the smoke from the weapon youb saw individuals moving toward the potential assailant and i move toward him as well. >> at 8:00, on the presidency, the relationship between thomas jefr sorn aferson and if enslav hemmings family. >> people could be bought and sold. that was a thing that many members of the hemmings family, they always lived with the spector or the possibility that that could happen because the law construed them as property and jefferson construed them as property. >> for the complete schedule, go to c-span.org. now a forum on child poverty programs and whether the u.s. should implement a universal child allowance program. experts look at the pros and cons of existing poverty

programs available to children and their parents. >> welcome to black irookings. along with richard reeves, the gentleman to my right, and i codirect the center here called the center on children and families which we're extremely pleased to do. and we're pleased to be holding this event as well. about an old policy idea which is often called the children's allowance. a species of guaranteed annual income. with some new twists. why would be concerned about the children's allowance, the idea of giving a guaranteed cash benefit to families. and i think there are a lot of reasons but i think two are predominant. one has always been a good reason to do it, and that is it costs a lot of money to raise a child, at least a quarter of a million dollars. the estimates vary greatly.

but it is a lot of money to raise children. and they're the ffew future. without kids we wouldn't have a future. the second is an issue of debate. maybe we'll have some today about that. and that is since welfare reform in '96 there has been an accumulation of, especially single women, but people at the bottom of the income scale who do not have any cash benefit at all. and these families are extremely poor and so forth. so there's a real concern that we need a way to get money to that group of families. of course these are all laid out in the papers and presumably mentioned by various of the participants, both the speakers and the reak tants. so the goal is to make sure that all american families have a cash new york, not just low

income families. but all families. we'll take about this later i'm pretty sure. very good modelling shows that even if you finance by ending the child tax credit and the $4,000 child exemption that there are no lewers. everyone would still have more than they have now especially if the benefit is set around $250 a month. so here's our plan for the event. as soon as i get through talking jane will come up and speak for an hour or so maybe and it will all be very important. so take notes. jane is -- this will take three minutes to tell you her title. centennial proges sore of social work for the prevention of children's and youth problems at columbia. pretty good, huh? good thing i had it written down. and i think it's safe to say for those of you who follow this world that jane is one of the

biggest stars in the world of social policy. truly amazing with is spectacular career. when she finishes we'll turn it over to richard and panel one. they'll talk about the context. richard will share the panel and introduce the speakers at the appropriate time. then we're going to present two plajs for what a child wants, how much it might cost and hopefully we'll say something about offsetting the cost of these plans. and aei, a resident scholar there are chair the panel. and then we're going to conclude the event with two keynote talks, one by robert door of aei whom i'll introduce at the appropriate time and the other k by rosa who will be introduced by jared bernstein and then

we'll have an opportunity for the audience to ask questions for all of the panelists, the speakers and then after the last keynote speak we'll' journ and have some adult beverages and snacks for people who can stay around for a little while. with that, jane. >> thank you, ron. so it's my pleasure to join ron in welcoming all of you here today. we both want to thank the people who supported this conference today. that would be the three poverty pernts, wisconsin, michigan and columbia and the neck foundation. and i hope i haven't forgotten anybody in terms of funders. it looks like i haven't. i also want to thank ron and his staff here at brookings for being such good hosts. they're tremendous to work with in organizing this conference. so this comes at an opportune time. we first began talking about this event a few years ago when we realized that 2017 would be

the 50th anniversary of the first conference on a universal child allowance. some of you may not have been here for that first conference 50 years ago, but there was such a conference, it was held at h.e.w. and organized by our colleagues at social work, evelyn burns and al kann. so we're following up on that earlier conference. already back then in 1967 many of our countries has a universal child allowance. and over the ensuing 50 years, universal child allowances have. become a court element of a modern safety net and one that helped substantially to help reduce the child poverty. austria, denmark, finland, germany, luxeningburg, never lands, norway, sweden and the uk have a universal or near

universal child allowance. providing a cash benefit to all families with children regardless of family income or employment, typically paid monthly, these universal child allowances help protect children from shocks and fluctuations in their parents' employment or income. the level of the allowance, the amount varies by country. in germany and belgium, the benefit for two children is 56 $0 -- $5600 per year np in canada up to $6400 per child under age 6 and up to $5400 for a school age child age 6 to 17 depending on your family income. we know from the uk that expansions of their child allowance and child tax credits in the late 1990s and earlier 2000s helped cut child poverty

in half if measured on a poverty as we do in the united states. the recent canadian reforms are set to do the same. the cut child poverty in half. it's important to note that these allowance amounts are are in addition to the universal health care and the low cost high quality childcare and preschool that these countries provide. they're intended to help cover the cost of other necessities for children. educational goods like books and toys, as well as material goods, housing, food, clothing and even diapers. so when we first started talking about today's conference a few years ago, we thought we would be introducing or maybe reintroducing the idea of a universal child allowance to u.s. policymakers, especially those who weren't around 50 years ago for the first conference. but over the past few years, actually the idea of a universal child allowance has been garnering quite a bit of interest and attention in washington and elsewhere in the

u.s. and from several parts of the political spectrum. today we're showcasing two particularly prominent proposals but there are also others. this seems like an ideal time to come together and talk about the case for a universal child allowance, hear about two current proposals and engage in a discussion of the feasibility, costs and benefits. so thank you all for joining us and let's go into the first session. >> thank you, jane. as ron says i'm the codirector of the center on children and families. i'd like to add my welcome to all of you in the room and also those of you who are joining us on the live web stream. people who weren't able to make it or watching around the country. you're almost as nearly welcome as the people who are physically in the room. those on social media, if you're going to tweet, use the hashtag child allowance to draw more attention to the event.

it's obvious from now that i'm from the uk which jane mentioned and in fact with three children who were being raised in the uk had a universal child benefit for all three of those children. i was then part of the coalition government that removed that universal child benefit by making it not universal for high rate taxpayers as an attempt to save money and shortly after that i left and came to the u.s. i'm not suggesting causality but i am just reporting the facts. we have two presentations and two panelists. you're going to first hear from kathy edin who is sitting two to my right as you look. she is the bloomberg distinguished professor at johns hopkins. seems to write a book every year. one "living on almost nothing in america." she's going to open her

proceedings with a presentation on the problems with the u.s. safety net. after that we're going to hear from bonnie mcloyd who is a clee jat professor of psychology at the university of chicago. these job titles are getting longer for everybody. she's going to present on why money matters. i should have mentioned that she's an associate editor of american sigh koolgs. on your far left is executive director olivia golden, a former fellow of the institute, eight years in the federal government as the children and family services at the u.s. department of health and human services. last an on the far right as you look at the stage, this is purely a physical description, not a political one, ramesh ponnuru. bloomberg panel. a visiting fellow at the

american enterprise institute. with no further adieu, i'm going to hand things over to kathy with her presentation. kathy edin. >> so the 20th anniversary of welfare reform has drawn renewed attention to this landmark piece of legislation passed just a little over 20 years ago. and the question that's come up over and over again is did it succeed or fail. so i live in baltimore and i do so so that i'm not actually inside of the beltway and i ask still think straight. but i've heard this is a city of simple answers. so i'm going to resist the temptation to give one. if by welfare reform we include the broad changes to the safety net we saw in the 1990s and into the 2000s, the extension of the earned tax credit, health insurance for poor children, s.n.a.p., the food stamp program

expanded of course by bush, ii, then i think the answer to the question of whether welfare reform succeeded or failed must be both. so let's talk about the success side of the ledger. i want to point out that i wrote a book about this with others. so i do write optimistic books. it's called "it's not like i'm poor." but in that book we chronicle a remarkable success of the '90 reforms, the expansion of the eitc that made good on the promise that if you work you shouldn't be poor. this is a remarkable achievement and we managed to do it -- this is really the theme of the book -- in a way that virtually consecrated these hard pressed working parents as citizens. so i first sort of caught wind of how profound this change had been when field work took me to

the east boston. i was following around the recipient to figure out how they spent the money. i ended up in east boston. stumbled upon an old building encrusted with 100 years of soot, wire mesh over the windows. both brass letters and carved into the facade of the building were the woods overseers of the public welfare. to me this was such a powerful symbol of the stigma and shamed that accompanied that program. it was almost as if you had to trade away your citizenship to get relief. so imagine my shock when i then went down bennington street and arrived at the local h and r block where of course about 70% of eitc claimants fill out their

tax returns. standing with with my colleaguicolleague i s, people would come out after giving h and r block $200 to file their taxes saying things like, i've got people. or i feel like a real american. even i feel proud to be a taxpayer. now my financial adviser tells me i shouldn't be, you know, paying as many taxes as i am. so i've never really felt proud to be a taxpayer. but these testaments of citizenships were just unexpected and really remarkable in our work. and we didn't just expand the eitc, we also made it easier for children of working parts to stay on medicaid and we made it easier for them to get on s.n.a.p. one of the legacies of the working poor is that of welfare reform is that the working poor are, at least in terms of money,

arguably better off than at any time in american history as long as they work full time full year. okay. that's enough optimism. what about the failure part. of course i like talking about that more. but let me start by saying something about the literature. laura and i have just reviewed all of the literature on welfare reform over the last 20 years for the annual review and it amazing how good it looked at the beginning. right? lots of researches including myself are looking at welfare reform in the '90s. two things were happening that made it optimistic. welfare rolls were falling, dependency was decreasing and labor force attachment was increasing. now, somehow after 2000 researches lost interest in welfare reform expect for a few notable exceptions. we failed to notice that after the late 1990s we no longer saw

this criss cross of trends, that instead two things were going in the same direction. welfare rolls continued to fall and so did labor force participati participation. so here's what we didn't understand about welfare reform. first, it was not a stroke of a pen. instead it was a dynamic force. now there are two features that led to that dinism. first, we ended the entitlement. second, we gave it to states as in the form of a block grant with little oversight. now, we all like to think of states as laboratories of democracy, myself included. innovation can be very good. but instead it became -- and i'm going to use a strong term here purposefully -- really almost an opiate for the states. an ir resistible flexible fundig

stream to use the citizen's term. i call it a slush fund because i like to call a spade a spade. but, you know, when governors wanted to give goodies away, they couldn't afford like michigan's scholarship program, there was the block grant. when states found themselves needing to fill budget holes -- this happened i believe just last year in south carolina with expenditures on child welfare. there was tannive. and states governors could also look good by giving more help, sort of piling on to this help for those noble working poor. and in this end what we've seen is a virtual collapse of the n tannif program. in every state of the nation it is only a shadow of its former self and we've essentially seen this rising inequality among the

poor. the second thing we didn't understand is that the '90s economy, the late '90s economy wouldn't last forever. it remains true that today's bad jobs are just much much worse than the bad jobs of the late 1990s when welfare reform was looking so good. there's now a rising literature on the fis suring of the workforce. in and out of the labor market now rather than stably either in or either out. so let's look at a few pictures. this is the decline in the tannive caseload among eligibles. as you can see it's quite stark. but what i want to point out, in our field work you may know that luke and i wrote a book last

year called "two dollars a day, the rise of the number of americans living on virtually nothing in america" and this was both an exercise of numbers and ef nothing fi. but we were following people over months and years in this situation. we were struck by the fact that when hard times came, in most cases it didn't even occur to people to knock at tannive's door. tannive was dead in the imaginations of the poor. here's how states are spending their tanf dollars. what we see is a die version by states. very little expended for work related activities. and the largest single category of course for other areas, oftentimes to fill budget holes or forgovern governors to give goodies. so there's less to the poorest, right.

this is really is store of of welfare reform. less to the poorest. more toe what my colleague robert calls the shallow poor and to the near poor. so in some we've seen a reconfiguring of a safety net. and laura and i in our and review piece argue that this is a redrawing of the line of deserve edness with work as the new litmus test for citizenship. now this has led to harsh consequences among the poor. we see the rise in extreme poverty. these are figures from the cps, you know, our original estimates were point and time estimates. these are from the cps. the reason we use the cps is because you can correct at least somewhat for underreporting. you may rale in the original we reported a doubling in poverty. here you see an increase of three times. now if we limit or estimates

just to single mothers, those most likely to be affected by welfare reform, we see a much larger increase from 900,000 to -- 90,000 to 700,000 in 2012. if you don't believe surveyings we can turn to s.n.a.p. data. these are the number of s.n.a.p. house holds reporting they have literally zero income when they apply for s.n.a.p. or go back for recertification. i will say something about this chart. when we plot this against our original estimates of the income and program participation, there is an eerie correspondence between this line and our estimates, especially at the end of the series. when what you see from the food stamp program is much more dire than what our estimates indicate. so what could be going on there. and i showed that slide in an

audience where herb and waldfogel were and they immediately said that's got to be child homelessness. since 2004 states have been required, schools have been required to report on the number of students that are either homeless or unstably housed. and we see that when states were kind of more or less reliably reporting there has been a huge -- we'll come back to this in a minute. so does it matter? does it matter that the cash safety net has all by collapsed in many of our states? my friend and former, i think former student but maybe didn't quite overlap says, look at all of this medicaid. right? robert rector said well the poor have cell phones. now ray mccormack from $2 a day

actually has medicaid but it doesn't pay for many of her medications. and she has a cell phone. i hear from her almost every day. how do we think about that given the fact that she had no heat this winter. how do we think about that when we consider the fact that her lights and her water were routinely cut off. her daughters turned 6 five days before christmas. ray had no money for a cake nor did she get any christmas or birthday presents from her family. how do we think of these two things together. and i argue that it's actually important to do that. i think these are food questions to be asking. i put it to you that we cannot adjudicate these claims unless we turn to direct measures of well-being like student homelessness. others that might be important are low birth weight, out of

home placements and food security and so on. but when luke and i looked into the data, we used state by years effects. i had to practice that even more than i had to practice my title. we found that for every hundred case decline in the tanf caseload within a state we saw 16 more kids homeless or unstably housed. a little taste of that well-being research. now tanf may be dead, but that's all the more reason to consider other ways to get a cash floor under our most vulnerable and least culpable citizens. our children. thank you. >> thank you kathy. our next bonnie who is going to speak on why money matters.

it should just come straight up to you, bonnie. there you go. >> the issue of why money matters to children's development is best addressed by the voluminous body of research on the effects of poverty and economic stress on children's development. this research is informed by three perspectives. the first focusing on investment, the second focusing on family stress and the third focusing on environmental stress. i want to try to present some major findings relevant to each of these perspectives and i want to encompass findings from correlation of research as well as experimental research. experimental research where individuals are assigned randomly to control or experimental or treatment groups

is critically important in estimating the extent in which the association of family income and child outcomes is causal. but these studies have a problem that they often tell us very little about the processes that are involved in that relationship. whereas correlation research has the opposite limitation in that it often -- it's purposefully focused on trying to understand the processes that account for the link between income and children's development. but of course the limitation of these studies is that they are susceptible to biosees from unmeasured family and parent characteristics as well as biases by direct nal influences of children on their parents. the most vigorous correlation of research, and research i give most weight to my many i overview using look tuesday nal

desins, controls for come founding parent characteristics and controls for the initial level of the outcome variable. so the investment perspective essentially arguing that children from poor families lag behind their economically counterparts in terms of their cognitive development and achievement in part because their parents have fewer resources to invest in them. they're less able to purchase books and educational materials at home. high quality childcare and other associated with cognitive and development academic achievement. the economically disadvantaged parents may have less time to invest in their children because they're more likely to have nonstandard work hours and less

flexible work hours. all of these factors have the effect of reducing parent child contact. so what do we know about -- what is the -- not experimental longitudinal research tell us. i'll be brief. there are robust links between family income, quality of the child's home environment and cognitive functioning. and there's very strong evidence that the link between income and children's cognitive functioning is mediated through home environment. the level of cognitive stimulation in the home. so there are many many studies that document these links. correlation of research. what's perhaps more important and what i want to emphasize is what we have -- the evidence that we have from experimental

research. experimental research does point to causal effects of family income during early childhood on children's academic achievement. so there were many welfare and ant poverty experiments in the united states in the 1990s and some of those experiments were experimental earning supplement programs. and those programs, without exception, increased children's academic achievement. but again we don't know from those studies what the mediating processes are. so these are studies that had random assignment, treatment and control groups and we consistently see that those children who are in families that had earnings supplements that brought the earnings of the family -- the income of the families above poverty level had subsequent increases in their academic achievement.

we also have some evidence from q quasi experiment. suggesting causal effects of income on children's school achievement. i think here's a case where you can begin to make causal statements, even when families are not randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. so we saw increases in low income children's achievement and educational attainment coinciding with increases in the eitc. likewise in canada, when family income increased due to an increase in the child tax credit, low income children's math and vocabulary scores increased. so i think -- i think it's very clear that there is a causal link between income and

children's cognitive development and their achievement outcomes. the other thing i want to emphasize, because it's relevant to the proposal that we'll be discussing today, is that there is pretty strong evidence that the timing of family economic conditions matters, such that economic conditions prior, experienced prior to the age of 5 compared to economic conditions experienced after the age of 5 are strongly associated with children's schooling, academic outcomes, adult earnings and adult hours -- work hours during adulthood. so economic conditions seem to be much more important for children's outcomes when we're looking at economic conditions that existed prior to the age of 5. and these stronger effects of income in early childhood are

consistent of growing evidence that the developing brain is more sensitive to environmental inclfluences in the first few years of life and they're consistent with the idea that early skills provide a key foundation for later skill acquisition. let me turn to the family stress perspective. the second perspective. this perspective essentially says family income matters because of the impact that it has on children's economic -- children's parents mental health functioning, tim pahe impact it on marital and co-parents relationships and ultimately the impact that it has on the quality of parenting. so from this perspective, children living in families with inadequate income and unstable income are more likely to experience internalizing

externalizing problems through these cascading processes whereby insufficient or unstable income creates economic pressure as parents struggle to pay bills. these economic pressure creates psychological distress in parents that spills over into marital and co-parenting relationships leading to lower quality parenting distinguished by harsh punitive inconsistent and detached parenting that in turn creates social yo emotion difficulties for the child. i would say in general that there is stronger more consistent support for these direct links articulated by this family stress model than there is for the entire mediation nal process hypothesized by the model. secondly i want to emphasize that the amount of family income generally is more strongly related to children's cognitive

development and academic achievement than it is to children's socioemotional development. we also know that decreases in family income and unstable income is linked to a whole host of negative outcomes. greater psychologic distress among parent bs, disruptions in family routines, decreases in cognitive stimulation in the home, increased school absences et cetera. terms of experimental research, again, referring to the experimental earnings sunment program in the u.s., some of those programs improve children's positive behavior and reduce behavioral problems, some but not all. in contrast to the effect that these programs had on children's academic functioning, all of them had positive effects on children's academic functioning. and in terms of the, what we

know about mediating processes, the experimental earnings supplement programs, some of them had positive effects on chirp's positive behavior and reduced behavioral problems, they don't tell us much, anything really that -- about what mediated those effects. there was no consistent evidence that parent well-being, parenting practices are family relations mediated these effe s effects. next i want to move to environmental stress perspective. essentially this perspective is a broad er view of stress. the family stress model has been criticized for focusing just on family stress. critics say, you know, poor children inhabit physical settings that are problematic in

many ways they are exposed to a daunting array of stressful conditions, not just family conflict but food and security, dangerous neighborhoods, inadequate housing, poor childcare, high levels of noise, high levels of crowding. they're exposed to these stressful conditions and stressful events. and these stressful events are often contagioucontagious. one stressor leads to another leads to another. so the environmental stress perspective formulated by development sigh kolgs and neuro scientists is seen as a krekive to narrow focus on family stress. in this broader perspective holds that family income matters to children's health and development because it affects the level of exposure that children have to chronic psychosocial and physical stress. we have -- in terms of evidence

from not experimental research, we see significant links between family income, stress exposure and sew psychosocial indicators. we're seeing more and more evidence of these links. so one of the -- two of the kind of links that i want to make a comment about is stress processes that are linked to poverty include detrimental changes in the body's hormonal responses to prolonged stress and immune and aging processes. so we're beginning to understand how poverty in the words of some of our students gets under the skin. so we now know for example that boys who grow up in highly disadvantaged environments, that are distinguished by poverty and low maternal education have sho shorter than boys who grow up in

environments. tell lameres are the caps on the end of dna and protect the chrome zoosoosome chromosomes. accelerated shortening is used as biomarker of exposure to lifetime stress. we also know from this research that cumulative stress exposure is a mediator of the link between poverty and children's psychosocial adjustment. we have some work from some experiment experimental, quasi intermentexl research suggesting that are is causal effects of income on infant child and physical health. in the u.s., increases in state eitcs have been associated with improvement in birth outcomes. we see similar data coming from canada.

it's unclear whether additional income in the case of birth outcomes made a difference because it was used -- the extra money was used for nutritious food because it reduced the stress created by economic pressure or because of other reaso reasons. so we don't have as much research on the environmental stress perspective, but i think that is where, you know, the research is moving. i want to summarize points here. experimental and causal experimental research points to causal effects of income on children's academic achievement. links between family income and children's cognitive development and academic achievement are due in part to differences in the provision of cognitive stimulation in the home. within family improvements. that is the same family, longitudinal research shows the famili same family when they have extra

income we see a correspondent increase in the quality of the home environment. suggesting that low income parents use quote extra money in part to improve the quality of the home learning environment. decreasing in family income are linked to various negative outcomes as i said. okay. so i'm going to stop there. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> now we have two respondents who are going to offer some brief comments en, i'll moderate a brief discussion among the panel before i throw it out to you. is olivia lifve? >> can you hear me? >> is her mike up? i think you can go. >> it's an honor to be here with this sbroointo panel. i'm going to try to make five

points in my five minutes. but there are dozens more things i want to say so please ask great questions. number one is that it feels to me like a particularly important moment to have a panel that's focusing on the vulnerability of children, particularly young children. children are the poorest americans, about one in five young children the poorest within that group. children are the most likely to be people of color of all age groups of americans, so facing lots of other barriers and developmentally as you heard in the last presentation, young children in particular but all children are at a particularly vulnerable point. and they're at particular risk right now in proposals from the administration and from the congress like the repeal of health reform and the president's proposals for 2018. so wonderful to focus on that. second, i would say that the idea of cash or of a child allowance is an important piece of a solution.

but particularly at levels of 2,000, $3,000 a child in the u.s. context, different from any other countries, it will never be more than a piece perhaps a modest piece of the solution. and i say a couple of headlines about that. one is that we have a growing body of research about how central medicaid in particular as well as s.n.a.p. nutrition benefits, earned income tax credit have been to children's well-bei well-being. and you heard some of that in the last presentation. medicaid and the affordable care act both, because of the importance to children of their own health coverage and because of the importance of covering parents and addressing their mental health and health needs. research is showing, for example, long run effects not just on child health but also on income in school completion years later. the other reason why cash is only a piece of the solution is that many of the crucial supports that children need

developmentally like health and housing and childcare that i'm going to talk about in a moment can't easily be averaged out to a dollar figure. the family that has modest health care needs and is healthy, the family that has a job that is coincides with school compared to the family that needs full-time infant childcare at $16,000 or high impact health costs. third point is that fixing low wage work has to be part of the solution too. and kathie alluded to this. the extent to which low wage work has gotten worse. one of the facts that often surprises people when i report it from the poverty statistics is that about 70% of poor children live in a home with a worker. so they're poor because of too low wages, because of too few hours or because of intermittent work or a combinatiocombination. raising the minimum wage, paid sick days so parents don't get

fired for staying home with a child are all central to the solution. fourth, i would pull out two areas where i think we ought to concentrate particularly based on the developmental evidence and the gaps we have right now and those are childcare and early education and housing. you saw kathy's chart about homelessness, the national statistics about homelessness show that the single most likely year to be homeless is between birth and age 1. which when you think about the vulnerability of young children, instability is extraordinary. concentrating on those where we now reach 1 in 6 eligible kids childcare. crucial. and finally i want to highlight that ron made the proposal that what we should be thinking about is all american children. about a quarter are of american children today have at least one immigrant parent. and within that group a bit more, about a third, 5 million,

live in homes with mixed status families. one or more citizen children and parents who are not. those children are at risk from a whole set of policies right now that are endangering their access even to health and nutrition that they're completely legally entitled to. when we go to cash solutions like the child tax credit, it becomes even more important to protect those children's access so that their parents who want to be able to pay taxes are able to pay them and have the benefits go to citizen children. otherwise we won't achieve what we're trying to achieve in terms of the improvement of the circumstances of a very large chunk of low income familiefami. thanks. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you so much everyone for being so efficient in your use of time. no pressure, ramesh. >> thank you for having me here.

i didn't realize it was the 50th anniversary of previous conference on the same topic. i would like ron and katherine to know that i am available on may 1st, 2067 should we need to reconvene, which i have a kind of depressing premonition that we may well have the same conversation. i wanted to make two main points. and one of them is admittedly not going to be even slightly helpful. and that is that although we're going to hear some great proposals, have a lot to be said for them, there is a broader context about having -- the importance of having a tight labor market that is just so vitally important because it's sort of harder to get your arms around, sometimes we let it slip out of our minds. but it really is crucial. over the last few decades i

believe we've had a full employment economy, something like a third or less of the time. and you know, we just make much much more rapid progress in periods when you've got those tight labor markets. while it may not be directly on point, i do think it's very important -- it has implications for everything, monetary policy to immigration to -- and we've got to keep that in mind when we think about macro economic policy, we're thinking about anti-poverty policy. the other thing i've just been thinking about, especially since i'm a political journalist rather than an expert in any of these social science trends is the political context right now and whether there's an opening for addressing some of these issues. and it does seem to me that there is a small such opening. and that is the conversation that is currently taking place about childcare. and particularly we've got a president who campaigned on the

idea of expanding help for people who are trying to balance work and family. i think that the proposals that the trump campaign came out with more deeply flawed in the sense of you know not being thought through at all. but to look at that optimistically, that means there is an opportunity to fill in and rewrite some details in a more productive way. i think that the starting point of the conversation has essentially been it's so hard to find good nannies in manhattan and that it could be useful to broaden this conversation to include low income people where i think you've -- and middle income people where you've got more serious needs. and then the second thing that

is notable about trump's proposal is that he did talk about allowing state-at-home mothers to have the same benefits as women who were working. and i think that that too pushes in the direction of something like a cash benefit program that just benefits all parents of children. again, i think it's a very small opening. one never knows how seriously any particular trump proposal is meant. but i think that if you're going to have any positive movement over the next couple of years, what you do is try to talk about a pro-child welfare proposal that addresses child poverty and can be fit into the idea of satisfying the president's campaign rhetoric. >> thank you very much. [ applause ]

>> your right collar is being pulled up. we have a massive audience out there. i want you to look your best. okay. we have a little bit of time for me to interrogate or to bring some of these ideas together. and then we'll pretty quickly move out to the audience. thank you all for your comments. i see this session has been about what's the problem that the other sessions are going to come on to. we're going to try to stay in that space as much as possible. i will note that the moment that jared bernstein walked in the room, talk about importance of tight labor markets and the economy, i just want to say i wish i could have that effect on poli policy. just by walking in the room to have that kind of magic. so let's start actually almost where kathy started and get the reactiction from the panel.

you said tanf has collapsed, the block granting led to a slush fund and you said that tanf is dead. and given it's basically dead, that's a great time for us to talk about the universal cash allowance given the collapse of cash welfare. first question, is that a fair summary of your view. and secondly, how much of that was about the block granting to the states? if that hadn't been part of the welfare from the beginning, and i know many who were involved have worried about that, i'm looking a at ron, therefore what cousin that mean in terms of how we look at the design and then i'll get the panel's response. can you start with that? >> the latest figures don sent me, we have $750,000 adults in the roles. if you count people who are just being covered, there are 3.8 million adults and children on the roles. i don't mean this in a strict

numerical sense. i mean anytime a sense that welfare really has died in the imaginations of many of the poor when they hit hard times. it's not the go-to program. it's not something that even occurs to many people. many of the people we followed have never heard of the program which seems unconceivable to us. was it because of the riots? if you had kept the entitlement you wouldn't have seen the trends. what block grants do though, is a, they decrease in value over time. right? and b, you know, if they're not monitored, states often have to make tough tradeoffs and they're an easy target. >> olivia, to you. >> as the person whoed a m ed a administered the tanf program, i did a short essay on what i've

learned. you can kind it on our website for the shriver's centers journal and op-ed usa today. i would highlight a couple of things and then make one more point of what has changed besides tanf. the first thing i would say is that i think the block grant in retrospect -- i didn't think this at the time -- was a huge part of the problem because correct me if i'm wrong has failed to increase it. it's gone down by 30% of value. so i think it's completely appropriate to blame states. texas reaches fewer than ten -- something like 5% of eligibles. california still has a program, reaches over 60%. that's about state choices. but it's important to blame the federal choice that for 20 years there was no additional investment. and from my perspective it's very important to see that in proposals to block grant as they come up right now. i think that that is important. the second -- and not to be fooled because at the beginning

what looked positive about tanf is it looked as though there were quote boat loads of money to invest in childcare and work training because in fact the block grant was initially set at a higher level. so the grants inherently fool you. the second thing i would say is i think it's important to highlight the other big changes over those 20 years. and i highlighted the changes in the low wage labor market so it's much harder for parents -- parents are working at hugely greater rates but it's very difficult for them to support kids. the changes in who kids are. they're disproportionately children of color and therefore facing a wide array of additional barriers. and then on the positive side, as kathy noted, many other supports for those families which have contributed in important ways to well-being but which have gotten stuck. so that important pieces like housing and childcare have gotten stuck. and the huge improvements under

the health care legislation are at risk. i would put all of those pieces out there. >> if we could guarantee there wouldn't be an guarantee there would not be this erosion of value -- you think it's inevitable. >> yes. >> so the block grants are -- >> yes. that's how i've changed my mind since 20 years uh-uh go because i've seen it. >> okay. any additional comments on block grants and these sorts of spaces? the dangerers of block grants? >> no, not specifically. just on the general question of sort of what we see as the dimension the problem, and particularly what we think of the state of tanf and so forth. look, i think scott winship is going to be the panel and have a very different perspective on it. i foumd his view of poverty

trends per suasive when i read it. i would go from these things aren't working better to the conclusion we don't need to do anything additional. because i do think there's a lot we can still do on child poverty and some of these proposals people are talking about even if you take the more upt mystic view. >> bonny, i wanted to come back to some of your comments and link them to olivia's points. i think mostly you were focusing on children. i think that's the way of looking it at the case for this kind of intervention. and so first of all i just want to check who that was and an appropriate summary and invite you to thing about the alternative ways you can spend the money. if you're interested in child outcomes and you've got a certain amount of money to

spend, then it becomes an empirical question, doesn't it? whether to give cash to the family or whether to improve schooling or pre-k or parenting program or create more subsidized work. so think about cathy's point in the pride people have in work. and y i think that speaks to olivia's words about housing. so your case was money matters but the other point should be make money matter lez in a sense of reducing the connection in some of these other services. you may have a more powerful eeffect, and i say may, than transferring money dollar for dollar. as you say it takes a lot, $3,000 to move the standard deviation of a test score by a fifth. i don't know if thaet a good return, but you might say you

could spend that money $3,000 in a way that could get something bigger for the child. >> well, i can't point to any definitive research that addresses that question. 1 point that has been made by people is that the advantage of cash is that cash is fungible. and therefore one can use it in ways that's responsive to the needs of particular families. so i think that i'm persuaded that the fungibility of cash has some advantage. and there's some evidence that earnings supplements and income are more effective than, let's say, as one study i think was

cited in one of the papers that i read is more effective in improving health than medicaid, for example. so i think there are -- it would be useful to have a better sense of what the research sesz about that. but i think on the face of it, there are advantages to cash benefits. >> they can choose how to spend. okay, cathy. >> so what we found in our work is that without a cash floor the income benefits become very inefficient. for example, as she mentioned earlier, she is about to have a surgery. she has now gotten back on medicaid bought cannot afford her medications. and she only takes the medications that are covered. so imagine what this looks like for someone's health profileb

over time. so imagine if it's not delivering the big bang for the buck it's because she doesn't have this cash floor. >> so the floor would probably be your point. >> right. so the other finding i think about that is there is this overuse of incline benefits and overuse of things that will lep advance various outcomes that are not being met. so when people have cash income benefits they may use those and other needs end up not being met. >> i would say the diversity of family needs, the fungibility and increased possibility of rent seeking with inclined benefits. all in my mind combine to a very powerful presumption of cash rather to incline benefits. i think it's a presumption that ought to be there.

>> i think it's mutt makes the politics very interesting. i think it is partly because there are people in the center saying i want to do it through subsidies and that's the child care, that's the house, that's whatever, whereas left and right and different kinds say that's the money and you can choose how to use it. so the politics of this aren't straightforward. >> to me the evidence -- >> you were talking a lot about services. >> yeah, i think that in the end the answer is going to have to be combination, right? children and families will not benefit if they can't get healthcare or they get evicted baz they have a little bit of cash but it doesn't solve those problems. but to me where you start is partly about the world at that poemt. and right now the core

healthcare benefit is threatened so protecting that is next and making it be more effective. and i actually feel very worried about the threats to housing. it's hard for me hi think about the developmental research to think about the worse thing for a baby than being evicted. so i think that's central. if along the way there came a moment you could get the refundable children's tax credit without facing at the same time with huge cut in public revenues without the huge tax will bill, of course i'd seize it. and two other quick things. one is that many of the proposals, the way they spread dollars out that i think trade-offs i think are important to talk about is initiatives that are universal or near universal are obviously spending a great deal of money on middle and high income families. and because inquality among children is so important, that's

a great. it would not be cut medicaid and give somebody a child allowance. it will be consider whether you need to focus on what's nearly half of children who are growing up below twice the poverty level. i mean we face a situation we're not investing enough in total in your future because we haven't responded to how insecure half of families with kids are. >> so you worry a little bit about the universal side of the dollar allowance in some ways not being the best of used resources because it's not going to the people that need it. that's a fair summary. i just want to des a quick question about the early years part of it. 0 to 5 is where a lot of action is. i just wanted to invite everyone on the panel to kind of reflect on how far up the age range such an allowance might go, where we should be focusing on resources

and where there's a case for a different allowance or specific case in those early years. given everything i heard, it's a strong case just the same. maybe university, i don't know know for various reasons. cathy, why don't you go first? >> yes, i'd like to go to housing. we have a quarter of all eligible families in the united states have a housing subsidy. but most of those families were on a list for years and years. or the lift opened up briefly and they win the lottery. and so young children are vulnerable not only because they're young but because the housing burden oer chb on their parents is most likely to be high. >> any thoughts on this whether it should be focused on the early year for young children. >> i think there should be an

allowance for younger children. but i'm not going to throw out on something else. i think that we need to start by improving what we've got. >> yeah, i certainly wouldn't propose that there not be a child allowance for children over 6. i would say that i think there's support for having a larger child allowance from 0 to 6 or 0 partly because of income of parents or children this age tends to be lower because they're younger. they have less work history, et cetera, et cetera. so taking that into account, that is the increased stress that parents with children this age are under in addition to the fact that the economic conditions for children under age 5 seem to be more important to their long-term outcomes.

for me, that would suggest a child allowance that is graduated. >> like a step -- >> yeah, yeah. >> and just want to invite everybody on wednesday by doing a session precisely on what's the right set of solutions from cradle to kindergarten. and the title of the book. and i would say that across the whole portfolio solutions, we need to look at the lot of unique birth to 5 solutions and the extraordinary difficulty of maintaining low wage work while also caring for a baby or toddler. to me that doesn't necessarily have an implication in the dollar aamount of the child allowance, but it does mean its a different portfolio of strat agency wheres and we need to pay a lot of attention. >> very good. we need to open up questions. one is that in the uk it's very different to take out a means

benefit and then have a means testing in the poor. so it does have a very political field to it. i'm not saying not the right or wrong thing to do. it's different to just saying only poor people can prove their poverty in some way get it. i think we're all well aware this is not necessarily an imminent legislative achievement. i can say that because there are lots of more pressing concerns, and i think olivia's mentioned a couple. the spirit here having good and broad ideas from the political side of the spectrum is very important as we go forward. so i think that's the spirit certainly of this session. and there are microphones. would you mind bringing it to this lady here? anybody else. >> good morning. thank you very much. it is expensive to be poor. and i wonder if the likes of you

all perhaps mean to do more to underscore that if you live in downtown baltimore the freshest place to get milk may be a liquor store or 7-eleven. but if you live north is you get to go to costco. so i would suggest to you all that people seem to think that poor people are poor because they don't manage things right. and in fact it's arguable that it is because in their environment whether it's rent or food, things are more expensive. and that if you're upper middle class in an upper middle class area, you actually spend less on food than they do. so i feel again, you can tell me i'm wrong, to all these people i'm wrong, but it is expensive to be poor.

and maybe like the pred basket thing that used to happen in the '70s with inflation, that someone goes out on the 3 bus line in baltimore and buys formula, diapers, milk, i don't know what and then goes and buys it somewhere else and compare. thank you. >> thank you. well, i'm going to tell you you're right just in case someone else says you're wrong. when we think about income poverty we tend to focus on the income side and not on the poverty side. the cost of credit, the cost of telephone communications, the cost of transport and so on is something we don't spend enough time on. one of the reason we do spend time on them in these political debates is because you might be able to build a coalition around it. the market isn't working well enough for one reason or

another. so there are market solutions that will lower the cost. with that, i just wanted to say i think you're right. now to see if everyone sees if you're right. >> i think there is absolutely, we've been talking about the poor pay more for decades. and this idea of left, right coalitions i do think the cost of housing particularly in some regions of the country is something we have seen more attention to from liberals and conservatives as something that could be tackled. but there are serious political economy problems standing in the way of addressing those problems. >> i want to emphasize this point. i start my career hanging out with folks who are poor and talking to them about their budgets and what is amazing to me is how skilled many poor people are at economic survival. be did a study for the usda

looking at 90 food stamp households. and the degree to the skill involved managing a food stamp budget is astonishing. it's kind of like a regular thing that happens to folks who do what i do. how can they -- you're so amazing at budgeting for food. but two siologists, what they've clued us into is there's a huge tax on one's cognitive bandwidth for doing that. so the space taken up for surviving is there a depth to one's cognitive load. and it's much harder on foe focusing on tasks that may lead from poverity. >> i would just add that the costs of being poor is exacerbated if you're african-american. and i don't know about latino but the research certainly

suggests that race exacerbates that problem. >> and i would like to add i also agree and say that another thing that exarbaits is the disproportionate share of poor people and black and latino people of working in low wage jobs in the rigidity of time. so it's both that things cost money and the ability to get somewhere, to buy on the sale or whatever it is is sharply constraining by the ways in which you lose your job or docked pay. >> thanks, two questions actually. the first is do you have any data or explanations for why given how kpengs was it is to raise children, why poor people would actually have kids, why they would add that stress

there. why not provide a the for dollar tax credit to tax preparers hooactually prepare money so they have a very -- >> very quit on the mike. i got the first one. >> essentially rather than having a subsidized program when you're providing people money to whatever, why not have taxpayers provide funds directly and give them sort of credit or tax deduction? >> very good, thank you. sole we be a couple of minutes left for the panel. so please don't feel you will have to answer both of those questions. but please do if you want and then any time thoughts. because this is probably our last round before we have to close our panel. >> on the first one there had been dramatic reductions in birthrate interest poor people and particularly young teenagers and young adults.

so there have been reductions in birthrate, inkreegss in work force participation. the way i think of it is families doing everything they can do. the problem is the market and public framework isn't supporting them in raising kids. i'm going to leave the second question to others. but the other thing i would say is these kids are our future. if we didn't have them, we would be an aging society like japan. so the fact that half of children are in struggling households where there's a lot of work but they're below twice the poverty level, it would be better for us if those families were more economically secure. but it would not be better for us if we had only highly aging well-off population no longer in an age range to have kids and fufewer kids. so for my% spective the kids are crucial to our future.

>> so -- or pass. >> well, i think children bring great enjoyment to parents. >> most of the time. >> most of the time. >> that's the most controversial thing anyone has said so far. >> but parenting is an emotional experience. you enjoy your children but they also drive you crazy. >> it's not just a financial decision, in other words. >> no, it's not. and that's probably a good thing. what? >> what? >> [ inaudible ]. >> yeah, it's very interesting. >> i've written a book on this topic asking people why they have children. and i wrote an essay with cristmer jinx a couple of years

ago called "do poor people have a right to bear children." so pretty much to your point we do see that children are key source in leading identity and closely linked to prosocial behaviors. and we know that men who parent see a lower rate of active testosterone and lower social behavior. what what we argue in the essay is that in a world where if you play by the rules you still can't afford a child, that is world that is irresponsible to you. and that's what's happening is that they are playing by the rules to the best of their ability, but they still cannot afford to bear children. and we argue that they have the right to do so. >> okay. >> so on that second question which i'm going to reformulate on why not tax reduction instead

of spending programs, is my answer. and i think in particularly the payroll tax relief is something we ought to explore. but we have of course tax deduction for people who give to organizations that combat poverty. and we should think about changing some of those. i think it makes a certain amount of sense to convert that into a credit, a flat credit that doesn't depend on your income for the value of that detukz. and i think that's a very important part, actually, of the american safety net. but it can't be of course the entirety of it. >> we're now how we want to design central policy and what the proes and cons of that would be. it's almost as we planned it. we are tweeting at #childallowance. we will have a five minute break. pleasene