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.

since welfare reform has continued to rise, that maybe even risen faster, so we're spending more money actually fighting poverty since welfare reform than before welfare reform begin. these all in constant dollars. this is not just a reflection of inflation. this is a collection of where actually spending more money on antipoverty programs on the hundred plus programs i was talking about. even if we have somehow held and with its block grant state and its decline in real terms, what we've done is simply shift spending to other programs, particularly to in kind of programs rather than cash programs. we have moved away from giving people cash and have increased hitting people of the types of benefits, housing, medicaid which is the biggest of all these programs, job training programs, education programs, food stands and so on are all

together. at the same time the question that comes up with what we have done in terms of poverty. again this blue line behind me is when welfare reform kicks in. the top rate, the topline that goes across is the official poverty rate from the census bureau. the other two lines are spending lines which you mentioned have continued to rise. what you see is immediately after welfare reform, the official poverty measure declined, measured by the official census measurement,

poverty rates went down but then it gradually has begun to the backup. went up quite a bit with a great recession, as now leveled off a bit begin but over all it's still roughly where it was comical all the way back to the beginning to the war on poverty and see the official census bureau poverty measures have not moved a lot. their take on paper taken below the poverty line and we consider them not poor. it's a bad measurement all the way around. much better are some of the alternate positiveness.

the census bureau has its own alternative poverty measure. a number of social sciences have developed poverty measures that will to take these benefits into account. they do a much better job of measuring poverty. one would like to clear is a myers sullivan supplement poverty measure and we could look at that because it does take into account the value of non-cash benefits that individuals receive. we think it's a much better measure. once again this is the brown one, a measure you see, and again after what we see the was a trend down word 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 way was going on before. it's not that welfare reform taken mendoza declined but welfare reform doesn't seem to have interrupted that line. that begins to level out around

2000 becomes flat thereafter. doesn't seem to have picked up particularly in terms of the recession 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 improvements 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. we also didn't see any of the bad things that were predicted to happen out of welfare reform in a sense i don't see any flight of in the people. in terms of al all the bad thins that were supposed to happen, don't see that happening. don't see any huge good things if you don't see people moving out of poverty, don't see the marginal increase in terms of productivity for the spending either.

moving away from the numbers, i want to look at what people think about poverty and the welfare system them about welfare reform. hear i'm going to talk about a survey that was done by the "l.a. times" along with our friends from the american enterprise institute. they asked for example, what impact of government and thai party programs had. than as people below the poverty level, the actual port which is a great idea asking the board how they feel about programs for the poor. we kind of neglect of that. as well as people who are above the poverty level. one of the interesting things is people who said what made it worse conforti% of poor people thought that the welfare system makes poverty worse. that would suggest that people who this is supposed to help don't think i'll what is helping the. among four people the number who say it's made a big improvement in their lives, only about 8% think it's making this system

better. so clearly if you go to the people who want the supposed beneficiaries over welfare system, they are not all that fond of it. they don't think it's all that great. in fact, when asked to benefits to people chance to stand on their own two feet and get started again, which is i think would want to see, gives people an opportunity to rise up, or do we think it's likely to make independent come if you ask the poor, 41% of the people who are in poverty think that welfare encourages people -- >> i'm going to moderate this bill. we have some people who are real experts who included turn this over to because i think you'll very much enjoyed listening to them. the second panel we want to build a little bit on what you just heard. we heard looking back and something because my gives us how they would make some changes. we want to focus this panel in particular i'm not just what we

have done but what do we do now. welfare reform is 20 years old. there is entire generations of people who don't remember welfare reform before welfare reform. it's a question we would talk about how do we do with the poor, how do we fix things, make things better for the future, people are not looking back so much as looking forward. i'm hoping we have some discussion about what are the next steps of welfare reform. what does the next version of the welfare reform look like. i think it will look very different than in the past. our panel the love answer that question, which is read everybody off at the beginning in the 20 other and keep it moving swiftly along. we start with ladonna pavetti, vice president for support policy at the center on budget and policy priorities. you've heard them referred to a lot already today. they are sharper group in terms of this. we do research there all the

time. she oversees the work and lives in poverty trends, including tanf. before joining the center on budget and policy priorities she spent 12 years as a researcher for the research institute which is another very good group insurance of numbercrunching and data. she's also worked for the urban institute, department of hhs on well for -- welfare reform, such as both a 30,000-foot level and some practical level experience which is important after that we'll hear from michael strahan contract of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at the american enterprise institute. i stole some other survey data earlier today. he works in labor economics and applied micro economic, public finance of social policy. he's been published in a wide number of peer-reviewed journals and policy journals and, of

course, most of the major newspapers and destined great deal of work on welfare reform and poverty issues for aei. rebecca vallas will follow. she worked for the national recession for salsas good claims representatives. for an acronym i can't even pronounce. she worked on disability which is another issue we've heard addressed. she's a very prolific in terms of the tv world in the debates. we don't do screening here. a very different world on that. we are looking forward to hear from her his love and finally william voegeli, senior editor of the claremont review of books and a visiting scholar at claremont mckenna college henry salvatori center.

is the author of two books. he should fit in well, and his work has appeared in a wide number of newspapers and peer-reviewed journals across the country. again we expect to have a really lively discussions are just get out of the way and turned over to donna to start us off. >> thank you, michael. oh, shoot. sorry. okay. so what i want to do is i want to start with just a little bit of background from a so because i thinit's important to

understand where i come from. i spent, been involved with look at welfare reform since it started. i have been mainly doing work in the field look at the implementation of welfare reform and particularly tanf since it started and i did work before. you heard conversations about the work that cathy eden did on how people make ends meet. i was one of the interviewers who did work on the above cited work on it and it will have continued that. one of my key focus is really on work in thinking about how do we do a better job of helping people who have trouble entering the labor market do that. so i think welfare reform and that was an aversion is a good time to take a step back. what i quickly want to do is i think one thing that's really important is that my experience of being in the field is the author distinct periods in the 20 a sense than if was a limited. the reason why that's important is i often think we have a

positive store and it comes from the early years. in the first four years, 1996-2000, we had a booming economy. we saw states changing and shifting their welfare offices towards work. we saw work programs being developed that had not been before lots of job opportunities for people including people who have more barriers to employment. we also saw the beginning of people use of a cup full family sanctions which is people losing benefits who couldn't comply with work requirements. the decline was so and our leaders was that all because people were getting work. some was because people were being cut off who could not comply with those requirements. we had the second period, the second period was one of the first recession hit and its aftermath. what happened was we started to see the shift and started to see more movement of the money away from tanf for purposes. the reason why this happened is

because states had so much flexibility. they have budget holes they need to fill and tanf really became a slush fund whether to get those resources and they took those resources. we started to see much more movement away from those core purposes. what happened then is in 2005 tanf would authorize they went to deficit reduction act which significantly changed and we a continued decline of worker produced during that period. we had really came to be impossible to make work standards which i'll talk about in my recommendations. they we had a slight recession, even bigger budget holes and more movement of money out of the core purposes. i think that's important to think about it. very quickly, what is also important for me is thinking about what are the facts that i subscribe to that my recommendations come from. one is one that heather mentioned which is tanf's researcher people. answers succeed at the start, it serves 20 for every 100 now.

there are 12 states and that number will almost certainly increase where the number is the looking to see understand, in louisiana the are about five families out of every 100 who received cash assistance. who are in poverty. that number is very, very low in some states. we also know that benefits have gone down dramatically. we haven't had, benefits have the increase in emojis states those benefits are extremely low. i think i think you've heard is this light is an important slide which really does show the employment trend and what i think it's important to keep those three periods in check. what you see is this gap between never married mothers with children and single women with no children under the age of 18 and that gap was closed in 2000. in 2000 those lines started move together. what you have is two groups of

women who have similar levels of education who have almost identical employment trajectories. what i take away from this is about the was this movement but we are on a downward trajectory for almost everybody was high school little or less. that's a labor market issue i think we have to start paying attention to. here is another thing that's important is that what this slight does is to look at the topline is the number of single mothers who are not employed. we've seen a lot of people who are employed and saw that go up but you also see the number of single mothers with no employment during the year going up. the bottom line shows what's happening to tanf. what we have is right now we have 2.4 times as many mothers who are not employed at all during the year. we have a group of women of single moms who are not in the labor market and are not getting any help from tanf.

that is something i think we need to be worried about. you have heard before there is 8 cents of every dollar of tanf go to work programs. states are not spent the money to help it. you look at this, there's a lot of people who could be helped but are not. not only does it not before, it doesn't offer childcare and it doesn't go for basic cash. so given that sent a facts what do we need to do to really change than if so we can create a better program to really focus on the fact that we have for today, not on the history but on today? i think what we need to be doing is we need to be focusing on two goals. ron mentioned this in his presentation, is that we need to be focused on how to fight an effective safety net and create effective work programs? that's important for two reasons. why is that we do have families who have been hit on hard times and it's the kids who suffer. hasn't mentioned this at the end

of her presentation. we know a lot about what happens and kids grew up in poverty. if they don't accept the safety net they end up in a very precarious situation. they may use some of the strategies that really allow them to have more income b but they end up in very unstable situations. that's one reason why that's important. the other reason why it's important is that there are not a lot of resources available to help people who need help getting into the labor market. if they're not getting help from tanf they are unlikely to be getting help from other places as well. we have a very poorly and declining funding stream that goes toward the workforce programs. tanf in many ways what we've done by not serving them is two things. would not provide a safety net but we've also taken away the opportunity to do what tanf was intended to do which was to help families get into the labor market. the other thing i think that is important and ron talked about

this is that you cannot make progress on each of those goals unless you address how tanf funds are spent. what are the changes we could actually make that would make a difference? first is that states are not held accountable for serving families in need. states could serve, those dumb as ugly are going going to go down. we'll see more families who are serving five out of every 100 families. i think what we need to do is create and accountability measure, hold states accountable for providing assistance to people who need it. you can imagine that could be coming up to the national average for some period of time or setting some minimal standards the other setting minimum benchmark. one of the things we've seen as states give the money from tanf is they've made the eligibility requirements tougher. so two examples. one thing indiana did is they made it much harder for families to come in the front door. have a very stringent work requirements which many people

can be so the caseload has plummeted. and arizona is over the last supper years conference 60 month time limit to a 12 month time limit. they did that for budget reasons. people in arizona can only receive assistance for 12 months. these are things we need to set minimum standards so that we have a safety net that can help families. and, finally, we feel like one of the things that support is creating a recession response fund. we had extra money during the recession because of tanf emergency fund that was created in states where able to use that in three ways. they were able to do with providing more cash, able to provide subsidized jobs. you to under 6000 jobs that were provided, and we also had, could be used for emergency assistance. we need to have something that takes in quickly when the next recession. that has to do with how do we create effective work programs. you have to people on the program in the first place to

help them. what i think, is probably the most controversial recommendation i have but funding in the field the one thing where did it is we have to place the tanf work participation rate which is the accountability measure that states are held accountable for with employment outcome measure but if we don't we will not see change. what i see and feel this states cut, tying themselves in knots trying to meet those rates which are meaningless. obligating example of exactly what they mean. the chart i showed you of the number of women, single mothers not employed come in indiana that went from 59,095-96. it is now at 97,000 to almost double. we have almost 100,000 single moms in indiana who are not working, no work in 2014. there can the caseload they serve 10,600 families, 2200 of

them were subject to work requirements. 687 met the work requirement, and 612 were insensitive implement. they were already working. so indiana served of those 100,000 families, single parents with the network, they in their tanf program were able to engage 75. that is not what tanf was about and it needs to change. the other is that what we've seen in a workforce system is a movement towards much more education and training because of the change in the labor market. than it really still a state in this workforce world and it means we really are constraining tanf recipients to be able to get the education and skills that will allow them to succeed in the labor market. it means states don't see coordination and collaboration as a real possibility. it's too hard because i tanf

constraints really make it too difficult. finally, this is one of the things that ron said is that we really to encourage states to identify effective strategy for helping individuals with significant employment barriers by insisting upon the. wind reform was debated there was a lot of concern about the families who were on tanf or longer to time for receiving welfare for longer to time. many of those individuals had significant barriers, depressi depression, some substance abuse, histories of domestic violence. kids with special needs and that is the very group of families that have been left behind with tanf. if you look at tanf programs they're mostly job-search programs and our requirements without a lot of help to people overcome those barriers and help to make those transitions. we need to think about what other pathways that really will work to that group get to work? i think his idea of where this is a good one to start but we need to figure out ways to

integrate more fully into the program. finally, by want to talk about is just bashing sorry. the funding. as i said to start there's no way you can accomplish anything if you don't change the way states can spend their funding. some of it is taking with some of the flexibility they have. we have two recommendations. one is requiring states direct more of their tanf funds to tanf score purposes. nationwide it's about half. you'll find states that all over the map somewhere higher, some are lower. really don't think about how can you really pushed states in the direction so that they're spending more on those core purposes. the other is we know that the block grant has lost its value. it's about 30 to less than it was initiated. is really think about how can you begin to add funding and how can you do that targeted to those core purposes and not just in increased that allows states to spend anywhere they want? finally one of the lessons we've

learned. than it is not a model for other programs. work requirements, when, we had enlargement about doing the people behind or some people worse off. if you look at the study one of the previous presenters, when my colleagues to look at, there's 10%, the bottom 10% of single moms who were worse off than before welfare reform. that's 2 million kids. 2 million kids who we are putting in very precarious situation. if you look at the next 2 million, they were pretty much even, and then there some increase. you see this difference between some people who were help and some people who were worse off. we need to worry about those kids were worse off because they are the ones with the least likelihood of succeeding in the future. the other is i think one thing we have to recognize is that we really put a lot of stock in what states would you and they really did not live up to the promise.

there is a wide range of ways in which states have used their funds. i think we need to think about whether, what would happen if you give states more flexibility with other programs, would we have worse outcomes or where would we end up? and then i think it's important. tanf was really about work, about creating work opportunities. states really never took it seriously. in the very early years they did shift the message and the culture. they were lucky to have a credibly robust labor market but after that they have moved away from that and they are struggling to figure out how they can do the right thing. i think we really need to think about whether or not we know enough and whether or not states are the right ones to really come up with the ideas in this flexible world to move people to work at. [applause]

>> thank you for having me. this has been a great morning i think on an important topic. it's an honor to be included in such distinguished company. the subject of this panel is going forward, what should welfare look like? i'm going to construe welfare very broadly and argue that we need welfare reform for men. if you look basically at what's happening among men in the workforce, you see that there workforce but this does raise have been going down dramatically. only about four in 10 adult high school dropouts have a job. the labor force participation rate among prime age workers, workers were too rich to be in school, too young to be retired, has dropped from over 97% when the statistics began after world war ii, debate about 88%. that's a tremendous decline in the share of prime age men who are working.

unemployment among minority youth is shockingly high. it ranges from 25%-50%, depending on the business cycle. there's a problem of men working particularly low-skilled men, men without a lot of experience. why is that happening? bears a mix of supply and demand factors. roughly the left gets this half right and the right gets this half right. there are serious barriers to work that mainstays. women face them, too. i'm focusing on men. there are work disincentives in public programs that are important and key been out of the workforce. specifically or particularly if you look at public programs like so-so streak is the insurance that have really very large implicit large income tax or to get a good sense of the problem.

for our demand factors, globalization is extremely important at reducing employment among men. when businesses have to compete, i'm sorry, when labor markets are globalized so labor markets can take a finish of workers in very different parts of the world, that pushes it down wages for low skilled been and that in effect pushes many low-skilled and out of the workforce a technological change is the most important factor that is affecting mailed employment. -- mailed employment businesses not wanting to hire as many people in certain occupations in certain industries, in those employment losses are concentrated among lower skilled workers. if you think about, think about a bank and imagine the bank has a ceo, a cashier and the

custodian. technology comes along. we don't have cashiers, now we have atms. as technology continues to advance we are going to find a way to clean the buildings with fewer people but the ceo becomes more valuable. so it's those lesser skilled workers that are being replaced. the same thing is happening in factories, for example, the you could argue manufacturing as a white-collar profession because you kind of survive with the robots and tell them what to do. the idea most people have from programs from world war ii. the labor market is experiencing many changes. many changes. those changes are broad, big, global changes, and those changes are related to policies here at home. what's the most important? if you think about a simple

economics 101 test, we know that the number of men who are working has declined. if that was primarily driven by a supply change by men just not wanting to work, he would expect to see wages increase. if that's primarily driven or in large part driven by a demand change, this is just a wanting to hire as many lesser skilled been, you would expect to see, price in the labor market is just a wage and what we've seen are significant declines in inflation adjusted wages. ..

that is due, in in large part to the changing nature of what firms are looking for in workers in addition to being affected by public programs and supply-side issues, i think it's correct and i think it points us in the right direction for welfare reform in the 21st century and what i am focusing on which is welfare for men. what should we do? i think we need to remove barriers to employment. we have a serious problem with occupational licensing. it is the case, that in many cases it's a good thing, you probably wouldn't want a brain surgeon who didn't have some sort of license, although i

think there is some libertarians who would argue otherwise. that's broadly speaking, a consensus view but as michael mentioned in the introduction, occupational licensing for hairdressers are nothing more than terriers for incumbent firms as they're designed to keep people out and keep people out of jobs. reform of public programs, social security disability insurance, it is an obvious candidate for reform. there are likely a large number of people, a large number of men enrolled in this program that could be working, at least to some degree. we think of disability as we used two in a manufacturing economy as a binary condition. you're either disabled and you can't work or you're not disabled and you can. that makes sense in a world where disabilities are caused by factory accidents and if you lose your leg you can't go back

to work in a factory and your either disabled or you're not. in the service economy, we can think more of disability as a continuum and if there are some jobs or some amount of work that disabled americans can perform and they would like to perform, then public programs shouldn't be be keeping them out of that even if it is not full-time, 40 hours a week, standing on two legs doing physical work. minimum wages, i think, are only going to be, a larger problem going forward. as a consequences, both changes in the labor market that are pushing down labor wages for less skilled americans, especially less skilled men, and the consequences due to the decision the left as macon, raising the minimum wage to $15. hour is reckless and irresponsible. it is a raise that is far

outside what current economic estimates of employment impacts can confidently forecast and it is a policy that might help the middle class that will leave the most vulnerable members of society. removing barriers and stopping new barriers from presenting themselves is one very important factor. we need to incentivize work. the gold standard seems to be the earned income tax credit. right now we have earned income tax credit that offers over $6000 for single mothers with three children, again this depends on family size and what you're talking about. roughly $6000 with families with large families or $5000 for single adults with no children

at home, a lot of whom are men. i think we could expand the earned income tax credit for childless adults while still maintaining a comfortable gap between childless households and households with children. that would, based on past evidence serve to purposes. it would pull people into the workforce. we know previous expansion had pulled people into the workforce from nonparticipation into jobs. there is every reason to believe that would happen if we expanded the childless eit c and of course the tax credit is an extremely effective anti- poverty tool including 7 million children every year. it goes to low income households, it doesn't go to the middle class. we need to build skills, this

one is much harder to do from the federal level and there seems to be some promising programs that can be targeted at lower income adults and lower-income men as a way to marry classroom training with what their local community wants as a way to increase participation. the nice thing is the skills that are taught are determined by local businesses, not by bureaucrats. if a business wants a worker to do something they post a vacancy and then the local apprenticeship office can hope help place someone in that job. it's the business that is determining what needs to be done. it's not the bureaucracy attempting to divide what it needs and teach that's people. i think there is a lot of promise there.

finally, as part of welfare reform for men, there needs to be changes in our culture and this is the hardest thing for public policy to do. i think many on the right, many libertarians specifically might argue it's an inappropriate thing for public policy to do and i have some sympathy for that view, but a culture that supports marriage, that supports family that supports fatherhood, that supports providing for your kid and being a role model in their lives and meeting your obligations, i think that is very important and that's an uncomfortable thing to talk about today but i think it's important, i think it is only becoming more important and i think if you're talking about non- employment among men and nonparticipation in men, i think

it stands to reason if we had a stronger culture around being a good parent and meeting your obligations to your children that you might see an increase in participation or at least that's a conjecture. what can public policy do about that? i think that's a separate issue but it is certainly cultural leaders and public leaders that can do, can make some progress in that area. i will close by addressing why this matters. there are economic reasons why we should be concerned about low employment among men and i think you can justify a lot of policies unfairly economic grounds. the. the growth of the overall economy, the growth rate of gdp and income and living standards are tied very much to a growing workforce to the extent to which men have been pushing down the workforce participation.

if you look at the increase in participation in the 70s and 90s, that increase was driven entirely by women entering the workforce and at the same time, as the overall workforce participation was increasing, the workforce participation among men has been declining the whole time. we don't have a third gender that we can bring into the workplace. that means the two genders we have are moving up. there's no equivalent of what we saw in the 70s, 80s and 90s and that means if you want to have a growing workforce participation rate we need men to reverse that trend or at least have it level off. i think that provides enough justification for many policies. if you are concerned about society, if you're concerned about the health of civil society, if you are concerned

about creating a society where individuals enjoy mutual dependence on others and have mutual obligations to others, if you think that's important as a matter of social justice, it's hard to have another kind of society with men not working and participating in the workforce. this matters on a human level. people who are working are much likely to be in prison and my touch more likely to not meet their obligations to their families. if we care about dignity, if we care about people living a full life, for men a lot of times that means paid employment. that is how a lot of men contribute to society and it's

true it's renovated financially but that doesn't change the fact that what is happening on a fundamental level are people who are applying their skills and talents to contribute. if you believe it's a normative matter that those contributions have dignity and are necessary for a full life, and if you care about people living full lives and people enjoying that dignity then taking steps to increase workforce participation about men it becomes of paramount importance. >> good morning. i think it is still morning, we are approaching brunch time if this were a weekend, i suppose but it's still still morning. my name is rebecca fales.

i work for the center of american progress and i have to say it's been a lot of fun listening to this conversation because there's actually been a lot of bipartisan, trans- partisan agreement and i'm hoping to continue that as we continue this morning's thoughts about where we go from here. i find it incredibly useful in having a conversation, not just about canis but poverty more broadly to start more broadly of a realistic snapshot of who is poor in america. the folks in this room are no doubt familiar with the headlines and nearly 15% of americans americans living below poverty in this country. less often discussed is how the poverty measure doesn't capture the much larger share of individuals in this country who are struggling to make ends meet. that's because that poverty measure is set at such an off

level. only about $24000 a year for appearance with two children. when you look at what experts consider to be the cost of living, what it cost to maintain and adequate but basic standard of living, we are talking about the family of four kneading $50000, at least to make their basic needs, twice what we are currently using as a measure of poverty. when you use that standard, what you find is that about one and three americans, 33.4% are struggling to make ends meet. this is consistent with the federal data. when you ask people if you're getting buyer if you are having trouble getting by, one in three americans are facing that dilemma. i would also also add that the widely had misconception that poverty is about us and them, a binary that the poor is some

sign that class of some 44 million americans who are stuck below some arbitrary line. poverty is musical chairs. half of all americans will experience at least one year of poverty or of teetering on the edge of poverty at some point during their working years, according according to really important and careful research. that number rises up to four out of five americans when you count a year of being unemployed or the head of household is unemployed or of needing to turn to the safety net. meanwhile, very few americans live persistently below that federal poverty line for it when you look at census data between 2009 - 2011 during the thousand 11 during the recession, fewer than 4% of americans were poor all three years in a row. this comes as a shock when you hear these numbers until you start to think about what are

the most common drivers of poverty in this country. according to hhs, the three leading drivers in the united states are job loss or having your hours cut back or that of your head of household, birth of a child and disability or illness. life experiences that are incredibly familiar to americans and probably many people in this room so in short, for most of us, poverty is poverty is not a lifelong identity. it is a common lived experience. i will throw out another number. it might sound incredibly high until you think about all the facts that i've just laid out and that is that 70% of americans will need to turn to the safety net at some time during their life. i'm not talking about social security. i'm talking about supplemental security income and unemployment insurance. this stark reality makes the conversation all the more important and it makes safe winning our safety insurance more important than ever hazard

the weather of the ups and down if you will of life and to get back on their feet when they fall on hard times. i do find it critical to start from a place of understanding poverty in america before it goes too far. we are talking about a broken economy, not a broken class of people. while canis was initially held as a success in the early years, too often the narrative stops there. that's why i am so glad that we are having this conversation this morning because 20 years on, the evidence is clear that canis represents a cautionary tale, not a model for other programs. it reaches precious few families in need. fewer than one in four poor families with kids. compare that to snap, the food

stamp program which reaches about 80% of percent of eligible families in their time of need. the program is unresponsive to recession. it barely budged in the recent great recession and even declined in some states. again, compare snap which expanded dramatically to meet the dramatic rise in need. lack of accountability for results is a concern across the aisle. helping participants get into jobs isn't even a measured outcome today, nor is poverty reduction despite what this program is reportedly about. and then as you heard at length, no accountability on where the money goes. again, compare, 95%, 95% of snap funds go to help purchase -- help families purchase food. it does a very poor job serving married and cohabiting families. that is especially concerning if you are someone who views one of canis for purposes to include

families is something you want this program to achieve. it generally doesn't serve two parent families purchase a small number receive help from canis today. it's incredibly ineffective at cutting poverty and hardship in addition to reaching a very small and declining fraction of struggling families with kids, benefits are so meager that even the lucky few who receive canis are still unable to meet their basic needs and that's because in no state doesn't provide benefits of even half the federal poverty line. we are talking about $10000 a year for a family of three. even counting snap, income isn't enough to bring a family of three to the federal poverty line in any state and it's not going to be enough to help you afford rent in any state. in light of this, proposals to model other programs, that

something we hear a lot about these days, whether whether it's housing assistance, nutrition assistance, health insurance would be nothing short of a blueprint for exacerbating poverty and inequality in this country. one additional quick note on work requirements, continued calls for extending work requirements to other programs has not only been unsupported by the evidence of what these types of policies achieved, but they they are also premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the individuals and families who find themselves needing to turn to public assistance are experiencing. what their life looked like. more than 90%% of households who receive public assistance in this country are elderly, disabled or working households who aren't kept out of poverty by the two low minimum wage. that is one area where we will have a friendly disagreement. one other key limitation not specific to canis that i think is important to mention is the inclusion of counterproductive

counter peace that prevents families from having savings. not only does this policy keep families from building the savings they need to get ahead, making it more likely that they will need to remain on assistance for longer or return to it in the future in the event of a future economic shock, but this policy is also incredibly wasteful from administrative perspective and recent research findings shows that most americans don't even have $400 in savings. savings. this means states are wasting taxpayer dollars hunting for a needle in a haystack. so i wanted to make one quick set of remarks with respect to social security disability insurance. that has come up a lot today. before i turned to where i think we go from here. i will let commissioner correct me or jump in if there's anything i got wrong or leave out.

there is often a lot of discussion about perceived decline in the labor force participation rate. i don't mean to say that but declines are not real. they are real but the perception that somehow everyone is going on disability and for anyone in this room who thinks that it is easy to qualify for social security disability benefits, i would urge you to. >> guest: someone who has tried to access the benefits that they burned or someone who has handled or still handles those cases. that is what i did as a legal aid lawyer for years before i entered the public policy world. just sit with me quickly as i explain what it means to be disabled for purposes of social security benefits. you have to have a physical or mental impairment that is expected to last at least 12 months or result in your death and you have to have that impairment in such a way that you can document that you can't do any job that exists in the entire national economy in

significant numbers at a level where you could earn even $1090. month. that is what we are talking about. the vast majority of people who apply for these benefits despite the fact that they earn them do not qualify and do not receive assistance and thousands of people each year die waiting for those benefits because it is so hard to document that disability. that is something to keep in mind as we think about this perception that people are all moving on to this other desirable program. i also urge you to look at information from the white house counsel and advisors examining that very question about whether declines in men are attributable attributable to disability and they have found that there is virtually no relationship. i would like to talk to anybody who wants to know what it takes to qualify for this program. where do we go from here? i think the canis 20th anniversary offers an

opportunity to reflect on where we go from here, not just when it comes to income assistance for kids and families and strengthening it should be a priority moving forward but i think it's also an opportunity to keep canis in perspective as one part of a larger anti- poverty agenda that we could be embarking upon in this country. i think that is particularly important given economic instability now being such a widespread experience due to decades of flat and declining wages and the gains from economic growth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few at the very top. other key priorities we need to be thinking about in addition to the canis strengthening agenda that was laid out this morning and that i echo heartedly, must include job creation and wages. if we are having a conversation about how we want to move people

from welfare to work, we would be missing a huge piece of the puzzle if we didn't think about jobs and wages and particularly folks who have been left out of the labor market. we heard over and over again, about 68 straight months of job growth since october 2010, something to, something to celebrate indeed with the recession in our review mirror but certain groups of workers continue to face elevated rates of unemployment and underemployment, particularly workers of color, youth were not in school and not working between the ages of 16 and 24, people with criminal records, people with disabilities. investments in infrastructure and research would yield dividends when it comes to creating jobs and pushing the economy to full employment but we also need to focus on pathways to good jobs for those who have been left behind and i would hope that we would be thinking about apprenticeships, national service but also about subsidized employment as we learn lessons, one lesson we should learn is from the

tremendous success of the canister emergency fund at the height of the great recession that put 260,000 americans back to work and help them get something on the resume in hopes that they could actually move forward in the labor market. rate raising wages. this won't be an area of bipartisan agreement but i think we can all agree to the facts which is that our federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. it has been stuck at an anemic $7.25 for over six years. when you think about what it takes for a minimum wage worker to earn the same in real terms today as he or she did in 2009, they nine, they now need to work an additional 244 hours to have those same real earnings. that is what were talking about when we talk about the loss in purchasing power. raging raising the minimum wage would not only lift americans out of poverty. it would yield substantial savings of many programs.

we would see $53 $3 billion in savings over ten years if we were to raise the minimum wage in that way. i would just add it's great to see bipartisan momentum growing for expanding this for workers not caring for children in their homes but evidence does make clear this policy needs to go hand-in-hand with raising the minimum wage. we need work family policy so working parents aren't needing to be making choices between work and caregiving. that includes paid family and medical leave, particularly thinking about the birth of child being a leader and cause of poverty in this country. i would also add that the right to request flexible schedule is critical. it takes a look at how the ragged edges of the job market are one of the reasons people need to turn to public assistance and particularly canis peer that is something we need to keep in mind. i think we should also think seriously, looking ahead to a new congress administration, we

need to look at opportunity to harness the child tax credit. we need to strengthen canis but we should look at other complementary policies that can help increase income, particularly for children in the first few years of life. this is something that both the center of budget and a number of groups have been looking at as a real opportunity. i also wanted to echo what michael said about investing, removing barriers to opportunity among many of the barriers that he mentioned, occupational licensing is critical, i think think we also need to think incredibly broadly about the relationship between the criminal justice system and poverty in this country. research has shown that if not for the trends that we have seen in mass incarceration between 1980 and 2004, our nation's poverty rate would have dropped by a fifth. dropped by a fifth. you cannot ignore the intersection between the two. on the back end of that puzzle,

what we have now is one in three americans have some type of criminal record and it has shown that not only does it impact families but to the tune of nearly half of american children now have at least one parent with a criminal record. because of the barriers to housing, employment, education and more, those children find their life chances severely limited. we cannot ignore the need to ensure second chance policies for children. i would echo john's message that we need to be careful as we think about the lessons learned from canis in extending any thoughts that this program must serve as a model for other effective programs. whether it's health insurance for affordable housing, we may have real opportunities in a new administration to think creatively and even bipartisan late about how we expand the itc, the child tax credit and other programs but it would be a

huge mistake with the other hand to weaken what is left of the safety net for families who are struggling to get by. thank you. [applause] >> thank you good morning. thank you ladies and gentlemen, thank you to the current panelists, thank you to the cato institute for having me here and an invitation that was borderline mystifying because i have no policy expertise in general to offer and certainly none that would account for a marginal improvement of what you have already heard today. i'm going to speak at a much much higher level of generality about political purposes and premises that shape the debate over welfare. not quite two years after the law we are discussing today was

enacted, the you new york ran a front-page story denouncing idaho for having reduced its welfare rules by 77% over the preceding three and half years. according to one academic expert quoted in the article, idaho has effectively made itself the works place in the nation to be poor. that is and was a contestable assertion but also a clarifying formulation with a clear implication that the goal of welfare policy is to make a state the best place in the nation to be poor and a nation the best place in the world to be poor. the times argued that the hallmark of a jurisdiction where it is bad to be poor is that government strictly limits the amount spent on welfare programs and the number of people enrolled in them. it follows an increasing welfare

spending is the key to making a place good for the poor. it's possible however to stipulate the overriding goal of helping the poor but then also arrive at a different conclusion about that imperative meaning. an alternate account would hold that the best place in the nation to be poor is the one where you are most likely to be poor briefly as opposed to securely and respectably. two attributes that would make it easy to get out of poverty and hard to fall into it are a dynamic economy with numerous opportunities to begin and switch careers or start and expand enterprises and to, powerful social norms that offer the poor sympathy and encouragement, all if i'd buy the tough love that reproaches

people for choices, habits or disposition that increase the likelihood they or their children will become poor and reduce the likelihood they or their children will escape poverty. in theory these two approaches to optimizing the poor's circumstances and prospects seem mutually exclusive. in practice, america has tried to synthesize them. much of this ambiguity reflects the nature of the american experiment which values both inclusiveness and individualism. don't tread on me. a good part of it i think also reflects the character of franklin roosevelt, the american most responsible for launching and shaping our welfare state. like bill clinton, fdr rejected

false dichotomies so emphatically as to call into question whether he acknowledged the existence of true dichotomies. during the election his advisers presented him with two possible addresses. one called for lower tariffs and one turn to higher tariffs. he said we've them together boys so on the one hand, president roosevelt could declare in his 1935 state of the union address that continued dependence on relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration destructive to the national fiber. he went on to call welfare a narcotic and subtle destroyer of the human spirit.

on the other, he introduced the second bill of rights in his 1944 state of the union address. the entitlement it endorses can be divided in half. the first four concerned individual people to defend for themselves while the second are prerequisites for a decent life whose possession in fdr's telling has no obvious relation to individuals productive activities. you are on your own that is when it comes to food, clothing, recreation and feeling useful. you are not on your own with respect to housing, medicine, economic security and education. a functionally and morally adequate safety net will guarantee these necessaries necessities to all whether or not it appears they are willing were able to fend for themselves there isn't much point after all

and declaring a right to welfare benefits unless you also insist that the needs of some give them a decisive claim on the wealth of others. the welfare state we have built to pursue these objectives now accounts for nearly three force of the federal government, the office of management and budget human resources super function comprises these six functions meant to achieve the goal fdr laid out. i include in today's discussion programs often in a properly entitled as entitlements because assisting those who are not poor is a feature of america's welfare state. as the principal architect of our social insurance system

said, a program that deals only with the poor will end up being a poor program. in his view, the political viability of welfare programs of the whole play of the welfare state required dispersing benefits throughout society rather than concentrating them on the poor. the political logic is to blacken the sky with crisscrossing dollars rendering plausible that which is mathematically impossible that in an enormous but finite amount of wealth can be taxed and transferred in such a way that nearly every household winds up as a net employer rather than a net exporter of governmentally redistributed income. in 2014, the federal government spent $7933. american on human resources

programs. adjusted for inflation and population growth, that figure was twice as high as federal spending for those purposes in 1989. three times as high as in 1974, nearly four times as high as in 1971 and five times as high as in 1968. in our federal system, state and local governments also pursue the objectives laid out in the second bill of rights, assuming these numbers, government at all levels spent about $10500. american on welfare state programs broadly defined, roughly $42000 for a family of four. this calculation excludes, by the way state and local government outlays on education

which amounted to $877 billion in 2013. in addition to money the government spends to promote the goals defined in the second bill of rights, it also has tax incentives that subsidize private spending for such purposes. federal tax exempt exemption for example promotes medical insurance and care, homeownership and economic security. that cost the federal government nearly a half a trillion dollars in 4-gallon tax revenue. furthermore, a significant though harder to quantify part of the welfare state consists of government enactment that do not until public spending or tax subsidies but the use of index to give some citizens to assist others. examples would include the americans with disabilities act, minimum wage laws, rent control

laws and regulations requiring real estate developers to incorporate low income housing into new apartments and subdivisions. in the 72 years since president roosevelt proclaimed the second bill of rights, efforts to realize its goals have grown dramatically. over the past half-century they have become american government central concern. to reemphasize something that was said earlier, we are left with the most interesting boring graft in american politics which argues that all these outlays, incentives and regulations have done very little to reduce poverty, presumably the purpose of the whole endeavor. for the past 45 years the proportion of americans who are poor or nearly poor has fluctuated in a narrow band from

16 of of the national population when the economy is strong to one fifth when it is weak. it is hard to see how it would be left on less effective to take the trillions of dollars now directed through a will during array of endeavors and distribute the money randomly by taking 2020-dollar bills in helicopters for example. wasting money is bad but for an affluent nation, probably not fatal. our welfare has grown faster than our economy but both have increased a great deal. my own act of the envelope calculation is that the trends since world war ii would have to continue for the rest of the 21st century before america's welfare state becomes scandinavian in size and scope.

that may never occur and may not be all that dire if it does. i personally would rather live in america than in denmark but i would also rather live in denmark than most places in the world today or in most times and places in the past. i will a welfare state also weighs assets that may not be so ample. one is the lives of people who could make valuable economic political and social contributions if we did a better job of lifting people out of poverty and for defending them from falling into it. another is the confidence americans feel about our republic's governmental competent and integrity like the wars in vietnam or rack, wars on poverty that devote ever-increasing resources to receding goals and gender corrosive cynicism at the risk of being rude to my cato

institute host, i would describe myself as a conservative who is no more than an equivalent of libertarian. i do not, for example consider the self-evident that the welfare state that welfare is leased and welfare is best. the creative destruction of capitalism is particularly creative for some and particularly destructive for others and that is a problem that cannot be opened ignored if self-government is to be asked sustained and vindicated. it is not enough for the welfare states to mean well, for it's hard to be in the right place. and it's not enough for it to do things. the point is to accomplish things. the contrast between large growing efforts to end poverty and negligible reductions of

poverty does argue that a welfare state divided against itself cannot stand. i believe much of the american welfare state operational chaos results from its theoretical incoherence. rather than choose between responsibility for their own lives and governments fundamental responsibility to prevent bad things from happening to them, we have treated the two propositions as ingredients in a mixture, not alternatives. the results could have been a mess. fdr to the contrary, it appears there are some things we cannot weave together. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, we will take some questions from the audience in just a minute. once again if you would wait until the microphone comes down and take them. i'm going to start off with the moderator privilege here and

asked the first question are here too. there's a question i asked at the very beginning of my remarks and that is what is the goal in terms of welfare reform, poverty programs, is our goal simply to reduce the deprivation of which people in poverty are suffering so their suffering is alleviated to some degree? is it to somehow enable them to get out of poverty or is it some combination of them. let me ask you to wait them to son degree. where should the emphasis be let's just go down the line and start with donna. >> i do think it has to be both and i'm not sure i can wait them. i think what i would say is i think where we fall short is we do not know how to make big

gains in moving people out of poverty. i think some of that goes back to when we focus on changing individual behavior much more than we focus on changing the stuck structural issues that lead people down the path that they take. we use it to make the distinction between personal choices and structural choices and i don't think when somebody makes the choice or we think of making a choice to not complete high school that that is their choice when they have not been given opportunities. i think we have to think about the structural issues and what we have to do to fix them. until we know how to move forward, then i think we have to be able to provide a minimum level that allows people to buy food, housing and to meet their basic needs. [applause]

>> i think it's a hard question. i think etiquette helps with normative statements to see if people agree with them because ultimately, can you you hear me? , is the son? excellent. ultimately, we are at democracy. we can decide on these issues and can be debating them. i think we should have as a basic standard, someone who works full-time and is the head of household should not live in poverty. that is something i believe in something i hope we would be able to all agree on and that means that if a person can only get a job for seven or $8 an

hour and the person has some kids at home, the rest of society pitches in to make sure that person those children don't live in poverty. that person is doing the right thing in a normative sense and society should reward that. that is one normative statement. another normative statement that i would support is that in a nation as wealthy as ours, there shouldn't be extreme poverty. the matter how badly you screw up, you shouldn't starve to death. no matter how bad your choices are your children shouldn't starve to death. i think that perhaps is a more contentious statement but that's a statement i think should at least be debated and one that i agree on. in terms of tackling the problem like that, i think to to decide what kind of safety net we want is a useful way to go about answering the question. >> thank you. so i think there are a few ways you can think about this there are how we feel morally, there's

how we feel economically, if you care as i think michael articulated about the basic principle that no one in this country should i would go further than even one who is earning $7.25 an hour and working full time but if you believe no one in this country should beef poor and no one who's child who was born into an unlucky situation should be homeless, you have a moral case for why we should care about that. $672 billion a year in lost gdp. even if you aren't persuaded by the moral case, there is a a strong economic case for providing something that is him more basic safety net than what we have through canis. in addition to the argument that we need something that can protect all of us from a situation that might befall on anyone, that 44 out of five number hammers that home, it's

not just about vindication of deprivation. there is a body of research making very clear that we are also talking about programs that boost economic mobility in the long term. you can look at earned income credit and very small amounts of money in the hands of poor families during the first few moments that can translate into dividends when it comes to improved health and outcomes and employment entering earnings. i think we have a lot of arguments that we can look to for how we want to structure this program. i would also just add, i hope the q&a takes is there a little bit, a program that i neglected to mention earlier in which really needs to be discussed hand-in-hand with the conversation is unemployment insurance.

we don't like to think about the next recession being on the way. statistically it is likely we will see a new recession not that far off. i apologize for being the bearer of doom and gloom and were not prepared for it. i think when you actually look at who unemployment insurance reaches in their time of joblessness, we are now at a historic low of just one in four jobless workers protected when they hit that time of need. that needs to be hand-in-hand conversation because of for talking about programs that protect people from joblessness and programs that can help people get back on their feet we need to not leave out. >> i would put my recommendations into the context of the overriding condition of experimenting and self government which i believe to be precarious so i would say

whatever policy ideas we ponder must be considered alongside the perspective for collateral and social damage that comes from quietly broadcasting the notion that if you have a problem we have a program and that unlike with the jeffersons and people throughout the declaration of independence said, our rights mean what they say they mean and they could be rights to anything we think you ought to have. i would say, given, in line with my more or less prepared remarks, given the abundance of our efforts are ready in the direction of mitigating poverty and preventing people from

falling into bad circumstances, our focus should be not on innovations or augmentations but on simplifying and streamlining and consolidating, doing fewer things, doing those few things better than we currently are. my final thought would be that i believe once the government addresses its role or responsibility mitigating poverty that the challenge of helping people out of poverty of giving them the resources, practical and moral to fashion good lives for themselves is largely a social, rather rather than a governmental and political function. i believe the most acute need there is not anything that any

candidate can offer but rather something that will work from the top down rather than the bottom up. people concerned about neighbors and co- worshipers who will reinvigorate the social capital required to help people along when they hit a tough patch. >> let me just asked about one issue that's being debated in a lot of states. it seems the big debate now among some legislatures on the idea that will keep the safety net intact but we will make life as miserable as people for the people who use it. you can only take $25 a day if you are on canis or you can't spend money here. we try to treat poor people as if they are three -year-olds getting their allowance.

to some extent, i think there's a little bit that we can expect anybody who is poor to take responsibility for their life. we have to give them the housing benefits in the health care. we can't give them cash because they might misuse it. to what extent you find that in the debate today. should we be giving them more moral guidance in their behavior or should we be giving them more responsibility saying it's your life, were going to help you but you're going to get this right. does anybody want to weigh in on that? >> will take a crack. i think it doesn't stop there either. there have been proposals, i'm thinking about a town in maine, to create so-called welfare databases so we can track people, complete with their name and address who are these welfare recipients. thankfully that hasn't gone into

effect because it would also be illegal. i think what we are seeing in this era of incredibly aggressive bureaucratic disentanglement, because that is what it is, is not just something that is in conflict with libertarian and conservative values, i would take issue with your characterization in a friendly manner that folks on the left also -- while i will return in kind, there is a sense on the left that people can't be trusted with their money. i think there has been a sense that proposals and policies can gain political popularity and actually be feasible to move forward if they are in-kind as opposed to cash. i think that is why we have seen that tendency. i think the broader cause and consequence in this direction has been to further otherwise

people who experience hard times. i think not only does that make it harder for us to build public will to ensure a robust safety net that is in everyone's self interest but it really labors miss apprehensions about who is it that makes anne's meats. i think that's where the conversation needs to head, the reality of the face of poverty in this country rather than, apologies to anyone i have been, the poor person eating bonbons on the couch. >> i think the other piece of this that i am always struck by is how little emphasis we place on the labor market and what that means for people in terms of their own choices. a lot of the constraints and the tough love sort of policies assume that everybody could go out and get a job tomorrow or they could get help from a church or whatever. in my 20 years plus, that is not

the reality that i think people face. i think the reality people face is that if you have one little blemish on your record for whether it's criminal or whether you have mental health issues or whether you have a disability, all of those things really lock you out from the labor market. just to give you some statistics, there is a a program in new york city that was actually rigorously evaluated and try to take people with the most significant barriers who were on canis and provide them with a comprehensive set of services to help them move into the labor market. they had statistically significant impact in what they did was move the percentage of people who were able to find employment from 27% to about a third period that means two thirds never were able to find employment and the labor market has a role to play in that. until we really struggle with licensing, i think there are

things that go into factors and we don't take account and we think they have more ability to earn their income than they actually do. >> i also wonder, to what degree can you have a functioning labor market when you put more regulations and you have to provide paid family leave and yet the provide healthcare and you have to provide sick days, at what point does that say there is no labor market with people with minimum skills because they simply cannot provide the productivity that all those of its cost. it seems to be a contradiction sometimes in those policies. >> i agree with that, i sync it only highlights the need for public policy to make it easier

for people to get jobs, to reduce barriers to employment, similar to what he just laid out especially if we have an expectation that people are in some sense choosing between not working and working. when does it create an economy that is able to support those workers. to answer your question, we should never dehumanize a class of people and we shouldn't diminish the poor and think of them that are characters that are inaccurate. to my friends on the left, that applies to the left as well. treating them as an income generating mechanism for all of our preferred social policies is also very distasteful. at the same time it is the case that the money is spent on low income programs and it doesn't

come from the money tree, it comes from people who earn that money, and the and the people who earn that money do have some right to exercise some paternalism. :

>> if the question is a concern about barriers to sort of reentry into the productive america and that under the current regime, the now 20-year-old regime, this is too difficult, there are too few opportunities, the walls are too high, i sort of go back to the framework about the entirety of what we're doing to promote welfare and about the premises of whether welfare is or is not a right. so i guess my question would be to the center on budget and policy priorities, to the center for american progress, if your organizations were given czar-like powers over or american policy, which is a rough approximation of where we'll be in january -- [laughter] would you in a blank sheet of

paper world get rid of tanf and reintroduce afdc, and this time do it right and generously with not simply the guarantee with welfare as an entitlement, but as a much higher floor to guarantee that no one who's on afdc has anything other than a, you know, sort of not-so-nice but reasonably comfortable life? >> i think even in that world, we still have a divided congress, right? >> no, this is -- >> oh, we get it all. >> the thought experiment is you're running the show. >> okay, interesting. >> i am going to go to the audience right now. [laughter] >> we'll never know. >> we'll never know. i'm going to keep that one a secret. we'll get a chance to weigh in on that, though, when we get to the questions. i'm going to start with right here -- [inaudible] >> the conversation you were having about what you need. having been responsible for welfare reform at the state level, what i found was it's not to just a job, it's all of the things around the job.

it's the flexible work hours or the flexibility when you have childcare issues or you have school issues that you have to deal with. it's the lack of coordinated transportation in many of our communities where the welfare mom cannot afford a vehicle. so it's all of those kinds of things. i have found that poor parents are not that much different than us middle class parents, we want the best for our children. but there are a lot of complications they have with the lack of support systems that we do not provide that many of the middle class -- >> i'm going to have to move to a question mark. i'm going to be ruthless on all of these. anybody respond to that? agree, disagree? >> i -- i mean, i agree. i think it is. it's why when we think about core purposes, we include childcare and work support as part of that because i don't think it's just preparing people for work, but it's also really helping them to be successful at work. and i think everything you mentioned is part of that. i would agree.

>> i want to make one other quick point which is i think it often gets articulated as though paid leave is something nice to have or even permission to have a sick day, that's something that's nice to have to, it's a cushy benefit. the reality is your job is on the line if you miss a day of work, if you call in sick, if your kid is sick and you have to pick them up. that's what we mean when we say choices between work and care-giving. maybe i'll work from home, maybe i'll take a sick day. it's you will lose your job. that is what is on the line if you take care of your family and if you take care of yourself -- >> but it is a cost imposed on employers. >> i'm not saying it's not, but as we weigh what that cost is worth. >> great. peter? >> i i wanted to ask what ideas does anyone on the panel have on what policies we could adopt to address poverty that would address poverty by increasing economic growth and wage growth

and job creation. so we actually, if you look at the data, we actually never recovered to normal levels of economic growth since the last recession. we've not recovered to normal levels of wage growth, job creation. so isn't the best way to address policy to get the economy growing again and to get jobs -- wages rising again? what ideas does anybody have about policies that could be adopted that could promote that? >> why don't we just quickly run down the -- no? anybody? i mean, i would suggest that what we really need is a significant reduction in the burden of taxes and regulation on business in america. that, i think, is slowing economic growth. but i also think, you know, we may never return to the levels of economic growth we've seen in the past. we're not going to see the labor force increase significantly. right now it's only immigration that's basically keeping our population even stable. so i think we're not going to see massive increases.

michael, you talked about that already. women are already in the labor force, minorities have moved into the labor force. we're not going to see that again. we're not seeing a big gain from education that you should see. that's a problem with our school system. and we're moving increasingly to automation as the tool for growth and productivity. so i think we may not return to the, you know, the 4, 5% growth eras of the past. to the degree that i think we can, it's going to require are changes in tax and regulatory policy. in the front -- in the middle. >> have welfare programs hurt through violating subsidiarity, i think you were talking about, have they violated the strength of the family and the private community by substituting for the role of the father or the extended family? >> i think there was some belief that that was what was going on when welfare was eliminated, but

i think if one of the things we don't have the question for, answer to is thinking about when you -- what happened with tanf is i think we really did take the floor out from under people. and i often think if you look at the issue that michael raised about peopling, males being out of the labor market, if you look at the opportunity youth, the 16 to 24-year-olds, those are kids who have grown up in this whole new world. they were not part of the old welfare system. and so have we really missed an opportunity by designing that right, sorry, to help create better futures for our kids? so i think we really don't have the evidence, and i think, if anything, we may have evidence in the other direction. >> [inaudible] >> sure, i would love to jump in on that. i'm actually really glad you asked that question, because i think often the, quote, welfare state gets described as the, quote, hubby state, and that's something that's been postulated

for decades now and was one of the views underpinning, quote, welfare reform. i don't know if folks in this room are familiar with a, a book called "all single ladies" by rebecca traister. it is worth a realize as we think about the trajectory that the single woman has, has seen over the course of the last few hundred years. she argues that for many, many centuries husbands had a -- and men -- had a wifey state and that my colleague, heather, at the washington center for equitable growth would go further and argue that american business for a long time had a silent partner in the stay-at-home mom and wife. and a lot has changed. we're no longer living in the "mad men" era, and that's why a lot of what we need to be having a serious conversation about is updating our public policy so that we recognize that we now have, in many cases, two parents working or we have a single head

of household who is working who is that mother. so it isn't, i would argue that we need to think about both sides of that coin. >> i mean, i think it's actually a very important question. you know, there's no doubt in my mind that if we completely eliminated the welfare state, if we eliminated assistance to the poor, that we would see an increase in private charity. i think that would happen. and we would see, you know, more men providing for their kids and taking a more active role in the lives of their kids. you know, but having said that, these programs didn't just kind of spring out of thin air. i mean, they were all started for a reason. and, you know, we started social security because the elderly were dying of hunger and were dying in tenement houses and were dying of disease. it was not that long ago, in the 1960s, that there was real starvation-level poverty among children all throughout the

united states. and that's why many of these programs were started. so, you know, i think, sure, it's the case that this is a sense in which men are being displaced within the family and churches and other charitable organizations are being displaced within society, and we should take that seriously. and when we're thinking about moving forward, we should design programs that encourage men to, you know, provide for their kids and that encourage the organizations of civil society to provide for their communities. but that should never obscure the fact that the family and the church, just as a matter of fact, were not enough to create the kind of society that we want. >> let me just ask a follow-up question on this, and then -- >> okay. >> -- on this sort of thought. because we, i hear this a lot, the problem of non-marital births being a huge problem. my question is who is these

women -- who are these women supposed to marry? my understanding is the men available in these communities are not particularly attractive mates. they have, they're unemployed, they have criminal records, they have criminal histories, there's a lot of issues like that. i remember the bush administration was going to do a whole bunch of things where they were going to put up billboards and say marriage is good or something, kind of encourage marriage. but it's not, i mean, it's not that women don't want to get married, it's often that they lack suitable partners in that. i just want to put that kind of in the context of this discussion as well. i'm sorry, i didn't mean to interrupt. >> no, what i was going to say is i think a point from the previous question is i think that it's really important to keep in mind the evidence that rebecca showed, that we have increasing evidence that providing the eitc, providing s.n.a.p. benefits not only has an immediate benefit of making sure there's extra income and food on the table, but it has

long-term benefits that really extends into adulthood of people having better educational outcomes and better employment outcomes. so i think in 20 years we're going to have a whole new set of evidence about the importance of income and the importance of what happens in a child's early years and that will really sort of shape our discussions and benefits about what we should be doing to make sure that those basic needs are met. and i think that the, i believe that the positive will outweigh any negatives that you may think would happen. >> i wanted to speak to your question -- >> sure. >> i think that another improvement that i would love to see to the broader conversation is to get away from the binary view of single versus married as though those are permanent statuses or as though people are giving birth to single moms and that that is their existence throughout their lives. when you actually look at the numbers, there are more married parents living in poverty than

there are never-married parents living in poverty, and yet we don't hear a conversation about marital poverty. i think that moving past the single versus married and the billboard version of that conversation is really important so that we can also be thinking about how to keep families who are together together and keep them strong. when you look at some of the major drivers of family dissolution, you find that rising inequality, declining union membership and poverty, actual material deprivation, disability, these are huge drivers of family dissolution. what we should be doing whether married or co-has beentying is -- cohabiting is help families stay strong and have the resources they need to parent their children in a productive way. >> yeah. phil. >> nobody's mentioned birth control. there have been some very promising experiments in colorado suggesting that much

easier access to long-acting, reversible methods of contraception has a salutary effect on a demand for welfare services and would certainly apply to married women as well as single women. what do y'all think about that as a matter of public policy? >> i think it's an area that we need to do much more work on. i think that it is a very tricky issue. i think that you have to, i think it's an issue of making sure that it is a choice for someone and not that it is coercion. so i think that there are -- it's an area where i think that we are at the very early stages of figuring out what good it can do and what bad it can do and lead me to really -- we need to really think strategically. but i think that it's not that it is it is -- i just think we don't know about what's the right way to the move forward

and to do more with long-acting contraceptives and how you actually do that in a way that doesn't harm people. >> i mean, i agree with that. you know, i think on some level it shouldn't be surprising that if you, you know, really encourage long-acting contraception you'll see a decline in out-of-wedlock births. it renders people temporarily sterile until the device is removed and they can have children again, so it's not surprising that if you temporarily sterilize people, they're going to have dramatically fewer children. you know, the concern that i have is exactly the one that donna brought up which is, you know, to what extent is this voluntary, you know? what kind of agency should we realistically expect these targeted communities to exercise when thinking about this? do we really want, you know, low income, young minority women having to make a doctor's appointment for, you know, a procedure in order to render

them fertile again, you know? does that, you know, is there, are there some issues with some, you know, some normative issues there. and, you know, at the same time there is not a shortage of, you know, kind of more regular contraception out there. it's very easy to get condoms, it's very easy to get the birth control pill, much easier to get condoms than even the birth control pill, but condoms work pretty well. and so it's, you know, it's not, it's not as if -- i don't even think we have a clear understanding of what an unplanned pregnancy means, you know, in a world where it's very easy to access condoms and where knowing how to use a condom is pretty widely known. >> i'm going to call on -- okay, bill? >> but i think this good question ties to what michael said about the controversy over

requirements as to how poor people could spend government benefits -- alcohol or not alcohol, seafood or not, you know, that kind of thing. and that, beneath that then is the unresolved question of whether, to what extent, how exactly welfare is or isn't or sort of is a right. if it's a right and that term is understood in the direct, literal sense, then it means that government is wrong to be interfering with the exercise of that right. if i have a right to these benefits, then government shouldn't be curtailing or conditioning that. right after i moved to california about a decade ago, there were stories that people were taking, that they provide some public benefits on something like a debit card. well, it turned out that among the readers of these debit cards, they were located in casinos and strip clubs.

some people apparently took this, you know, right to public assistance in a more literal way than the legislature quite intended. the, over the years the ambiguity about this question, i think, has been one of the defining features of american politics. a phrase often used is that welfare benefits, public assistance of various sorts should be given as a matter of right which is a brilliant sort of fudge, because it says to people who disagree with the idea of a right, well, it's not really a right. we're going to sort of go through the motions of pretending. and it says to people who think it is a right for all practical purposes you're, we agree. so i don't think until we really grapple with that question that things like restrictions on spending, things like quasi-voluntary, long-term infertility can be addressed or resolved. >> but there's a broader

conversation than just -- [inaudible] and i think the concerns that have been raised are valid and important. we also need to be thinking about how does reproductive rights and access fit into a broader conversation about an anti-poverty and a boosting opportunity agenda. and until we're in a place where truly all women can choose if and when to become mothers, they aren't going to have control over their economic futures and much else. i think it's critical that you brought that up. it's also why we should be suspect when people who blame single mothers on the one hand for all of society's ills, it seems on the other hand also want to insure abstinence-to only education in schools and defund planned parenthood. it, to me, strikes me as talking out of both sides of your mouth. >> all right. i know that's going to proto voc a lot of questions at lunch -- >> perhaps on the panel. >> as i always say, i don't want to stand between anybody and

food. we have lunch being served in the yeager conference center upstairs. i want to a thank you all very much for coming out. once again, i'm michael tanner with the cato institute, and you can follow along the discussion if you want to react to some of what you just heard, it's hashtag welfare 20th. that conversation will continue. thank you all very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> you can watch this panel as well as the morning discussion

on the impact of 1996 welfare reform law beginning later today on our web site, c-span.org. >> here's house speaker paul ryan's comments on the welfare anniversary released this morning by his office. >> the problem with our welfare system today is it's, basically, a work replacement system. it's a system that discourages work. it's a system that penalizes work. and as a result, people don't work. so people stay stuck in poverty. it's as if this war on poverty approach is to treat the symptoms of poverty to make it more tolerable, but more persistent instead of going at the root causes of poverty. the reason many people are in poverty is because they're not working, or they're not getting an opportunity to make the lives they want for themselves. what we're doing is changing the incentives and removing the penalties that are placed on people in poverty so that work always pays. it always makes sense to take a job. you will not be penalized to take that risk, you'll be

encouraged. that is the core principle of our welfare reform plan. >> today marks the 20th anniversary of the 1996 welfare law. passed by a republican congress and signed by president bill clinton. our special program looks back at the senate debate over the 1996 law. >> current welfare system has failed the very families it was intended to serve. >> i don't know many people who want to humiliate themselves standing on a line waiting for their welfare check. yeah, there are some cheats out there, and there are druggies and there are drunks. they're out this, there's no question about it. but a lot of those people are simply people who have not yet discovered a way out of their misery and their poverty. >> we have decided that the states and the governors and legislatures out there in america are as concerned about the poor as we are. as concerned about their well

being and as concerned, if not more so, than we are about the status of welfare in their states. >> and includes discussions on how the changes impacted the poor. >> from now on, our nation's answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare. it will be the dignity, the power and the ethic of work. today we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance not a way of life. >> tonight at nine eastern on c-span. the house and senate return to legislative work on tuesday, september 6th. agenda items include must-pass federal spending. they're also expecting to fund zika virus research and prevention programs and pentagon programs. the house is also expected to consider impeaching irs commissioner john koskinen. the house will be live on

c-span, and the senate is here on c-span2. and this from the hill over this past weekend. senator pat toomey is feeling the effect of donald trump's sagging poll numbers in the creating battleground state of pennsylvania. up until a few weeks ago, the republican senator was consistently leading his democratic rival in this year's most expensive senate race so far. a quinnipiac poll has mcginty up three points and clinton surging by ten points. a month earlier, the survey had toomey leading by ten points and trump by two points. senator toomey has not said whether he'll vote or -- vote for donald trump in the november election. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider.

>> host: and this is "the communicators" where we look at the intersection of public policy and telecommunications. this week a look at law enforcement and cell phone tracking. our guests, neema sing ghoul janney who is legislative counsel at the aclu and mike doucette who is a commonwealth's or state's attorney in virginia. mike doucette, how do police use cell phone tracking today? >> guest: we use it a number of ways. of, we use it to try to find individuals in realtime as well as historical information, where people have been in the past. in order to solve crimes that have occurred or are about to occur. so, but we do use it very much in that capacity. >> host: in your view, is it an effective tool? >> guest: it can be, absolutely. i mean, i can think of one particular very gruesome homicide we had in lynchburg a

couple of years ago where while the case wasn't resolved by cell tower or information, it -- that basically broke the case. we would have never found the suspect but for the historic cell tower information. so it can be very, very helpful. >> host: are there restrictions on how the police can use cell phone tracking? >> guest: based on what we've seen, there's often not appropriate restrictions. i think it's really important to talk about how some of these devices work. you may have heard the term stingray, one of the cell phone-tracking devices that are often used by law enforcement both at a federal and a local level. and the way they operate is, essentially, by impersonating a legitimate cell phone tower. and as a result, what they allow are police to gather things like location information or serial numbers of not just a specific target's phone, but all target phones, but all phones in that area. in some cases they can also block or jam devices from making calls. you know, and given these

extraordinary implications, the impact on the rights and the privacy of not just the individual that police seek to target, but really all other individuals in the range of the device, what we're seeing is law enforcement, you know, often lackey protections -- lack key protections to make sure the devices are used appropriately. in some cases we've seen police use these devices without a warrant, we've seen a lack of policies around what information must be purged. generally, you know, the information about these devices has not been made public so there can be a debate on whether and how they should be used, and all of this is very concerning. >> host: mike doucette, what -- should police have to get a warrant? >> guest: well, now, if we're talking stingrays or we're talking cell tower information, i mean, there's sort of a number of different areas, a number of different technologies. and let me be sort of a disclaimer. i own a smartphone, that doesn't make me smart on this technology.

i'm a practitioner, i'm a prosecutor and deal with these cases all the time. but, you know, if we're talking, you know, we have stingrays, we have historic cell tower information, realtime location through third parties. there's all different legal consequences and legal considerations for all three of those. and so, but when you're talking about stingrays, you know, should there be a warrant requirement, i think, yes, personally. and, in fact, in virginia our legislature a couple of years ago required that. i mean, we as prosecutors got together with the aclu and other groups, state police, and we passed legislation to make it clear to law enforcement in a stingray sort of situation that you do need, you have to have a search warrant. it's not clear as far as constitutional law at this particular point in time, although i think we're probably getting close to that. but i agree that a lot of this