particularly our soldiers in the u.s. army. they sacrifice a lot. they spent sometimes and some hostile conditions and they want to know it makes a difference. and it makes a difference when you know you are helping soldiers on the battlefield. you're helping make soldiers better prepare for their mission. ultimately, there are some son daughter, wife, husband of a gun safe because of the things you did at fort ap hill. host: colonel john petkosek is commander of the asymmetric warfare group. thank you for your time. guest: we also want to thank fort ap hill for hosting us. the video work -- we want to thank them as well. that is it for "washington journal" today. another episode comes 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> covering several senate hearings on the c-span networks today starting with defense secretary ashton carter and the outgoing chief martin dempsey. they will become about the pentagon budget. our live coverage picking up in about half an hour 10:30 eastern on c-span. right now -- a hearing on technology and seniors living independently. that is that 2:00. also, on c-span 3, labor laws and the seafood industry. is that 2:30 p.m. eastern. the new congressional directory is a handy guide to the 114th congress with color photos of every sender and house number,

plus i'll and contact information, and twitter handles. also, district maps, a full dot map of capitol hill, and a look at congressional committees, the and state governors. order your copy today. it is $13.95 through the c-span store at c-span.org. >> the pentagon budget hearing coming up at 10:30 eastern this morning. in the meantime, a portion of "washington journal. host: we are back. a roundtable discussion about interstate poverty. i am joined by michael tanner and ross eisenbrey vice , president of the economic policy institute to talk about the issue. ross eisenbrey, let me begin with you. let's look back a little bit before we talk about what is happening today. what happened to inner cities in

the country? guest: there are two things that are very important. one is the industrialization and the other is racial segregation. because we really have two different stories within most american cities, a story about what has happened to african-americans and what has happened to the rest of the population. let me start with housing and how that affected lack people. -- black people. we have a long history and baltimore is a great example where they have, in the 1920's, the mayor set up a council and segregation committee, a neighborhood association set up to keep black people out of white neighborhoods and to keep them in pockets of very dense, poor black population. they were segregated into essentially a ghetto. because they were in that situation, when the great wealth

expansion in the united states occurred after world war ii, they were left out of it. they could not get mortgages because they were redlined. there were exclusionary zoning practices in the suburbs that kept them out of the suburbs. they couldn't get federal insured mortgages because the federal government actually told mortgage companies and realtors that they could not give them to black people. they were absolutely excluded. their ability to buy a home and get the wealth that goes with home ownership was blocked. that continues today. the impact in that. the children of those people in the 1940's and 1950's, did not acquire wealth. they -- they did not inherit

wealth and they are still in very segregated neighborhoods where they are poor. host: we will dive into that a little more, but michael tanner, what do you think? guest: i agree with most of that, but i also think we have to include the fact that there (202) 748-8003 was an enormous fight of the middle class out of the city that the ways in the 1960's and 1970's. particularly in the wake of the right on the art with the king's assassination. the white middle class largely fled and the black middle class followed the not too much longer and you ended up with higher taxes in the city and it drove the middle class to the suburbs, where they found less crime, lower taxes and a better quality of life in terms of schools. what you ended up with in cities like baltimore is a concentration of a small group of people in the tourist and wealthy areas and large segments of poverty, which are sort of walled off the rest of the community. host: ross eisenbrey, what did the government do and how has the government responded? what has worked and failed in

your opinion? guest: what michael said about white flight is right, but i used to think it was a question of whites on their own got up and left the city partly because the cities were increasingly black and white people did not want to be with lack people and they left. i grew up in the detroit area, which lost almost all of its white population and was losing it long before the riots in detroit. it was a huge decline in the white population because they were able to move to the suburbs where jobs are being created. factories were being built not in the inner cities but out in the suburbs where land was cheap. and the federal government was financing their mortgages. was ensuring their mortgages and -- insuring their mortgages and making a possible for them --

impossible for them to buy out -- possible for them to buy out there but not possible for black people. the federal government encourage the segregation and it has never done anything to track it. all of the programs you can think of, if they don't address that core problem of poor people without any wealth being segregated into a tight area of the city, if you don't deal with that problem, you will never solve the problem. guest: the one thing this government did is there a lot of money at the problem. at the start of 1965, we poured money into the inner cities and finding it generally. we spent some $22 trillion since 1965. last year alone, the federal government spent about 688 billion dollars, 120 plus different antipoverty programs state and federal government spent about $300 billion more. between 2003 and 2013, baltimore got $6 billion in federal funding, plus an additional $1.8

billion in stimulus money, plus the individual welfare payments that went into people living in those communities. we have known money at the problem. what we have done through that is we have made poverty of bit less uncomfortable. we have given people food, done away with malnutrition, but we have not enabled people to get out of poverty. what we have not been able to do is allow people to rise up the economic ladder. what we found is that simply giving people money is not the answer to those types of solutions. host: why not? why is there not economic opportunity you are talking about? guest: number one, no jobs. if you look at unemployment in baltimore and areas of low income, where freddie gray was arrested, the unemployment rate there is around 50%. that is an area that does not have a grocery store. there is not a restaurant, not

even a fast food joint in the entire area. we know jobs are the number one way to get out of poverty. less than 3% who work full-time living below poverty level. host: who is to blame for not having jobs of these areas? guest: maryland has one of the worst business rates in the areas. one of the highest business tax rates, huge regulatory burden. property taxes are very high in maryland. what you've got is essentially a government climate that is not nice to the creation of business. guest: i could not disagree more. maryland is actually the wealthiest state in the nation. their pre-capita income is number one in the united states, so people there generally are doing well. baltimore is not doing well and the poor people in baltimore are not doing well. the war on poverty did reduce poverty.

it was successful until poverty rates declined drastically -- they fell to 11% at one point and the national poverty rate is back up to 15% now. many things changed in the late 1970's. most important things are we stopped rewarding work the way we used to. the minimum wage has lost 30% of its value. it is much harder for somebody to make a living on minimum wage. people used to actually -- senator warren tells the story of her father losing his job and her mother being able to support the family and keep their house because she took a minimum wage job. that is impossible now where the minimum wage is well below poverty wage. if we rewarded work and raised the minimum wage, as members of congress are calling for a $12 minimum hourly wage, that would

lift millions and millions of people out of poverty. they would be paid for their work in a way that allows them to take care of themselves and their families. host: before we get to calls michael tanner, you are shaking your head. i want you to respond. guest: minimum wage increase would help relatively few people in poverty. only about 30% of people in poverty live below the poverty level. by and large, the idea we have people trying to support the family on a minimum wage is a myth. only about 5% of people on minimum wage are single mothers supporting children. what you would do is wipe out a lot of entry-level jobs, the first wronrung on the ladder to get out of poverty. the suggestions are you would help the number of people in the middle class with an increase in the minimum wage but you and her -- would hurt people who are poor. host: let's get viewers involved. we will come back to this. guest: i disagree with that. host: i will let you jump in. we will hear from randy first in clearwater, florida.

good morning. caller: good morning. i am calling about this disaster for decades between u.s. citizens taxpayer money between $17 trillion and $22 trillion on the war on poverty. nothing has uplifted people. they get housing. they get help with their electric bills. lifeline on their phone bills. this is all racist. and you can't get money single mothers -- host: randy, you disagree with those policies? caller: after, you know, you know, all these decades,

yes. there is a safety net, but my family took an on-the-job training apprentices to help install carpeting or painting -- host: so having some sort of training to go along with these these safety net programs. ross eisenberg, i want you to respond to him. guest: i agree with michael tanner that the problems are there are not jobs for these people in baltimore. the unemployment rate at 8.4% is that when out of 12 people is looking for work and can't find it. ok? there are enough jobs for people in baltimore. it is just not true that people -- all these poor people there and the unemployed people are living on welfare.

only 5% get cash welfare benefits. 25% of baltimore city's residents live below the poverty line and only 5% get cash welfare benefits. the fundamental problem is that there are not jobs. you ask what are the policies that work and don't work. the biggest policy failure in the united states over the last 30 years is cutting taxes as the way to solve these problems. he cut these top marginal tax rates from 90% to 70% and their administration down to 50% and then down to 28%. we have had 30 years for that to magically create jobs. it has been a complete failure. the results are there for everybody to see. host: we will hear from grade eg next. we divided the lines regionally, eastern and central dialing in

at (202)-784-8000. mountain pacific, you can dial in at (202)-784-8001. we have a third line for inner-city residents at (202)-748-8002. greg, in columbus, ohio, you are next. caller: thank you. i think it really is all about segregation. if we can admit and believe that one point in america that there was forced to your graphical segregation and we say when does id it and? if it did end, why are people still primarily segregated? my second part would be -- when we talk about jobs and job training, what about infrastructure? there are so many infrastructure jobs that need to be done everywhere in the united states.

a job-training program would be to train these people -- anybody to work and to do these jobs. i think this is disingenuous. oh, my god. sometimes you have people saying these guys are so lazy and nobody wants to work, but when you look at the fact that it is hard to get a job as a black man with a college degree than it is to be a white man with a felony. i'll be lazy, or you don't want affirmative action? host: michael tanner, want to jump in? guest: that's a very good point. it is largely a problem of jobs. what i disagree is i think that the government does not do a good job creating jobs. baltimore got 1.8 billion dollars in stimulus funds and they spent of that. $1.5 billion they created 67 permanent jobs. that is not a very good bang for your buck if you will in terms of government spending. there are things we can do to make it easier for young black

men, in particular, to get jobs. for example, we should not require businesses to ask whether or not they have a felony on their record for example. the fact that we overcommit allies and arrest young black men for all sorts of absurd crimes, thereby giving them it almost impossible to get a job in the future or become legible is a huge problem. those are issues we can deal with right away. in the terms of long creation of jobs, i disagree. you can't expect businesses to operate at a loss. if you're going to tax and regulate them and required they pay excess benefits and so on, they simply are not going to hire. we are going to get more automation, more jobs overseas and so on. host: 1.5 million black men missing, touching on what you were saying, there are only 83 black men for every 100 women not in jail. among cities of the sizable black populations, the largest single gap is in ferguson,

missouri. north charleston, south carolina, has a gap larger than 70% of the city. the gap driven mostly by early death and incarceration barely exists among whites. guest: that is a gigantic problem. we have a national policy. it is implemented at the state level of counting black men into -- hounding young black men into jail. criminalizing things that should not be criminal. harassing them, the police in the freddie gray case, what was he chased for? he looked at a cop and ran. that is not a crime, yet, it led to his death. there is a really interesting study in baltimore following for 25 years, 800 public school students starting when they were in elementary school. here is one of the many conclusions. having an arrest record or failing to complete high school were less consequential for

white men than for african-american men. 84% of whites without a high school degree were employed at age 22. among african americans, just 40%. the consequences of having an arrest record are much more serious for african-americans. this is one of the things that has kept them off of the job. host: let me ask both of you -- what leads to having an arrest record? and that being predominantly among african-americans -- what role does government play in helping or hurting this statistic that you are telling us about? guest: the police police black teenagers for these things and they don't police white children in suburban places at the same way. i grew up in a suburb were kids

openly drank alcohol or they used marijuana, drove fast, you know, they did all the things kids do. those things are criminalized for black teenagers. they are not for white teenagers. the result of that is for the rest of their lives these blacks, especially men, are discriminated against in the job market. guest: and the war on drugs as well. the fact is that we arrest people, particularly black young men, for possession of small amounts of marijuana and things of that nature. the fact that we create crime areas and police go in and looking for problems and trouble. and they do, if you are hanging out in a corner, they will go up and assume you are dealing drugs which may or may not be correct in this case. that leads to the problems on the road and that is what leads to the sort of abuses we are saying going on. baltimore has paid out some $6 million and police brutality claims over the last decade. this sort of harassment sort of

policing leads to the trouble we are seeing. host: what about the public institutions that these kids are supposed to be in or part of growing up? education? guest: "the wall street journal" is not normally a place i turn to for inspiration but in yesterday's addition, there was a story -- well, i don't see it in my papers, but there was a businessman jay steinman saying he had his kids in a baltimore public school where there were not toilet seats on the toilet the heat went off in the winter, the lighting was poor. the schools are crumbling. and he said, how can you expect kids to value their education, pay attention and learn in that kind of an environment? the federal government, among others, could do something about this. that is an infrastructure problem. there was legislation that was kicked out of the stimulus

program, a 30 $30 billion program to fix the schools around the country. it would have made a huge difference in baltimore. guest: but baltimore spends -- among the biggest u.s. city, they are third or in the nation fourth in terms of per capita spending. some of it is wasted and they are having to pay back a state grant because they ended up using the money for dinner cruises rather than fixing schools. a lot of it is simply not been effectively used and part of that reason is because the teachers union in maryland is very strong. it has one of the weakest charter school laws in the nation, in fact, there are a lot more charters was in washington, d.c., then the entire state of maryland. either parental choice and public school choice is limited. you can't remove your children to a different district and different school, so what you have is very little parental control, very little monitoring and requirements for the teachers, and a lot of waste in

terms of the money being spent. host: let's get back to cause. -- calls. dennis has been waiting in west palm beach, florida. thank you very much for waiting on the line. caller: my pleasure. if they just talked upon education which is what i wanted to discuss. to me, if we are going to talk about poverty in the inner-city, it seems like there are two systemic problems. number one is everybody knows the family is broken up and the other is the education issue. as one of your guests just said, baltimore does spend the third and highest amount in the nation per capita on spending per child . as i was listening to the comments regarding the baltimore riot, a lot of the people on air said we need more money for spending on education in baltimore which is absurd. then i heard other people saying the quality of education in baltimore is bad, forget the money. that is wonderful, but the people that are saying this.

they don't want the kids to have an option to get out of the public school system and go to private or religious affiliated which the supreme court said was totally constitutional. i saw a graph on c-span this past weekend that had statistics on the screen. one of which was that in baltimore, there is a daily 46% truancy rate but there is 50% unemployment among locks. -- blacks. well, isn't it kind of interesting that 50% of black people can't get a job and 46% don't go to school? i wonder if there is a coincidence there or what. host: i'm going to have brought ross eisenbrey jump in. guest: i am going to say i hear something that sounds a little bit racist going on but the fact of the matter is, that the schools in baltimore are just overwhelmingly high poverty schools. the white people left the baltimore school system 30 years ago or more. the private schools, the white kids are in private schools and they are paying $25,000 or

$30,000 a year for that school. they have taken their resources out of the public schools. host: you are talking about taxes, property taxes? guest: property taxes and personal resources that families pay, successful or better off families have time to spend in the schools. they bring their expertise, they participate in the classroom. they do extracurricular activities. the public school my children went to had a parent-teacher budget of $150,000 a year. the parents put that in apart from the taxes they pay. that kind of resource is not available to the high poverty kids in the baltimore schools. guest: that just highlights unfairness of the current system. you are right. the white children have gone to the suburbs or private schools so what we are seeing is that

black children are stuck in these lousy public schools and we are not going to let you out. why don't we give them the options to take their money and that the money followed the child instead of the school? and let them take that money and go to the private schools are go to the suburbs or go to a better school district within baltimore? why do we lock them into a lousy school because they are poor or black? host: daniel is next in grand rapids, michigan. go ahead, daniel. daniel, good morning to you. you are on the air. one last call for daniel. there you are. go ahead. caller: my question is in terms of the gentleman from the cato institute, about what makes him an expert on the inner-city. the only thing he has thrown out our numbers -- are numbers which tend to not reflect the reality of the situation. the gentleman from -- mr.

eisenbrey is talking about some of the realities versus what mr. tanner is doing in terms of the miss making of what is occurring in the country. host: let's give michael tanner a chance to respond. guest: you are right. i grew up in a middle-class and working class family in lily white, western massachusetts. i have not lived in the inner-city other than washington, d.c. in my life. i can't say i experienced anything like what the young black man experiences today and i won't pretend i had the same experience. but i have worked for years on inner cities and poverty issues. i have written several books met with people in the inner-city, talked to them traveled and worked as many areas as i can. i think i have some expertise. if the question is that they disagree with my facts and figures and numbers, i would like to know which ones they disagree with because of those are generally accepted figures coming from the federal government, coming from legitimate sources. host: we will go on to maurice in memphis, tennessee, on a line for inner-city residents.

you are on the air. caller: first of all, mr. tanner , he referenced the wall of poverty. and the great society. from the very beginning, the conservative movement that has swept the nation was a direct reaction to the fact that the war on poverty was working. these ideas and these notions of african-americans of those as the most dire need is another problem. you end up stereotyping all individuals. if the war on poverty had been allowed to progress, we would have seen a much more aggressive push back against poverty. to go back to the war on poverty

and say it is a failure, that is why you started the whole conservative movement. starting with nixon, reagan and the use of these buzzwords to to say these are failed politics but you have 50% of the population that are pushing back on these progressive ideas. host: that is maurice and memphis, tennessee. ross eisenbrey. guest: there is a lot of truth in what he is saying. there is no question that ronald reagan ran on the notion of welfare queens getting welfare benefits and driving catalogs -- cadillacs at the same time. he is famous for that. if you step back and see what happened and what changed in 1980 and coming forward, the biggest change in america is the nation cap growing.

the economy kept growing, but working people white and black stopped being paid. stopped seeing wage increases in compensation that tracked the growing productivity of the economy and the overall growth of the economy. if the growth that we had from 1945 to 1980 had continued to today, the average household in 20% to 80% of the income distribution range would have $18,000 income per year that they have now. that is a transfer of wealth that they did not get. where did that will go? -- wealth go? it went to the top 1% and the annual amount that is lost to that middle 60% is $1.3 trillion a year. that is the big change in our economy. host: we will go to nelson in st. louis missouri. , you are up next. you are on the air. caller: good morning. thank you for taking my call.