are so low that they did not bring families out of deep poverty, much less out of poverty. it is not going to affect the poverty level if the cash assistance is too low. it does not help people get and keep jobs. even though there was a great focus on work and a rhetoric around work and a desire to work, the rules, especially

since 2005 create incentives that limit opportunities. states have strong incentives to steer clients to activities that help the state meet its requirement rather than focusing activities that are tailored to the individual needs to achieve self-sufficiency. i don't think. [inaudible] they emphasize immediate help and job search even if jobs aren't available or if the lion has significant challenges, as many do. job search is a core activity. it is limited to six weeks. year. vocational training is a very important activity for helping people reach long-term

self-sufficiency. it is limited to 12 months in a lifetime. basic skills training or longer-term education and training are not allowed to count toward the states work requirement. states have incentives to not allow those activities for their clients. this doesn't mean people are just languishing, people do get jobs. they are typically unstable, low-wage jobs. when they lose those jobs, they return to the program. research. research shows that a large number of people applying for the program are doing so because they recently lost a job. when they get jobs again, they are the same kinds of jobs that they lost to get them on the program to begin with. it ends up working as an insurance rather than a ladder up for self-sufficiency. the program did not provide a

safety net during the recession. unemployment rates doubled in the number of cases rose by 13%. because it reaches only the deeply poor family and serves less than one quarter of families in poverty, many, many of those who were struggling during the recession and may have thought they could use some cash assistance didn't qualify. they went poor enough. they may have seen that the work requirement could be counterproductive. it has been shown to be successful with business and clients alike and that is an experiment we should look to again. other programs like snape did respond to the increased knee during the recession but not this program. what has it been doing these last 20 years? it has evolved from a cash assistance to a broad funding

stream. these numbers from hhs show how spending has shifted away from the program. if we look at 1997, that blue bar at the bottom is 71% of spending. in 2015, only 25% of the grant in states also stated maintenance funding. 25% went to went to basic assistance. 7% went to work activity, 17% went to childcare and more than half, 52% went to other things like state atc, college scholarship, child protective services, all valuable and worthy causes but not what we think of as cash assistance. and if we look at the 17% goes

to childcare, only 6% goes to families who are receiving the cash assistance. most of it goes to canada's spending. canis spending. we need to continue to look at this. growing up poor has negative long-term consequences for children. we have written about the lasting consequences of child poverty. this is whether you measure it if it's relative or absolute, just looking at the federal poverty level. children growing up in poverty in the united states have poor

consequences. children grown into poor families have forced adolescents and adult outcome. the chronic stress of childhood poverty actually alters early brain development in ways that impedes their future success. they estimate the economic cost of child poverty is more than $500 billion. year. we cannot be okay with temporary assistance for needy families that doesn't reach seven out of ten families and doesn't effectively assist them in getting on their feet. the changes to our safety net need to recognize the changing work, the low-wage work where people get a call to say come into work now, oh we don't need

you. it's very it's very difficult in that kind of unstable environment to have multiple jobs, to have stable childcare or to go to school and seek additional training opportunities for advancement. these are really important challenges for men and women. the work rate of men contribute to poverty among single and two-parent households. people want to work. we go back to that quote i had at the beginning. they would give anything to have a stable job that could support their family. we need the policies and the job structures to support that. they need to work together to support people's desire to work. going back to how growing up

poor has long-term negative consequences for children, we can't afford to punish parents because were punishing their children and the rest of us as well. specific changes for canis that i would like to see is increased funding especially during the recession. restructured incentive to have a balanced set of incentives based on work, family economic stability and child well-being. all of those are important. then then to look beyond canis to support low-income families with a full package of support, tax credit, medicaid and others that have been shown to reduce the hardship. thank you. [applause] >> i'm going to give to comments. first i am going to praise those

comments and then i am going to criticize them. my criticisms are very similar to hers. michael did a good job summarizing the background on welfare reform. it was a very strict set of work requirements that were implemented aggressively by the states with a lot of doubt at the time of the states could actually do it. they really did remove the entitlement. they really did impose work requirements. they really did penalize people who didn't work and eventually got people off the rolls and i think they are keeping people off the rolls and they probably shouldn't. as a result, caseload reduced by 60 some percent. nothing like that has happened to a federal program. i want to talk about the results by talking about work because those people on welfare, where did they go? there was studies that that show that 60 or 70% actually had work at some point

in the first six months after welfare reform. let's look at the data for the country as a whole. if you look at the top left, the line graph is mail and the next one is all-female and the next one were nonmarried females. they were the heart of the problem and they are more likely to go on welfare than any other group. their more likely to be on welfare, not just canis but food stamp, medicaid and so forth. women who have a baby outside marriage are likely to be poor and go on welfare. that's always been the case and still is today. you can see by looking at the never married women chart, there is a huge increase in employment. these are people who actually had jobs. these moms, partly as a result of welfare reforms went out and got jobs. we had about a 40% increase in work over a four-year time.

that was in part due to welfare reform, i'm not attributing all of it too well for welfare reform. we had a fabulous economy, jobs looking for people rather than the other way around. the other thing was the earned income tax credits and a series of benefits that congress really did. congress, congress, over a time period of 20 years to change the incentives on welfare. you did better outside welfare even if you had a lousy job because you got the earned income tax credit which could be $6000, you got, you got the additional child tax credit, often you got daycare, often you got food stamps so you can build a package of benefits to get you to 18000 or so and a lot of people did that and i think that's part of why, it wasn't just the changes in welfare reform, it was the safety and lure of getting additional benefits that had such an impact. so this tremendous increase in work, what happened to poverty?

the bottom line, the red line is for all children in the top two are black children and parents children in single-parent families. the foregoing have an impact we need to focus on single-parent families, especially those who are never married because they have the highest rate of poverty, as you can see in this chart. if you if you look at the chart, about halfway across you see this big decline, it's different from what michael showed you remember this is single mothers. all children you can see the change but for kids in single mother families, there's a huge decline in poverty. then of course ironically because these families are now more subject to the wounds of the economy than they were before when unemployment right rises as it did in 2001, then

employment goes down. they are like other americans, they suffer suffer from not being able to find jobs. they're going back up again, unfortunately at a slow rate but we can expect that if we have a good economy with jobs available, a lot of mothers who would not have worked before, would not have worked before, will work. to me this is the single most important impact of welfare reform and other associated factors including reforms and federal law that we have probably changed the share of never married mothers and all single mothers who are working and it's not likely to change. now if we look at how the system really works, i have a chart for you to see and this is it. this is from the congressional research service untouched by my hands and what it shows is over a period of years beginning in 1987, poverty in the state of nature among single mothers, that means with no government

benefits, what's the poverty rate based on their own abilities and earning rates and that we add the work support benefits and the e itc and you can see what happens to the poverty. take the last year. the poverty rate is 48% and as we add more benefits, it comes down step by step by step, coming down to 24%. that is a huge impact of government program on poverty. i think they are playing a role in the increase in work rates that i showed you in the previous slide. that part of the system is working. not only that, i would argue this is the single most important way that we have invented to reduce poverty. social security reduces poverty more but we just give money away were never going to do that with prime age working adults. if states can get low income mothers into these jobs that are

paying $10 an hour, unless they have a lot of kids, they can escape poverty and at least they are where they could advance themselves in the american economy. that part of it has been good. it could be better. we could improve it but it's pretty good. now, my criticism of welfare reform. i think i played a big role in welfare reform. we were crazy about the states and we loved the states. there was a long story about the second veto where the states picked it up off the carpet and got it back in place and we finally passed which would have never happened without the governor support and we all thought the states were great. i think it's turned out to be a mixed blessing. one of the things i think we need to do, first of all republicans have got to say we won this, it was a great reform but it's 20 years later and now we need to change things. one of the things we need to change is state flexibility. the states are not doing what they thought they should and they are not doing what they

were doing earlier. they spread the money all over the place. heather showed you very good data on that. there's good dating from the enter of budget and priorities. we need to tighten up on the state. i doubt republicans will be able to do that but i think we need to do it because it speaks to the laboratories of democracy, they shouldn't play games and trick the rules of welfare reform. they should be forced, which now turned out to be necessary to actually try to help people get off welfare. that brings me to the second problem. i do think there's a problem at the bottom among female heads of family. there are too many families in deep poverty and too many mothers were not able to hold a job and raise their kids for that same time. i was a single parent and i know it's a challenging thing to do, especially if you have a lousy education and have never had so financial support from your family. we need to help that group at the bottom and we are not doing that. we are just letting them be poor and some times deeply poor at

the poverty level and we could do a lot more to improve that. the federal government is not going to be able to do it. the bottom line is i think we need to go back to a lot more waivers. that's where we got welfare reform in the first place. there were 43 waivers at the time we passed the welfare reform bill and almost all of them had to do with work and limiting family size through birth control and other methods. we need to find ways to help these families. we also need a lot more work on how to help them advance in the economy as heather pointed out. i think in summary, welfare reform has been at least a half success, maybe a little more than that because i think it's an amazing thing. you can actually change the likelihood that a whole demographic group will work more and that sets up all kinds of possibilities for the future. but the way it's been run now i

don't think it's been successful at this point. we need to make changes in welfare. thank you. [applause] >> good morning. first of all, i want to thank the cato institute for inviting me to speak today. it is truly an honor to be on a panel along side think tank scholars who have done respected , high-quality work on this issue and even those who designed the law that we are discussing. i feel flattered and honored. i'm not a thing take scholar, i just know enough about statistics to get myself in trouble. i want to talk about an analysis published in family studies that shows two basic truths after welfare reform. the first truth is one he just

discussed. when welfare benefits became contingent on work, a lot of people sought work and found it. here you can see a chart with the census data. it focuses on the children with single mothers, the demographic most affected by the law and it shows their poverty rate against the nationwide unemployment rate so we can see the effect of the economy. the poverty metric doesn't include things like food stamps or health benefits, both of which have really risen over the past decade. it also doesn't include tax credit like the earned income credit which was similarly designed to encourage work. it does include cash welfare which the reform cut. even by this measure, these kids are better off after the law them before it, including, including in the wake of the great recession. the poster form blue years fall before the red years almost categorically. before welfare reform passed, critics said vulnerable kids would be thrown into poverty. when the opposite happened they said it was just the economy. two recessions later that doesn't seem to be the case

either. there are still many poor children in this country and welfare reform made the problem better, not worse. these major changes to the safety net, the 1996 law and the boost income tax credit succeeded in moving more people to work. it's the first step toward the middle class and welfare reform helps people take it. this success is something we can't forget, even as as we consider newer and more nuanced allegations that the reform was harmful to some. speaking of those allegations, here's another chart that is almost identical except the poverty threshold is divided by ten. in other words these folks would still be at or below the poverty line if they had ten times as much income as they do. you might call that extreme poverty. the trend is reversed. after the law there was a sharp increase of kids living in families that reported very little income and this became even worse with the recession. in some ways these results are unambiguous and unsurprising.

the reforms were designed with a carrot and stick approach for those who worked receiving additional aid and those who didn't work were cut off from cash welfare. it's hardly shocking that some people got the stick and the number of people without cash group, one of the leading researchers in this area put it most eccentrically and a 2014 speech, they were the worst off single parents and rose to the better off. in some ways we are in murky territory. for one thing people do not always tell the truth. another, my simple analysis using the poverty measure doesn't include non-cash benefits like food stamps. this means we have to dig deeper in the picture we uncover is a very clear at all. there's one thing everyone agrees on which is the situation looks better when you correct the data to account for non-cash benefits. what they don't agree on is how much better. pick one example from the left,

the the center on budget and policy priorities recently reported that incomes fell for the bottom 10% and did so immediately and dramatically after welfare reform. in 2005 there were about $2800 in cash benefits and $250 in food stamps with private income tax credits and other private income tax credits and other programs replacing only about $700 of that loss. increasing food stamps benefits help them rebound after that but only partially. here's the striking chart from that report. there was jobs between 1996 and 1997 for the poorest single mother families. on another news paper, scott will speak next and argues that the very poorest may not be worse off at all. i will leave the details to him. for now, suffice it to say a lot depends on how you process the data including adjusting for inflation and putting a dollar value on things like health metrics. researchers don't even agree on whether health benefits should

become it at all. some prefer to look at a consumption which tends to be much higher than income at the very bottom. there's a new report out focusing on this approach. extreme poverty is very rare by this measure. we could also look at indicators of hunger which fell after welfare reform but rose after the great recession. that's a lot of puzzle pieces and they don't all fit together. at a minimum i feel comfortable saying two things. one welfare reform helps a lot of people and there's no use pretending otherwise. even on the center budgets new analysis, nine tenths of families were better off a decade after the reform, most of them significantly so. the very poorest family have less cash than the use too even if other benefits help them more than they have in the past. this is almost an unavoidable consequence of cutting off cash assistance. in the book to dollars a day, it

is hard to get by with little cash even when you have benefits that pay for food or housing. the panel after this one is going to focus on where we go from here. i would like to briefly lay out a few lessons i think we can learn from this expense. the biggest lesson is that a safetynet can succeed succeed. we have made important progress and any future reform should be made with an eye toward improving that progress. i think there's also an issue for those who would like to charge full steam ahead. specifically they must grapple with the fact that those other programs help keep a lid on cash welfare. changing that program would give incentives to get jobs even further and could address that overtime work requirements have been gutted in seven programs. it could also severely punish those who don't find work, whatever the reason.

one way out of this conundrum is for states themselves to provide a way for nonworking recipients to earn their benefits. early proposals for what became welfare reform actually included government provided jobs, community community service is also an option, won the state is trying. we should keep an eye on such experiments. another lesson, explained in $2. day shows that cash matters even when other benefits are available. that brings up how to get more cash to the poor without re-creating the anti-work incentives incentives that we had 20 years ago. there are three ways to do this that warrant our attention. first we can make sure canis is doing its job. just like the point that heather made in the previous presentation, rather than defeating them. second we can rethink the paternalism of the rest of the safety net. we make a lot of money available to the poor on the condition that they spend it the way we want them to come on food, on housing and eat lunch and even on their heating bills. converting this need to cash we

give them more flexibility without changing the total amount of aid. it would also prevent pushback often called the nanny state on the right and the daddy stayed on the left. we also might want to consider some form of cash assistance. the idea would be to make sure each family receives a modest amount of cash while otherwise maintaining the work focus incentive that made welfare reform a success. we might look of the child tax credit which is popular with the anti- poverty left in the profamily right alike. right now it's worth up to a thousand dollars. child but not available to the poorest parents because it's not fully refundable. i suggest changing that. other conservatives have made similar proposals and just last week to liberal think tanks released reports doing the same. the nice thing about the child

tax credit is that the middle class already gets it so we don't have to deal with phasing it out as people earn more money which discourage them from doing so. other benefits like food stamps could be cut back to compensate. again, the ideas to keep families out of extreme poverty. it's not to undo what we have accomplished by orienting our safety net around work. thank you so much for coming and i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> good morning. i want to thank michael and the cato institute for inviting me to this event. i have a pleasure to be on the panel with my colleagues here and i want to preface my remarks by saying a couple things. one of which is that when welfare reform passed, admittedly, no one cared what i

thought but i was a post and thought this was going to be a disaster. in my research and that of others has led me to believe otherwise. i also, personally would spend a lot more money on poor people than we currently do which would probably make some folks that cato blush. the reason i am practicing my remarks with all of this is that i'm going to tell a story that will hopefully convince you that this conventional wisdom that we have that most people were helped by welfare reform but that there was a group at the bottom that was hurt, this is much less to that argument then i think people believe these days. so before moving on i want to acknowledge that because i think welfare reform has been such a success, it's worth acknowledging that one of the architects of this bill, i think ron has probably done more, very few people has done as much in the world as ron has. so congratulations to ron. okay. so because i'm worried about

being able to get through all of this in my time, i am basically going to blow through a couple slides and my basic case will be that welfare reform reduced dependence on cash welfare, it increased work among single mothers, a reduce child poverty while leaving deep child poverty at or near historic lows and therefore welfare reform lessons should be extended to others in the program and they should be accompanied by other strategies to promote upper mobility among kids as michael said. most of this will be charts. i sort of speak in charts, for better or worse. welfare reform reduced the dependence on cash welfare. this is a chart i did with christopher in 2004 and what you are seeing is between 1960 and 2014, the number of families getting cash welfare expressed.

one hundred single mother families. what you see their is just this dramatic, unprecedented decline that actually starts in 1995 and you can see where estate labors began in 1993 but truly just an unprecedented decline in the welfare role. how much would set due to welfare reform versus other things, it is mostly based on regression models and at some level we will never allow but the literature implies that the combination of welfare reform and declining real welfare benefits, which is part of welfare reform, that combination is about as important or more important than the income earned tax credit and both were probably more important than the labor market over time. okay. a few charts on welfare reform and how it affected work among

single mothers. some of this will be repetitive of things we've seen before. in this chart, the top line shows the percentage of single mothers who worked at anytime during the year. this is is from a study by the congressional research service. you can see that it rose starting in 1993, it peaks in 2000, falls thereafter but remains above the pre-reform levels. similarly it was found that employment among single mothers, without a high school diploma increased from about 45% in 1991 to 65% in 1999. it was still 55% in 2012. it rose and it stayed higher. to be clear, that doesn't mean that what welfare reform did is make states do all these clever creative things to make their families more employable, the main thing that welfare reform

did is it convinced a lot of people not to apply for welfare in the first place and to try to find work instead or to leave on their own because they could see the writing on the wall. i do think one weakness with the current reform or the current law is that it actually hasn't been that innovative in terms of helping people build their skills. on the other hand, you don't actually need that through these poverty, turns out a lot of people were employable. this this was a big debate when the bill passed. i think what is clearly seen is that there were jobs out there and a lot of people were able to take and if it's from that. a couple more charts on work, this is from heather of the washington center for equitable growth. i want you to look at the greenline first which is a trend trend in work for unmarried women with children, you can see clearly that increase in the 1990s followed by a smaller

decline. compare that against the blue line of single women without children, the future line is married women without children and even among married mothers, this line at the bottom you can see it rises before reform and it plateaus. i think that's pretty good evidence that the policy changes of the '90s, in combination really caused work to increase. then the literature on this, how much welfare reform, in a broadly speaking term, the tax credit is generally found to be the most important factor in increasing work and then the combination of welfare reform and declining real benefits is about as important as strengthening the labor market during the 1990s. okay. finally this is a chart that i

think ron updated in his presentation but it just shows you there was a bigger boost among never married mothers around the same period. okay. now i'm getting into self-promotion as part of making my case and a favorite came out today called poverty after welfare reform which i've been looking at poverty trends over time. different parts of the income distribution. starting out attacks that child poverty. i think this is probably the most controversial or the most uncontroversial part of the story because we've heard it from other people, even if you looked at the red line of the official measure of cash income, welfare reform, child poverty is lower today than it was in 1996. now what i do in the papers to make various improvement, the the orange line at non-cash benefits, it's mostly food stamps but also includes housing subsidies, school lunches and breakfast, energy subsidies,

that lowers the levels more and actually makes the trends look a little worse, the third line as taxes and it is adding income for this group because of refundable tax credit, the blue line combines cohabiting couples, the official measure basically treats married couples as one unit and combines their income and takes into account that the family is realizing savings by living together but it doesn't do that with cohabitation couples. it turns out cohabitation has risen over time and you can see what happens to poverty there. now by that measure, if i stopped at that fourth line, that shows the child poverty in 2014 was at a historic low. it was lower than it's ever been before. the next two adjustments i will make her more controversial. i spend a lot of time in the paper with specific appendices arguing my case but even if you don't buy my case for these last

two things, line four indicates the child poverty is lower than it's ever been. okay, the next line, line, the green line uses a better inflation adjustment then what is used in the official measure, that's a very controversial point and i don't think it should be. on this anniversary anniversary everyone will use what i've been using and that's the expenditure deflator. read appendix one of the paper if you disagree. then finally, the purple line adds health benefits. this, for some reason is also controversial. i would agree that how you value health benefits is not entirely clear. but it is entirely clear the health benefits have value to poor people otherwise we wouldn't have medicaid. we wouldn't have expanded health insurance so much over the past 20 years. what i did was take basically the amount that employers of the federal government spends her

family and take a 75% discount from discount from that. that's about $200. month to families who have this health benefit. you can see what happens. the trend keeps going down. the last line corrects for the fact that income is underreported in household space. it's partially correct. it corrects the fact that government benefits were unreported. it doesn't correct for the fact that earnings and other private sources of income are underreported as well. this ends up being a huge deal. kathy eden who is a scholar that i recommend a ton, she made her name in the '90s with the book that basically showed that women on cash welfare systems could not get by on that money alone. the way they made ends meet is that they had other sources that they generally wouldn't have reported, household surveys to government officials in fact, that extra money that they typically wouldn't have reported

would have raised their income about 40% more than their income with food stamps and housing benefits included in there. so in some ways you can think of this final line that should be even lower. whether the decline in poverty should be steeper is an open question. but that line only partly corrects for this problem. okay, quickly on this chart, this is a picture, i'm not selling you snake oil, the top three lines are from my estimates from the congressional research efforts and from economist bruce meyer and james sullivan. you will see those lines line up really well even though the measure poverty very differently. the green line is also from myron sullivan and this is unique because they are looking at consumption rather than income. they argue, very convincingly,

and i dedicate a few appendices pieces to this that income is underreported in surveys and the consumption is left an issue of consumption. they find a steeper drop in poverty. that orange line is the final line that i show you here. line seven. you can see it lines up very well with their measure. in fact there's drops a little bit more adjusting that if you correct for all underreported income, you see an even better trend than i show. also there's a line in their okay, so moving on, now we are at deep child poverty. deep child poverty is under half of the poverty line. it's a group in more hardship. there is more controversy at this point about whether that has risen or declined. the basic message that i want to give is whatever changes there have been, they have been very small.

if you look at the purple line which combines all mine improvements, vendee poverty deep poverty among kids was lower in 2013 and it was 1996. it measures up a little bit in 2014 and not still lower than 1995 and 1997. basically, the real take-home is that very few children, thankfully are in deep poverty. my number seven partially corrects for this underreporting and it finds the center on budget and policy, the trend looks a little bit worse there but were talking about an increase of 1.1% in 1996 for that -- line is to 1.7% in 2012. income has grown since then so i'm guessing the line would look better if we had more up-to-date numbers. again, the basic story is there hasn't been much change over time.

we saw a huge decline in overall child poverty. we have this great development along with what looks to be much harm done. finally this is a chart that shows the share of kids living in 2-dollar day poverty. this was the claim in the book by kathy and look luke that the number of kids living on $2 a day has increased over time. as you can see, first of all, if you look down the purple line, there's a little more volatility in these lines because there are fewer peoples in the samples but again the 2013 line is about the same as 1996. six. it goes up in 2014, i'm not sure how serious that is, you can take it seriously but it's not much change and what's more important, when you correct for underreporting of benefits you get these lines at the bottom. they basically show you that no kid lives on $2 a day in the united states.

there are homeless children who generally do not show up in the surveys and we don't know what the trend in homelessness is so i devote some time in my paper to that as well. one and 15 children were living in extreme poverty and this doesn't include corrections for under reporting of private income. so, the other point i want to make, they make they make a big deal about cash being different than non-cash benefits which is an important part in some regards, but even if you believe that redline is somehow true, which you should not, that rise started in the 1970s. to blame welfare reform on this is not quite clear that we ought to be doing that. it also increases among groups that were unaffected by welfare reform such as the elderly, childless households, married in college graduate saw a rise in $2 a day poverty if you believe

the numbers. my basic message is you should not believe those numbers. okay, i will and there, my time is up but i will talk more about changes and the lessons from reform in q&a. thank you. [applause] >> thank you to each of our guests for that enlightened commentary on welfare reform and the results of welfare reform. we are going to move into a q&a section now. i was fascinated by some of the research that scott showed us and went through some of those slides. one of the questions that i have for scott and for others on the panel is how much of what we see in the differences in some of the poverty measures, such as unemployment or caseload are actually do to welfare reform

and were looking at these population surveys, how much of them are due to underlying factors which are moving some of those variables around i don't know of a lot of research to try to distinguish between those different strands. the percent of the single moms receiving tanf has declined steadily even after 2000 when the economy was doing well, when

it was not doing well. that suggest probably the reforms have played a pretty big role. >> ron and have become anything we're missing in this picture as we look at some of the poverty indicators that are moving. are the other components or motivators were not talking about today which are influencing those things? >> i think when we look at the charts that show, if you look at cached income, this is the poverty level, adding benefits, it's a low-level. i think what this shows is government programs are working. when you add those things you fewer and fewer people who are poor. when you get down to the very bottom and you're looking at the families who are supposedly on $2 a day, less than $2 a day,

you really can't survive on that, there are these unreported sources of income, i think we have to think about what that really means. if someone is selling plasma, if someone is selling sex come if they're doubling up with families that doesn't mean they are okay. it doesn't mean they are not poor. >> appreciated. we're going to move into an audience q&a now. if you have a question please raise your hand. i will call on you, and with the microphone. please keep your questions nice and concise. and also in them with a question mark. thank you. start on the left. in the middle ear. >> thank you. i just wanted to ask you kind of

reverse of the question i asked michael before. it was ended because one way or the other it wasn't working. now we have tanf and with a bunch of other programs in kind programs. we have the eitc of course, providing for the poor or the low income families. if these programs are still aimed at eliminating poverty, do you see a punctuation mark for these programs? or do you see them as a perennial part of our economy? before i leave that question, what i would like you to do, if you see this as a perennial, a permanent institution, are there other ways to provide this?

in other words, is there another way to provide the income distribution through these programs? thank you. >> i mean, i think it's pretty clear that as a society we have chosen non-cash benefits and tax credits for the working poor as the way that we want to try to reduce and prevent poverty in the united states. that's probably not going away anytime soon. i think robert's point about why not just get everybody cash is attractive in a lot of ways. the concer concern and the reasy we don't do that is policymakers are concerned about what people will actually spend the money on. but i mean, if you think people

know best what you need and giving them cash makes as big also makes the poverty statistics a lot easier to interpret. for that reason i might be interested in experiment in with it. >> i think there's a danger in emphasizing cash too much, because it's easy to count, americans can see it, and they will see how big the welfare state is much clearer than in another current system. it's much easier to say we need to give food to babies and help to babies and housing and so forth. i think over time if we converted more of those programs to cached, total spending would probably fall. i'll bet there are people in this room who thinks that's a good idea because it has increased so dramatically over time. i think that would be a consequence of a. i still think they key is get as many people as possible to work. i don't think -- think of it this way.

in 1996 when the patch welfare reform, take all the people in poverty who are not on the disability program, and even some of those, there were a lot of people in there. this was the essence of the debate in congress. a lot of people who could support themselves. you needed to change the system to get them to do it. that's what welfare reform did. as scott charts show, my show, and glacial research service, work is up, poverty is down. that's the headline. how do we get more people out of that group? it's a much smaller group. you think logically more people with problems, barriers to employment, not necessarily disabilities but for transportation, live in and day with are many jobs and so forth. that is the part government could help on. that is why we need of more waivers by the states to give them a chance to explore other ways they can do it. i think we ought to have stronger work requirement that any other welfare programs.

>> right there in the back. in the middle. >> to what extent has people simply moved from tanf to social security disability, which i understand has gone up 10 times in like over the last decade? >> i think the question is how much our individual substituting other programs for tanf. >> well, no, it's freshly ssi, also secured income, and it's true. and it know for fact i talked with number of people in states that the make a bigger effort than they did in the past to get people on ssi. people whose welfare independent to try to get them on ssi because the benefit is 100% federal, although many states supplement the benefit. that's the motivation.

if you look at the ssi rolls, they have grown over time. not by factor of 10 but they have grown. if you look at health surveys there's almost no evidence that americans are less healthy, more disabilities or more days where they can work and so forth. so this is entirely something generated by the way we do the program. a lot of people want to change it. however, marketers, we had a golden chance that you because of programs running out of money and congress had to do something. what a great opportunity to at the very least try experiments with helping these people were, just like welfare reform. instead of doing the they just took money out of the social security trust fund and put it into the ssi trust fund. that's congressional solution to the problem. it will be difficult because a lot of people are feeling sorry for disabled people, and they forget the issue, whether they're really disabled. we have too many people on disability rolls who are not truly disabled. disabled. >> i think this gets to be an

important point out the incentives and the differences in the incentives in those programs. if there are people who are truly disabled and unable to work, then it isn't appropriate for them to be in tanf long-term. that is a short-term program that is supposed up and they were. at the same time work can be very valuable in before someone who is disabled but can still, not completely disabled to extend to their ability. working can be useful so i think when we have these really clear lines between if you're in tanf you must work in the short ssi you can't work. that doesn't fit the realities of the range of disabilities and range of abilities. >> right here in the front. >> thank you. could you speak to the issue of the impact of technology on job

availability? the controversy now where people believe that technology will perhaps dramatically reduce the number of jobs available, and how well will for reform or whatever technique you want to use apply any contacts with a may not be jobs available for people who truly want to work? >> i think first of all it's important to recognize that the argument that there's weak demand for labor is exactly the argument that i am people who are opposed to the welfare reform bill in 1996 made. the idea was, these folks all want to work but the economy isn't producing jobs. it's going to be a disaster. i think that we show not to be true. there's a lot of debate about technological employment and whether typological change is really going to reduce employment in the future.

to the extent that it does it's going to do so because it's going to make things cheaper. so everything we buy would become a lot cheaper. people will not have to work as much as we work to be for the same standard of living. a big drop in demand for labor in the future doesn't have to be a lot more unemployment than we have today. it could be a 30 hour work week instead of a 40 hour workweek as the stanford to be retiring at 55 instead of later. i think it remains to be seen but it also doesn't show up in the data in terms of productivity growth. we would like to see more productivity growth than what we've had. >> here on the right. >> thank you.

nobody has mentioned the underground economy in the discussions that we had writing a book on welfare. we encountered a lot of people who were trading babysitting for car repairs, people who are housecleaning in exchange for meals. there's a lot of that going on out there, and i wonder if any of the charts, since this income is almost certainly never measured in any other surveys, if any of the charts take that into account? because i think there's probably a lot more than that in plasma selling. and people can do quite recently well with it under similar circumstances. >> this is one of the reasons that consumption measures, poverty measure is based on consumption rather than on earnings or income, are superior in many respects. this is one of them.

if they are the money presumably they spent it and passes reported then maybe underrepresent in the surveys say don't get a good measure of the. that's another reason that consumption is a better measure. do you a great? >> obviously. it's also the case the more severe to get in terms of who you are looking at, severe hardship, a lot of these ideas break down. what is income? i looked into the research showing that, for instance, the number of people to get food stamps and don't have any other, don't have any cash income, that that's gone up. again i think the reason i gave in the report, reasons to question the but if you look at the report from the is department of agriculture, they went and interviewed folks who didn't have any cash income but were getting snapped. it turns out that a lot of them are doing odd jobs, all of them

are getting noncash benefits of other programs. if it -- if you're asking someone who is at the very bottom to account for all income that over the course of a year, the kind of thing, that they get are sort of scattered enough that it's difficult to even account for them. it's not just that they have steady work and are just lying about it. to some extent the way people get income is like the rest of us get it. it. >> a couple more and then we will wrap up. on the right. >> mr. haskins, when you're talking about the second half of your remarks that tanf was not exactly working out as well as it probably could have, at the end of it you are blaming a lot of that on the states, other

performers. i was wondering could you be more specific about other states are negatively affecting tanf and what is the motivation for states doing the? is it some kind of requirement of the federal government in order for them to get federal money as opposed to actually solving the question of poverty? >> to point. one, based on actual data which was shown that the states are spending a huge amount of the money on things other than the two most important goals of welfare reform, which was cash assistance and work. and openly reducing cash assistance and increasing work. and back before welfare reform or in the early days of welfare reform, states spent most other than of dollars on those two things. now even with the generous economy the secret charts on the website the center of budget policy priorities, much less to spend on those two activities. so, for example, the states that tanf dollars on college

education, spent tanf dollars on child protection programs, for which we already give the states about a billion dollars. so they're not spending it on what they should. so that's the first thing i would do. i would have much tighter controls and i would try to get the states to spend their dollars, their tanf dollars, on either work or cash welfare. the you saw also in the charts that the states are getting a much lower percentage of poor single mothers a cash benefit. that is why it is increase the notwithstanding scott, unless you're a brilliant genius and know how to make it go away by running a calculated, there's been, and by the way, scott, even if it hasn't increase, people at the bottom or desperate need help. that's one of the purposes of

and. so that's what they should be focusing their dollars on. second thing, more speculative. my own vision was that once people got in workforce, once single mothers got in the workforce they would discover that they like working at that life is better when they earn their own money. that by and large happen. so the next thing would happen is they would like to get ways to make more money so they would get training, go to night school, two things to lots of other people to make sure they're making 20 or $30 an hour rather than 10 or 12. that has not happened. and that is where the states could really come in the if they are the laboratories of democracy they should figure this out. we do have good experimental studies showing some kind of training, especially focus on fairly short term training, focus on jobs available in the local economy have had major impacts on employment and on hourly wages. so that's the kind of thing states ought to be doing instead

of draining all the money i'll tanf been spent on something else. >> one last question. be want to wait for the mic? >> good morning. i'm a freelance journalist. it's rumored up to a million civilians coming in to all the states -- serious. what kind of effect will have on your poverty reform? >> i could hear. >> the quake was about immigration and refugees coming in. maybe restate. >> a million syrians are coming in your. how will that affect your poverty reform? will all come from the same pot speak with i think the question is about immigration and how that will impact poverty programs. will the strain the system?

do we need more? >> tanf is not available to recent immigrants. it's a five year limit, five year time limit of being in the country legally before you can qualify. there's not an immediate threat, threat to all those people coming on and getting on tanf. there are other government assistance programs designed to assist refugees directly. there's a longer-term issue of how, as people come in and find their footing, what will happen. but as far as tanf is concerned, someone who arrives right away is not eligible for federal tanf funds. >> okay. great, with that we will close out. thank you all for being here him and a warm thank you to our panelists for the insightful

discussion. [applause] >> we will move into our second panel so we will take a 15 minute break until the event michael tanner will introduce that panel. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> this conference on the impact of the 1996 welfare reform law continues in about 15 minutes.

a panel looking ahead and recommendations for improving the law. tonight on c-span at 9 p.m. a special program looking back at welfare legislation that was passed by a republican congress and signed by president bill clinton. the program features 1996 congressional debate over the law and examines how a change in welfare system impact of poor people. while this conference is taking a break, here's michael tanner, senior policy in this is -- policy analyst with decatur institute. [inaudible conversations] my name is michael tanner and senior fellow at the institute and i want to welcome you to decatur institute for this welfare reform 20 anniversary.

it was 20 years ago today that president clinton signed the bill. 20 years ago bill clinton signed welfare reform -- [inaudible] finally ended up with a bill that he did sign. i think one of the things we failed remember is just how controversial this bill was. there were protests even as he signed it. there were people outside the white house who were protesting in chance of one, two, three, four, stop the war on the poor. three members of his own administration resigned in protest because he was signing this law. and they were all manner of dire predictions. "the new republic" wrote an article at the talked about how they would be family breakup in

wages would decline in the would be millions of people thrown into poverty. there was a very famous study by think tank the said a million additional children would be cast into poverty in this law passed. it was very controversial when it passed. and we saw as i mentioned people on the left were sort of predicting all sorts of terrible things would happen. and on the five people were talking about this being a new era, that the entire framework of social welfare policy had shifted. we are moving away from welfare to work, for example. that we were changing the attitude of something that kept people in the pinned to the idea that charles murray had talked about in losing ground, that we are moving away from that entire epic of welfare to something very different that was going to

reduced spending, move people off the rolls, gave people into work, give people a chance for self sufficiency and radical change what the dole met in america. the reality i think is that neither one of those predictions came true. we have a couple of panels that are going to talk about this a little later. one is going to look back what happened in the past answered measure the goals of welfare reform against what actually had been achieved. then we will take another panel that's going to take a look at what we can do from here. what's the next up and welfare reform, what lessons can we learn from the past and apply them to the next generation of welfare reform. so really some fantastic people who you're going to hear from. i'd like to take a few minutes before we begin to sort of if i can put some of this in context, maybe set some of the stage, raise a few questions that i

hope you will be thinking about and maybe our panelists will touch on as we move forward and kind of think about what welfare reform has actually meant. one of the important things to recognize is welfare reform touched on a very small portion of what welfare of the social welfare safety net in the united states actually is. welfare reform actually handled one have been a for films with dependent children, it's not tanf, temporary assistance for needy families, and a couple other small programs but there are actually more than 100 federal antipoverty programs of various sizes and kind. 70 of those programs actually provide benefits to individuals. they either give them cash benefits or more commonly what's called in kind of benefits which is something like housing or

food stamps or health care or something that people actually receive cash the resistance of the kind of benefit based on whether they are moving. -- whether or not they are low income. that's a huge severe social bureaucracy. it spends a lot of money. those hundred plus anti-poverty programs cost the federal government last year about $695 billion. and if you throw in state and local spending which is another $280 billion, we are close to spending a trillion dollars every year fighting poverty in this country. you can't say that we don't try at least in terms of dollars if you're measuring input into fighting poverty, we have a fairly high number of inputs. we are spending a lot of money

fighting poverty in this country. i do want to keep this in perspective because whenever i start to but how much money we are spending fighting poverty, people get the idea that some of that's where the money is in washington your that it is all being wasted on poor people into get a lot of negative press around some of those right wing radio talk shows the to go crazy about these numbers. i just want to keep it a little bit in context, the get up the money we spent on welfare for the poor is dwarfed by the amount of money we spent on welfare for other people if the amount of money we spent on welfare for the elderly, for example, is far, far greater than the amount of money we spend on welfare for the poor. corporate welfare from over $100 billion a year we spend on corporate welfare which some of those upset people the same way that welfare for the poor people upsets people. and then, of course, it's hidden

in the military budget as well. whewe need to keep these additis well for in context or in mind as we move forward us a talk about welfare. the reasons the reform of welfare on the celtic knot of we're spending a lot of money on it. the reason for reforming welfare is much more to do with are we helping the poor? it'is not just a question of mo. if you want to save money, if that's all we care about is let's reduce spending on programs, there's a lot of other places we can go to just reduce money. let's look at the quick question setting the overall context of the discussion will have today and did welfare reform were? i want to look at this welfare reform in terms of spending. as you can see this line, this is welfare reform. if you look at the context, we're spending on welfare, federal and state spending were both rising prior to welfare reform.