say eitc 're gonna does have an obligation to work disaviewgoing to try to you of that. let's take food stamps first. how many minutes do i have left? minutes. f you look at that chart over there, the green line is there. 2.1 from '96 from 4.7 to cases. look at food stamps. exactly tracks it. because people on food stamps combined it with tanef. when they went to work they usually closed the food stamp case and they were going to work. beginning in 2002, an explicit decision by the food and service in the bush administration was to expand nonworkings including food stamps. there was no parent of work and look what and now happened. the red line shows how many. same people, the same families, female, primarily that head of house holds were on tanf. but they're not expected to work and they don't work. second, disability. the disability rolls have expanded immeasurably. of academic work revolves around the notion that isability, because it's increasingly easy to get, has substitute for retirement. for people that want to retire early. be attacked.to the only way to get to

if you get married and you're in phaseout, it hurts you because you loose eitc. summon the couples have low incomes that they're mostly in way rate is increasing the you combined income they get more money. i'm not saying there's no penalty in the eitc but for those of you from the finance committee and the ways and means committee i wouldn't spend too much time troubling us up with trying to find these marriage penalties. it would be a good thing to do. i'm all for i don't think it's going to make a big deal. the research on whether those kind penalties have impact on people's marriage rates is not encouraging. it doesn't suggest they have a big impact. that's the first thing. marriage penalties, i don't think are going to make a big difference. the second is the benefits of reducing nonmarital births. i think this could make a big difference. the rl list to be laid out to reduce poverty rates, lower abortion rates, definite lower abortion rates. clear in several studies that are good. letters base in vegas which leads to better child development, increase like

a program like the eitc, there are 20 million beneficiaries. in the normal current population survey of census, they just impute who receives that. they have no idea who gets that money, absolutely no idea. and considering that there's large-scale fraud in the program, you can't make imputations 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 re-elected. it really hasn't improved any since then, ok? it was a bad survey in 1948, when there were very few government programs and they were just really trying to measure employment. this program, this survey has been flawed for over 65 years. it's time for the government to actually know where its money goes. and the only way to do that is to do a survey where you pick up demographic data but then you go the snap program, you go to the tanf program, you go to the eitc and you match the social security numbers so you actually know what income came into that house. and what you would find is something that's dr

there is every reason to believe that would happen if we expanded childless eitc. of course the earned income tax credit is extremely effective poverty tool. lifts millions of people out of poverty, including several million children every year. it is very well-targeted. unlike the minimum wage, it goes to low income households. it doesn't go to the middle class. we need to build skills. this one is much harder to do i think from the federal level. but there seems to be some promising work-based learning programs that could be targeted at, at, lower incomes, adults, lower income men as a way to kind of marry classroom training with what businesses and their local communities actually want as the way to increase employment and increase wages. the nice thing about the work-based learning programs, skills that are taught are determined by local businesses, not by bureaucrats. a business, a business wants a worker, to do, they post a vacancy. then the kind of, local apprenticeship office and work-based learning office can place somebody in the job. it is a business tha

and neither tanf or eitc, is helping people get those earnings in the first place. and tanf did not provide a safety net during the recession. during the recession unemployment rates doubled and the number of tanf cases rose by 13%. because tanf reaches only be deeply poor families and serves less than one quarter of families in poverty, many of those struggling during the recession and may have thought they could use some cash assistance did not qualify. they were not poor enough to fight their struggles. or they may have seen that the work requirements could have been counterproductive. what tanf did do during the recession, with some targeted funding, was offer short-term subsidized employment, which was enormously popular with businesses and clients alike. that is an experiment that we should look to again. other programs, especially snap it responded to the increased need during the recession, but not tanf. so, what has tanf been doing during the last 20 years? it has evolved from cash assistance to a broad funding stream. these numbers from hhs shall have spen

the eitc has more than doubled. i didn't put down numbers for the child tax credit, or medicaid. child tax credit went from about zero to $30 billion. medicaid went from about $150 billion to $300 billion. i think it is fair to say that the reports of the death of welfare are greatly exaggerated. when the popular press, and even my academic colleagues, look at poverty, they tend to measure income. to measure income, we rely on the current population survey or cps, or the survey of program participation, or sip. the cps is the source of our official party numbers. the sip is the source of the data used by eden and schafer. these surveys are so flawed through poverty measurement that they should be abandoned and less linked to administrative data. you heard a version of that from robert, and i will emphasize that as well. using a slightly different analogy than he did, income surveys are measuring cups riddled with holes. the holes are the benefits and other transfers that are not reported in the survey. and if water is leaking out of hole, it often makes a family appeared poor, ev

we have the eitc of course providing for the poor and low income families. now if these programs are still aimed eliminating poverty, do you see a punctuation mark for these programs, or do you see them as a perennial part of our economy? and before i leave that question, what i would like you to do, if you see this as a perennial, permanent institution, are there other ways to provide? in other words is there another way to provide income redistribution than through these programs? thank you. >> any of our panelist. >> i think it is pretty clear as a society we've chosen non-cash benefits and tax credits for the working, the working poor as the way that we, that we want to try to reduce and prevent poverty in the united states. that's probably not going away anytime soon. i think robert's point, why not just give everybody cash is attractive in a lot of ways. the reason and concern why we don't do that, policymakers are concerned about what people actually spend money on, but, i mean, if you, if you, if you think people know best what they need, then giving

does havey the eitc an incentive. i will disabuse you. for 2.1 cases and you can look at the food stamps. eeople with food stamps combin it. when they go to work, they close the food stamps cases. a decision by the bush and administration was to expand food stamps and there was no pairing of work and food stamps and the red line shows the same that are not expected to work and they do not. bandisability has expanded academic work revolves around disability is a substitute for retirement for those who want to retire early and it has to be attacked. to way to get to this is condition this to a participation standard, including vocational education and this congress will not abide by this and neither will the social security office. the earned income tax credit pairs your work with actual benefits and it is a good thing. , betweenearned is that january and march, welfare recipients do not come in to participate in work activity because they take the benefits without having earned them. get turbotax to make up self-employment and take childre

i did mention the eitc. it has the effect of popping up wages. and that i think it's very good. it's a cumbersome system that requires filing an income tax return i was basically designed originally to refund to low income people any federal income tax that had been withheld from the wages but it now .-full-stop those amounts by considerably more than has ever been withheld. it's the right idea. it makes them pay and is contributed very substantially to getting people out of welfare and into work and to take a job that maybe seven or $8 per hour. it is in this same process as earning 12 or $14 an hour and i think that's the right way to go about it. i certainly agree with you that this plethora of benefits housing, food, etc. is very patronizing and to the extent we can give people money. it's to set their own lives and priorities that is also a move in the right direction and is subsidizing wages is one way of doing that. >> we have seen some states, kansas and missouri and others come down with the drug testing recipients and the prohibition on buying seafood with food stamps

next stage in that is very clearly that we need to change these welfare programs starting with the eitchat currently penalize low income mothers and fathers when they get married. that's an absolutely crazy thing to do. i mean, if you were just to sit down in abstract and invent 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 they decide to marry. host: you can watch that heritage event and others related to welfare reform at c-span.org. just type in welfare reform and you'll see a lot of stuff there. and maya us on the line now from phoenix, a democrat. good morning. caller: good morning. i just think it's unfair that when people that receive welfare, when they find a job, they automatically receive child care assistance. i make $13 an hour. i pay $800 a month for daycare. i applied for child care assistance through the state and i was put on a waiting list. it already has 2,000 people on there. but if you're on the welfare and you get a job, you automatically receive child care assistance. i think that is ve

we have increasing evidence that , providinghe eitc snap benefits, not only has an immediate benefit of making sure there's actually income and there is food on the table, but it has long-term benefits that really extends into adulthood of people having better educational outcomes. in 20 years, we are going to have a whole new set of evidence about the important of income and the importance of what happens in child's early years. it will shape our discussion about what we should be doing to make sure those basic needs are met. i think the positive will outweigh any negatives you think would happen. >> i wanted to speak to your question. i think another approved -- improvement i would love to see to the broader conversation is to get away from the binary view married asersus though those are permanent statuses or as though people are , giving birth to single moms. there are more married parents living in poverty than there are never married parents living in poverty. yet we don't hear a conversation about marital poverty. in the past, single versus merit -- married and the billboard v

i would just add that it is great to see bipartisan moments in growing for expanding the eitc for workers not caring for children in their homes. this policy needs to go hand-in-hand with raising the minimum wage. we need work-family policy so that working parents are not needing to be making choices between work and caregiving area that includes paid family and medical leave particularly thinking about the birth of a child being a driver of poverty, a leading driver of property in this country. the right to request flexible and predictable schedules are researcherork by a takes a look at how the ragged edges of the job market are one of the reasons that people need to turn to public assistance and particularly tanf and that is something we did he -- need to keep in mind. to their opportunities harness the child tax credit as a tool for investing in the next generation. we need to strengthen tanf but we should be looking at other company entry policies that can increase income particularly for children in the first few years of life. this is something the center for budget and a number of

we have the eitc of course, providing for the poor or the low income families. if these programs are still aimed at eliminating poverty, do you see a punctuation mark for these programs? or do you see them as a perennial part of our economy? before i leave that question, what i would like you to do, if you see this as a perennial, a permanent institution, are there other ways to provide this? in other words, is there another way to provide the income distribution through these programs? thank you. >> i mean, i think it's pretty clear that as a society we have chosen non-cash benefits and tax credits for the working poor as the way that we want to try to reduce and prevent poverty in the united states. that's probably not going away anytime soon. i think robert's point about why not just get everybody cash is attractive in a lot of ways. the concer concern and the reasy we don't do that is policymakers are concerned about what people will actually spend the money on. but i mean, if you think people know best what you need and giving them cash makes as big also ma

keep in mind the evidence that rebecca showed, that we have increasing evidence that providing the eitc, providing s.n.a.p. benefits not only has an immediate benefit of making sure there's extra income and food on the table, but it has long-term benefits that really extends into adulthood of people having better educational outcomes and better employment outcomes. so i think in 20 years we're going to have a whole new set of evidence about the importance of income and the importance of what happens in a child's early years and that will really sort of shape our discussions and benefits about what we should be doing to make sure that those basic needs are met. and i think that the, i believe that the positive will outweigh any negatives that you may think would happen. >> i wanted to speak to your question -- >> sure. >> i think that another improvement that i would love to see to the broader conversation is to get away from the binary view of single versus married as though those are permanent statuses or as though people are giving birth to single moms and that that is their existence