real policy ideas, structural ideas, that can be brought forth for that? >> sure. having schools, kids and the adults who work in them who want to be in seems like something we as a country can surely afford and should do and we haven't done them. many of our schools in boston are more than 100 years old. >> okay. i think that we better move on. i'm sorry there wasn't time for more questions, but thank you so much. this was an informative panel. the berkings institution on the future of public investments under the trump administration also heard from an aid to house speaker paul ryan. he was joined by fellows from the right and left. >> we are going to start our

panel because we are rushed for time. i'm pleased to have ted mccannis from the house of representatives, bob greenstein and this morning and now we're going to talk about a way -- away from the academics and talking more about the practice al issues associated with implementation. we spent the morning talking about the evidence and academic studies and making sure studies are done well and are identified about the effects of policies and this would have been a reasonable question, i think, a year ago or two years ago. i think we feel like it maybe is a more important question now. does evidence matter to the political process? do these studies have an effect and if so how? >> i think it matters a lot. i think that in my experience in

new york and in new york state, new york city, we paid attention to evidence and outcomes and it had an effect on how you do your debate. i do think you have to be careful about overstating the evidence and you can't oversell and you think you have to know your audience. i think in looking at this sort of data about investments in human capital, i think the best finding is concerns medicaid and maybe food stamps behind that. i'm not so sure the finding is so strong in cash. i think when you go in and talk to people who have particular viewpoint and here i'm going to talk about my friends republicans, they're going to want to hear about employment effects and they're not going to want it to be dismissed as unimportant. it really matters and they're going to want to hear the truth about that. they're also going to want to hear the extent to which these necessity of investing in human capital is driven by an absence of another parents for instance

or the issue of single parenthood. you can't write a series of papers about investing in new capital for young children and not talk about poverty and race and single parents. i think it matters a lot. i think the speaker in his better way proposal that was referenced mentioned evidence, certainly the hottest republican election to some people in town was the election of todd young in indiana. he was an evidence guy, pay for performance guy. i think that people who want to start with the premise that in the new world we live in now, evidence doesn't matter, certainly aren't helping their case. >> what's your take? >> well, if i didn't think evidence mattered at all, none of us up here would be doing what we do. having said that i think my take is a lot less than robert's. i think evidence can matter a lot when decisions are being made in a non-politically po

polarized atmosphere. when an issue has a lot of politics around it, you can find members talk about evidence basing and then in the same statement or the same document making statements that are actually contrary to the evidence. a couple of examples of things that bother me now, we continue to have members of congress and others say as though this was based on evidence that poverty programs are a failure because the poverty rate is the same today as it was in the '60s when every reputable analyst knows that that comparison is based on the official poverty level and doesn't count the programs that have expanded because they're generally non-cash and there's broad agreement among analysts

that poverty measurements should count the non-cash benefits. when you do, there's a big reduction in poverty. we've had hearings on the hill. i was in one when there were two republican and one democratic witnesses and the witnesses echoed each other. and members who were in the room and heard this agreement within days were repeating the line everything failed, poverty rate didn't go down. one more example, if you look at a lot of the discussions on the hill, there was an earlier panel, i think it was greg and kristen were talking about how much policy discussions were in the context of perceived labor supply. and there's a particular line you hear over and over again in policy discussions that low

income people in large numbers face 80% marginal tax rates and are worse off if they take a job. we have a study that came out a year and a half ago that says the median marginal tax rate is 14% on people below half poverty, 34% between one and one and a half times the poverty line. we did an expensitensive analys. you have to be in a narrow income range. it turns out about 3% of single parent families with kids can be subject to something in the 80% range. it doesn't matter. the data's out there. it keeps being repeated as though this is the norm. i think where we run into challenges or where the data or the evidence don't support an

ideologically position or aren't helpful in a polarized political fight and i think our big challenge is how do we bring evidence basing even into those kinds of debates. >> do you have a response? >> i guess i'll go and talk a bit about evidence more broadly in the political process. i think we use evidence fairly regularly in the political process. i think you've seen speaker and then senator murray move on the evidence based policy. we mentioned senator young talking about pay for success. not only that, but whenever i've been in the room trying to figure out how to move policies forward, even when it's republican, democrat, negotiating things out, there's conversation about the process. it's not a conversation devoid of what we think the best policy is. it's a conversation based on the political reality and then

combined with sort of what the best policy going forward we think should be jointly. a lot of that is getting agreement on what the evidence shows. a lot of controversial issues. the evidence is mixed and folks -- you can't really come down on one side or the other side. folks retreat to their priors and end up arguing from more of a political point of view, but again that's just part of living in a messy world. >> i would just say that on the first example that bob gave, most of the time when i'm in the room and that statement is made, it's always proadvicvico but we haven't achieved the ability to rise above poverty. that isn't just a political statement. i think there are americans who care about having people get out of poverty so they at the end of the day don't need ietc or food

stamps or the value of public health insurance to provide the difference between what they earn or make on their own and the poverty line. i acknowledge that that political statement, we both have on both sides egregious behavior by politicians who sometimes say things that aren't quite right, but that one is a little more complicated because people do aspire to having the poverty measure be achieved without transfer payments. >> i have to disagree. robert, what you just said is fine, but in most public debates you look at various members of congress and others on sunday talk shows and the like. they do not express it more often than not in the way you just mentioned. it is used that poverty programs have failed and we should change them. that is the common rhetoric. the war on poverty failed. it didn't move the needle, a

very common statement. this shows we're doing things wrong and the current things don't work. >> there are people that say welfare reform was a success. >> i'm not going into the welfare reform thing. i think we can agree the evidence -- >> i think we can probably argue that different poverty measures show different things. >> yes. >> we can agree with that. >> and the more accurate poverty measure to use would be an a consumption base poverty measure, which we don't have. >> i heard you say, though, what people say in public and what they say in the back rooms is kind of different and i worry about the disservice done when we know the facts, but we're playing politics all the time. is there anything that academics or think tanks could do better to try to get more agreement where the evidence really like everybody sort of agrees on the basic facts? >> there's another problem here.

i'm not sure exactly what think tanks should do about it. i think everyone on the planet would agree that on a lot of complicated issues, i'm getting away from poverty measurement into research on impacts, on a lot of issues there are multiple studies and they sometimes go in different directions. if there are five studies and four go in one direction and one goes in the other, it is not uncommon in this town for people for whom the one that goes in their direction they cite only that one and they don't tell you the other four exist and then, hey, evidence based, here's the study. so i don't know how one achieves the following goal, but there ought to be a norm, that when we're discussing an issue on which there's research and evidence, that if various pieces of research go in various

directions, it's perfectly fine for someone to say why they think a given study or studies are the best ones, but you need to inform your audience of the studies that go the other way. if you think they're wrong or not as solid, why you think that. what should be viewed with suspicion is any time there are multiple studies, if someone cherry picks one and doesn't tell you about the others if there are quality studies that go in the other direction, to me that's not evidence basing. >> i don't think you can argue with that. i think it's a good aspect to look at the full array of studies. i think it's important when citing the studies to be really clear about the findings and the margins between a finding that shows a significant impact and not. i think sometimes in town people have a tendency to say the evidence suggests or the evidence shows or there's a lot of evidence that proves and then

when you look beneath that and you find the difference in the outcome wasn't that great and there may be other studies that show something different. when that happens at least in my limited experience here in town, when that credibility problem comes into effect, it really undermines the whole finding. you don't want to do that. you want to be clear about the caveats and the extent to which whatever intervention, especially a policy, it had an impact but maybe it wasn't as big as you want to pretend it was. i want to say one other thing. we can't underestimate the prevailing economic forces at work in the country that are sometimes more important or appear to be more important, especially in poverty, in that sometimes there's -- you had a question in the -- something you said to us. you said why doesn't everybody talk about this when all they want to talk about is a dynamic

scoring. people are worried about the overall economy as much as they are worried about a particular intervention in poverty and i think that has to be considered. >> let's move on from that a little bit. the thing that we try to talk about today was to sort of bring bunches of different kinds of policies together because we think really these are policies that are actually -- have the potential to be investments. we want to raise future growth and we're worried about productivity and we're worried about supporting medicare and social security. things that will raise future growth and interest rates so it's a good time to do investments so we're focused on what's consumption and what's investment and how can you make the case. is that something that politicians actually care about, what happens if 10, 20 years down the road from something or you have to make the case it's jobs or is it all about labor

market stuff? >> i think politicians care a lot about that. we just passed the 21st century cures which is about seeing down the road benefits from reducing diseases. when they're talking about the aca, there's a lot of conversation about prevention. i think -- i think that's something that politicians consider fairly closely. you do have the scoring rules that don't allow you to capture the savings so it makes it more difficult to include them. >> going back to the evidence a little bit -- >> can we stick on the growth for a moment. >> yeah, we can stick on growth. >> well, look, if you're a politici politician, you can be in either party and you're favoring a poli policy. more often or not you will claim that your proposal will promote growth. it doesn't mean it will, but these claims are so common. i would also argue that the standards that are used for

claiming growth effects are not equal on the spending and the tax side. almost any tax cut that anybody favors in either party is often claimed as producing growth. in most cases claims well beyond the evidence. what's interesting on the social program side, your paper does a great job of summarizing this. if i'm on capitol hill and i'm not talking about republicans versus democrats here. it's pretty much the case with all of them. there is a real lack of knowledge of the research showing some of the long term positive effects on kids for kids for certain kinds of programs, interventions as you discussed in your paper, whereas among both parties there are kind of assumptions often fairly

evidence free or the evidence may come from a lobbying firm that's producing data to serve its clients, that whatever is the tax cut or tax break will have these terrific effects on growth. i'd love to see somewhat more attention on the spending side, but for both of them equally rigorous standards for what we know about growth effects. i think we're a long way from that right now. >> so is there a role for cbo for example to be evaluating policies as part of a standard part of the tool kit to say we think this is likely to be growth enhancing or not and to have a good impact on growth for policies both on the tax side and spending side? >> my view is it would be useful for cbo to do this on both sides as analysis and that cbo should do it on neither side for

scoring. i don't favor dynamic scoring for taxes. depending on the model that you choose, you get wildly differing results. i suspect that 10 or 20 years from now, based on whatever data we have then, if one is doing scoring on taxes we might be in different ballparks than today. my view is we should get the best analysis we can of those effects on both taxes and spending, but i don't actually favor doing dynamic scoring on either side of the budget. i think it undercuts the solidity of the fiscal numbers. >> would it make a big difference you think in terms of what kinds of policies were enacted if there was a score to it or if there was some kind of standa standard analysis that people would look to? >> if you can find savings that makes a big difference. that's how we score -- >> the stuff that young kids

happens 20 years down the road, there's no numbers way of really making it -- >> yif you can show that it's going to save money and be positive, that's going to be in its favor, but in terms of the actual political moving it, it's very very helpful to have a negative after a policy because then it can pay for some of the other things we like to pay for that have a positive after it. >> that's the main reason we now have dynamic scoring on tax policies. it makes tax cuts easier to pass. you may think it's legitimate. i'm not saying it is or isn't. the main political motivation for beginning to use it was to make tax cuts easier to pass. >> one of the things that you talked about was sort of like we shouldn't oversell the research results, but it's kristen mentioned it's really really difficult to get solid research. you have to wait 30, 40 years,

50 years to know that these things really matter, but we get snippets by understanding the young -- the fetal situation matters a lot, but there are snippets that we piece together. that's not the same as saying we have incredible evidence, but at the same time not doing policies while they may be incredibly helpful because we haven't waited 50 years to say. what should the bar be? how should evidence play in and how good does the evidence have to be for policy to be based on it? >> i think one of the big difficulties is if you create a government program it's difficult to shut it down. if you create a program that doesn't show evidence it's going to continue. that's an issue that conservatives have. if we know it didn't pan it we could turn it off or no longer continue the program, i think you would see more willingness to take risks in this area, but

i think generally the thought is, well, if we do something, it doesn't work, it's never going to end and the spigot will continue going on and we'll add additional programs in the future. >> so are you weighing the probably it will work against the -- >> yeah, there's sort of that general -- >> there are ways to evaluate the level of riggerneorness of evaluation and when you have a good study that does a randomly controlled expirment. what i'm worried about is when you have a close call or when the caveats inside the study are

serious and you don't explain those as you present the results, then i think you undermine the exercise and it's not helpful when people say you didn't explain the detail or you made the impact sound significant when it wasn't. there's definitely a bar. i can't describe what it is, but what i would say is if you don't have it, don't say you do have it. >> i think another -- a couple of challenges here robert's point about i certainly agree that particularly where findings are no the statistically significant, people shouldn't be presenting them as a real finding. by the same token, we know that in the low-income area, if you have an intervention and let's say there's an improvement for kids or employment ten percentage person, the average person say that sounds small. we know in the world of policy

that's a big effect. we have to help people with that. i think one of the really tough things is what happens when we have social science research and policy makers draw -- and the rest of us draw policy conclusions from it and then as the years go by we get more research that sometimes actually goes in the opposite direction. two examples, for years the research scene indicated a lack of lasting effects from head start. now there's newer research that suggests long-term positive effects. the same is true on moving to opportunity, the original results looked disappointing in most respects. the hindrance study has very striking and important positive effects for families with kids under 13 who use the vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. in the area of welfare reform, the academic studies through

2004 and 2005 were a lot more positive than the recent academic studies. i think the political system has some difficulty. it's enough to get people to use studies in the first place and when they start using them and get used to it and the new set of studies come along that go in a different direction, it can take years to get people to get their minds out of the earlier set of studies and they assume that that's still where the evidence base is. >> on the other hand, you can have a series of studies that show limited impact of social interventions or a positive effect of welfare reform and then when he gyou get the one t goes against that, that becomes the most important study ever done. you have to be careful both ways. >> agree. it has to be more than one study when there's lots of studies. >> let me ask a question about what sara documented and whether or not there's basic agreement on both sides of the aisle about the finding that where someone

was born and the family circumstances in which they're born in has enormous impact on their eventual outcome, and earnings and everything else. is there agreement on how true that is? >> i think that -- yeah, everybody sort of agrees with that. >> everybody agrees with that? >> absolutely. i think that -- yes. >> so the disagreement is about -- is the disagreement about the remedies or what the federal role should be in the remedies? >> what i've experienced in observing the debate is that it's both about what are the characteristics of the household that lead to those disparities and whether we should talk about all of them, which includes the absence of another parent or marriage, as well as race, income, neighborhood, community, or just a few of them. as i mentioned anti-inflammatea

important point that people who want to persuade about intervening in the lives of kids, it's important for them to start by including why we need to do this the family issue because when you don't mention the family issue, you've immediately got a representative who is waiting fo ar that. i don't think anyone disagrees that it isn't part of it. just include it. i think there's an agreement -- i think speaker ryan speaks to that. he says in some of his remarks he says it's not right in america that the household in which you grow up in determines the future of your lively hoiho. we have to talk about how we can persuade people on both sides that come together in interventions that reduce those disparities. >> i think this can get complicated and challenging. again, let's take the evidence

synthesized in the paper on income effects on young kids. and the research indicating that particularly for certain kinds of interventions, snap, others, a refundable tax credits, a variety of things, evidence that the added income early in childhood appears to be linked to increased educational attainment in some studies like dianne's in terms of girls who got food stamps early on, increased employment and self sufficient sufficientsy is linked to increased employment and earnings in adulthood. we're going to have a debate this year among other things on importing work requirements into

programs like medicaid, snap and housing programs. the evidence on work requirem t requirements is presented in the sa same auditorium is the biggest effect, not the only effect of those work requirements were lots of sanctions. bob said the larger effect in sanctioning in removing benefits than in increasing work. okay. if put these two pieces together, would this mean that large scale sanctioning by reducing income and potentially increasing tax stress among very poorly young kids could reduce the degree of employment and earnings in adulthood and would the net effect over time be positive or negative. the answer is we don't know. we don't have the kind of data to draw the conclusion of which side would be higher. but the question isn't even

being asked. i really do think that the findings on the long-term effects on kids has barely penetrated into policy debates on capitol hill at this point and a challenge for the years ahead is can it become not the sole determining factor, but a factor amidst a bunch of other factors and other pieces of evidence as we have policy debates. >> i agree it's new and it's -- it is so new the extent to which it's penetrated into congress is understandable in my view, but i also think that it's not part of the discussion. i think it will be part of the discussion and i'm not sure that just the way bob summarized the finding on sanctions was -- i mean, i think the general perception is that the introduction of work expectations in afdc through the reform led to more work, less

receipt of cash welfare and less poverty. >> let's open it up to the audience for questions. the mikes are coming around. george. >> hi. i don't know whether one would consider the tax foundation a provider of research or merely a reporter, but what they're doing is i think of extraordinary importance right now. tax reform, they did a study on the republican plan back in december and all they did was report the numbers with the dynamic scoring and report the numbers without dynamic scoring. i know you were on joint tax. how does one get beyond that kind of nonsense, or is it just something we have to live with?

>> of dynamic scoring? >> yeah, the tax foundation is an example of my skepticism of dynamic scoring because the tax foundation modelled -- we've written a paper about this. the tax foundation model rests on a series of assumptions, some of which are shall we say outside mainstream economics. the scores they get are very different than those cbo tax joints get and those in the tax policy center analysis issued this fall. the range of results under dynamic scoring are so enormous and i think that's because while in concept who could disagree, you want to know the economic effects and if you could actually get good scores on it you would want to use those scores, in reality it's hard to, in my view to trust any particular dynamic scoring when so much depends on the

assumptions underlying the particular model you elect to use to do the dynamic scoring. >> questions? anybody? over there. tell us who you are, please. >> i'm mara winestooeein there a lot of studies that go on in the public so when you have research presented to you in the world that tlooihrives on the twitter version of the as a result, whose onus is it to dive into that information and how do you advise people to go about that? >> anybody? >> i'd say it's probably on the decision maker more than anybody. when i was at ways and means, we spent a lot of time talking with folks on the academic community

and folks on the ground to get a sense of does this actual -- does this academic finding make sense with what other folks are saying. you weigh all of that and try to come to the best possible conclusion. i think the academic is trying to show a change and show something nice and it's our job to make sure it makes sense. >> you could also attest to the importance of institutions like the congressional budget office and the research service. there are a number of reports of thinking in the tax area, but they are in the spending area as well, where they -- >> evaluate. >> evaluate and review research. it's also -- it's not a government agency, but this is another reason i find the urban bookings tax policy center is a critically important institution. we need institutions that do

high-quality work that aren't politically motivated and that people regardless of their political viewpoint can hopefully look to for help in sorting through a lot of complex data and numbers and helping them to evaluate an array of -- a blizzard often of information and sometimes numerous studies that go in different directions. >> terrific. i think we're going to end it now. thank you so very much for participating. thank you. the brookings institution forum ended with a conversation with two members of