that happens a lot because a new design a program, you will often have the person there, deeply compassionate, as i am, helping people in need as people in this this is definitely have, who will say what about this definitely have. and you are designing a program to make sure that nothing bad happens at the lowest common denominator. when you do that, when you subsidize or design a program that provides an entitlement without expectation, you'll get more people taking advantage of that entitlement without expectation. and you will get less work and all of the benefits that you derive them introducing the workplace program will be gone, and you have to be careful about that. one of the greatest aspects of welfare reform that i do not think it's enough attention, if said in the weight the previous cash in a way that the previous

policy did not, recipients of cash welfare of the united states can go to work. work or already be at they can go to work. they are capable and they have assets to build on, not just liabilities to care for. in saying that, they went to work and take the challenge. i like to remind people who talk about the history of welfare reform or the benefits of welfare reform or what newt gingrich or bill clinton did, i would like to remind them that the real heroes of the welfare reform story from 1996 where the recipients themselves, who proved that what others thought about them was not true. that they were capable and could go to work. all i want to make about that is if you design your program to to the hit -- direct it problem which i think is a floating problem, described by schaeffer, it will underline the benefits of the program you design for all the others who responded to the challenge and went to work and reduced the

poverty level. with that, i will close. >> thank you. this was a really helpful and complement of presentation to think through the assertions about welfare reform having harmed those who are the least well off in our society, discussing the problems and data that are used to give that misimpression, the challenges with the data sources and surveys, and what this means at a programmatic level and how to do a better job of helping those low income persons, in general, and particularly those in the most dire need. we would like to open it to the audience to ask questions 40 -- ask questions for a few minutes. they there will be a microphone. we are live streaming this, so wait for the microphones. down in front. >> the data from the bookkeeping appears to have been pretty flawed and a lot of ways.

is that down to ignorance or is it deliberately misleading or could you venture to guess? the second question, have you been able to have a one-on-one with these authors with your data and their data and what shakes out? have you had that conversation? >> what i would say about that is anyone who researches poverty and uses this type of income data knows, and dr. meyer is overwhelmingly great research, in demonstrating this income data is not any good. the more you ask of it, the less accurate answers you will get. in particular, it does no good at either end of the distribution. the farther down you go in the farther up the go, the more likely you are to get nonsense.

if you go to the ends, you have. nonsense. from the time i studied this in graduate school when reagan was president, they were people showing up in the sense since -- in the census records with zero income for the year. did they start with that? they have been there forever in the clearly do not have zero income and you take that seriously. what we have are people attempting to use these studies to measure people with nearly zero income and as dr. meyer explained, the lead food stamps out, and they leave out the informal earnings for the most part, so the data is not any good and they are asking bad data questions that it cannot possibly answer. you can not try to determine whether there are one million children that have no will or benefits using a survey that is missing 20 million benefits per month. i think they just wanted to get a sensational number and that is what they did.

some of the previous research has been good but this book was not. >> others? >> i do not want to question motives. i cannot look into their heart and figure what they are doing. i know cathy and i know luke and i talk to them periodically and appear on panels like this. i have written about them, but i think that there is a motivation that comes from kathy's ethnography research, where she is in the households of folks who are struggling and in need, and i have all kinds of -- and have got all kinds of problems facing them. that makes her want to see what does this mean more probably? .- more broadly it is ethnography and data. the other thing that she did discover, and i think is out there and have not mentioned, is the extent to which states that -- to wish -- to which states

are behaving differently with regard to the current tanf program and the way the office receives or accept people. i think kathy got some examples and god knows that iran cash welfare that i ran a office so not everything goes beautifully, and it looked pretty negative. one story is a woman went to the cash welfare office in illinois, it was a democratic state and and a democratic mayor and a democratic governor at the time and the program was run by , illinois state of welfare, and she stood in the line and got in line at 7:30, and when she got up to see someone about getting assistance, the person said, if you are not in the line before 7:30, we cannot see you today. that kind of thing -- there is evidence of that and concern of that. that led her to believe or sense that the absence of the entitlement has led to the states not feeling any pressure, that they had to take at least an application or see someone who came to the door.

finally, bruce, and a few others, but more bruce than anyone else, is really some of the evidence about the failures in the response rate and in the accuracy rate, as well as the failure to count benefit. we have really come more firmly to a conclusion that those surveys are really bad they cash badly flawed than we did even four years ago. maybe that is an exaggeration, but it seems to me you are stronger now about how bad those surveys are then you might have been three years or four years ago. is that right? >> i think that is fair. jim sullivan and i believe that the income data were not capturing people's well-being quite a while ago, though he did

not have what you might call the smoking gun, where we could look and see if we had benefits to people's income who did not report them, then you really can see that people at the very bottom had much higher income then it seemed. >> there is one other thing, the grant was -- block $16 billion in 1996, and it is still $16 billion now, roughly. for people like that on the left, that is just like the biggest crime of all because of the major social program has not expanded and has not continued to grow. i think that there is a desire to find a way, find an argument for spending more through the tanf program and that might have motivated some of them. >> next question. >> following up on this conversation, myers wrote a nice

article about a year ago regarding the surveys and the response, having guided the income surveys but relying largely on the expenditure surveys. can you tell us why they think the expenditure surveys are so good since you told us that the upper end of the responses were so awful? >> that is a fair question. so when you look at the income surveys, the problem is that there are so many different sorts of income. we have probably already listed one dozen programs and there are lots of others that matter, too. we have probably already listed one dozen programs and there are lots of others that matter, too. you have to get all of those, the different sources of income, formal jobs, informal jobs, you need to get transfers from family, friends, fathers of children, lovers.

all of those things, it is a tall requirement to get all of those categories because you can have someone that is just relying on a couple of those, and if one or both of those are not reported, then it puts that person at zero income. on the other hand, with consumption, it is simply -- at least the way we do it -- we focus on rent and food consumed at home, and a few other categories, but those are the ball of spending -- the bulk of spending, and people know their rent. they are happy to report it. they are much less willing to talk about their income. it is just a more sensitive topic.

>> [indiscernible] >> some of the best work that is looked at participation in the consumer expenditure survey finds that when you look at the lowest percentiles of income at the zip code level, say look at the zip codes that have the lowest income, their response rate is slightly higher than the average, so if anything, it looks like the consumer expenditure survey over represents people at the bottom. one way to put this, we are essentially saying the government, the federal and state government spends about over $1 trillion a year on 80 different programs providing benefits and services to low income people, and basically, the government does not know or

that money goes. c, therem like the eit are 20 million beneficiaries in the normal current population and they just impute to receives that and they have no idea who gets that money. absolutely no idea, and considering there is a scale -- large-scale fraud in the program, you cannot make imputation for fraud. they have no idea where that money is going. the basic methodology for these income surveys was invented in 1948, when truman was reelected. it really has not improved any since then. it was a bad survey in 1948, when they were very few government programs, and they were just trying to measure employment. this survey has been flawed for over 65 years. it is time for the government to actually know where it's money goes, and the only way to do

that is to do a survey to where you pick up demographic data but then you go to this snap program, ego to the tanf program and you match social security numbers so you know it income came to that house, and what you would find is something dramatically different. you would find that welfare does raise people's living standards because today's economic resources and the poverty rate would be much lower. you would also find that we are spending a lot more than people on the left would like to pretend we are, which he would at least have truthful data to make decisions on. >> next question. wait for the microphone, please. >> thank you. tyler o'neill from pj media. i would just like to ask if there is a political figure that really stands for the sort of

welfare reform that you would like to see and just how disappointing, perhaps, our presidential candidates might be? >> this panel will not be able to engage in electoral politics, so maybe we can think of -- i know there are people instrumental in the welfare reform passage and have been important in the conversation over the years to speak to. >> i would say the actual person who is the most important to welfare reform 20 years ago was jim tallon, the congressman from missouri, he put welfare reform in the contract for america and essentially designed the programs in the house that later became the ultimate policy, and the goals that we had back then i think are valid goals. they were not to cut welfare spending, not to be people onto the street, but rather to say that welfare should not be a

one-way handout, that welfare should assist people who need assistance, but it should also encourage and essentially demand work. more importantly, where i think welfare reform has fallen short were concerned 20 years ago about the percentage of children born outside of marriage, which has continued to go up and which is the root cause, not only of poverty, but other social problems. we need to do something to address that. i think the next stage is clearly that we need to change these welfare programs, starting c, that penalize mothers and low-income mothers and fathers on the get married. that is a crazy thing to do. if you are to sit down in the abstract, what should we really not do in welfare, it would be, let's put a financial penalty on every low income mother and

father when we decide to marry. implementing the programs, what were important characteristics u saw in those that helped the implementation go forward? >> to me, what matters most is there ought to be, like roberts at 25 years ago, that there be some supercool relationship, that assuming they are able-bodied, that they be required to do something. ork requirements and what is expectations are the most important thing to me. and the willingness to talk honestly about the benefits for children to have active parents and we have to be honest that we are not going to solve all of these problems unless we get some help from the family as

well. so those are the characteristics that matter to me the most. i will stop there. > next question. > you talked a lot about the calculation of income, including expenditures. do you also calculate debt, including credit card debt in he poverty rate? >> you better take this. >> sure. [laughter] sure. when we look at consumption or aybe more properly spending, we do not factor in debt, but let me explain why income is a better way of looking at things, even when people, maybe especially when people are getting into debt.

>> you mean expenditures? you said income. >> i'm sorry, thank you. why you want to look at expenditures. thank you. if you have people in debt, they will not be able to spend all of their income. they will have the scrimp a bit to pay off the debts, and if you look at what they are able to spend on food, housing and other things, event a better measure of well-being. imilarly, if people are living maybe beyond their long-term needs, you would like to know that. you would like to see that if they are living in a nice house, driving a nice car, you would like to be counting that. so in both cases, if you look

at what they're spending you are going to get a better measure of their living standards than if you looked at their income in the case when ople are saving and into saving. probably the best two examples are you have a lot of college students who are really living retty well, even though they ave little income, or you have an elderly couple that own their own home or they own a car and they frankly have a lot of clothes, furniture, so they do not need to spend a lot to be quite well off. they may not be getting any income, but but we look at in the case

of the homeowner, we do not look at what they are actually spending. we look at the value of owning the home, and we look at the cars that they own and the value of having a car of a given make, model and year and e know that from data. >> i want to just jump in. one thing i want to make clear. none of us here say that people at the lower end of the income scale are doing tremendously ell and resent that. we are expanding -- responding to david, rhetoric about what is misleading about what is really happening and we need to be clear and honest about the data and that may lead us to say, they are better off than those other people say they are, and that needs to be done if we formulate good policy.

one of the things i think, and i wonder if you will comment on this, if you start zero in 1996 and you look at consumption and rising in consumption and you look at maybe the second or lower middle and compared it to the bottom, did their consumption rise at the same evel over the periods or maybe the way things have shaken out his consumption has grown and people in the lower middle have not had as much growth or am i rong about that? >> people to the poverty line have had a little less growth well below the poverty line, the people at the poverty line

has had more growth than those in the middle, so the lowest growth is at the median. > one last question. >> hi, i want to emphasize what are kind of the key take aways here, because everything i have seen, people talk about spending trillions and trillions of dollars on the war on poverty and things are not much better now than when we started. using your data you guys have been talking about, how much further are we better off? you sound like things have improved since welfare reform. can you lay out how things have improved, if at all? >> that is a very good question. on normal -- our normal trope is we spent 24 chilean dollars on the war on poverty and the

poverty rate is exactly where was in 1967. the reason for that is garbage data, so we spend $1 trillion a year providing cash, food, housing and medical care to low income people, not including social security and medicare. of that trillion dollars, of normal data, they can about the percent of income. guess what? if the welfare state does not have any effect, it is because they deliberately don't count foot stamps and earned income tax credit as income. they want to exaggerate the number of poor people so we can spend even more money. if it does not count, if you do not counted, it doesn't count. the fact of the matter is even the government cannot spend a trillion a year and have no impact on anybody's living standard. there is a conservative view

that bureaucracy sucks up that money but it doesn't. it goes to poor people. it is not really that hard to give free stuff away, but apologies to robert -- [laughter] we give away money to low income people in massive amounts, and when you count that money, you find that in fact the poverty rate is down, but the problem is that honestly that is not what lyndon johnson was trying to accomplish when he watched the war and poverty. he wanted to shrink, not deal really would the symptom of poverty by giving people free stuff but by the root causes, meaning he wanted people to be self-sufficient and able to have an income above the poverty level without government assistance. you have to take anything lyndon johnson said with a grain of salt, but i think he actually meant that because his image of a good welfare program was a civilian conservation corps in the 1930's, or people went out to shovel dirt, move

wheelbarrows to get stronger and healthier. he really wanted people to flourish in our society, not be perpetually dependent. by that measure, the war on poverty has spent a complete flop. people are no more self-sufficient today or less self-sufficient than we started 50 years ago. that's why we need to change the way welfare is given in a way that helps, that combines with the positive energies of the recipient toward work and marriage, so that when you get a sin gistic effect of the poor and n helping themselves the government reinforcing and complementing that positive activity, rather than displacing it and saying, go home, we have a free something for you. >> bruce ney even r, would you like to say anything in

conclusion? >> i thank my colleagues have said things quite well. i am happy to leave it there. >> robert, anything? >> no, i think we have had the great discussion. >> thank you for cosponsoring with this today and thank you for being here. we will have lunch, for those in attendance, out in the hall and please join me thanking our panelists. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national able satellite corp. 2016

>> monday marks the 20th anniversary of the welfare law passed by republican congress bill gned by president clinton. our special program looks back the e senate debate over 1996 law. system urrent welfare has failed the very families it was intended to serve.

>> washington journal is next. we'll take your calls and look at today's news. morning a conversation on political activism and protest in zimbabwe. garvey will announce he's seeking a residential pardon for his father's 1923 mail fraud conviction. that's live at 1 p.m. eastern. hour, editor in chief of reason magazine libertarian party president candidate gary johnson. he national political correspondent terrell starr with usion on millennials and minorities in the 2016 election.

later scott anderson of the new magazine talking about his article on the arab world since the u.s. invasion of iraq. we'll all take your facebook comments and tweets. host: good morning, wednesday august 17, 2016. three-hour program today on "the washington journal" that will include our weekly segment, on magazine as well as a look at libertarian millennial and minority issues in campaign 2016. but we begin with the focus on issue of veterans unemployment. the most recent job numbers saw a half point jump in the for veterans ate with post 9/11 iraq and the nistan veterans seeing largest jobless rate increase from june to july. that news came despite the generally strong