 Good evening everybody. Can you clap once if you can hear me? Didn't work. Good evening everybody. Thank you, Tom. Hi folks, how's everybody doing tonight? I'm glad to hear it. Thanks so much for joining us at New America. I'm Justin King and if you're in the room here with us or if you're watching online thank you so much for taking the time to be with you, be with us here tonight for our event on toxic inequality. Yesterday was tax day. Who's all done? Oh, there's a lot of hands down. Good luck. It's a little late this year. Why do I bring up tax day? I bring it up because the tax code is a major tool for our government, right? It lets the government raise revenue. But less discussed, an additional purpose of the tax code. It's really the main way that the government supports the maintenance and development of household wealth in America. Supporting individuals to build wealth, not just survive, but build wealth and real economic security is an express purpose of our government's function. And this year that purpose will be supported by almost seven hundred billion dollars worth of spending through the tax code. Thanks to my friends at CFED, our co-sponsors tonight for tracking that figure year over year. That money goes to support home ownership, it goes to support retirement savings, it goes to support all manner of wealth-building activity in households in America. Of course, that money goes almost entirely to the top 20% of the income distribution and it goes largely to white Americans. That's current government policy. And if you're in the space that we're in and you talk about this with your folks from home or folks up on the hill, it's sort of a shocking figure to them, right? But that kind of policy is really among the milder historical efforts to build wealth inequality in America and in particular racialized wealth inequality. Our history is really defined by government efforts to help build wealth in ways that are hierarchical and deeply racialized. And that real history and its ongoing impact has given us a tremendous gap in the household wealth of Americans based upon their race. That living history really informs the mission of some of us here at New America, working in what we call family-centered social policy, where we're trying to ensure that social policy delivers on the ideal of equality of opportunity in America, for all of us, not just some of us. And that living history is the subject of the book that we're here to discuss tonight, Toxic Inequality, which I don't want to give away too much and spend too much time talking about what I think about it because we have the author here tonight and you deserve to hear from him. But it's a deeply engaging book that marries that policy legacy with the real stories of real families struggling to get by in America over the course of the past few decades. The book argues that we need to understand not just income inequality, but also wealth inequality, and we need to understand them together with racial inequality, which Tom says in the book are powerful institutional forces, I'm sorry, which Tom says that are shaped by powerful institutional forces rather than individual choices. And those forces distinguish who gets ahead from those who are stuck in place or are falling behind. The book argues that since policy built this sort of uniquely unequally unequal American society, policy can build a fairer, more just, and more equal society, but that race-blind policies will not deliver us that society. If you accept the evidence that Tom presents, then he and the book present an imperative to act that is not just economic, it's moral, and it's civic. This is not an impossible challenge for our policy tools, but it is a real conundrum for our politics. How do we act to write ongoing, inherited injustice when doing so is seen by many as injustice in and of itself? If the election of America's first black president and an agenda that modestly worked to undo inequality help lead to the election of President Donald Trump and an open agenda of upward redistribution of wealth has our inequality already broken our democracy. Where and how, where do we go from here and how do we get there is really what the book is about and what the conversation we hope to have tonight is about. We have a terrific panel. We have a terrific audience. Janelle Ross is here to moderate our conversation tonight. She's an amazing reporter for the Washington Post. She's a fellow at New America who's working on her own book project on the racial wealth gap. She'll begin with a conversation with Tom about whom you'll hear more in a moment. Then they'll be joined by two experts, Jeremy Greer from CFED, where he's the vice president of policy and research. CFED, I should mention, has been tremendous partners to New America for many years and in particular as our partners in presenting this event tonight and as an organization that has done tremendous work trying to design policies and practices that can help to close the racial wealth gap. And then our other guest is Cecilia Munoz, who spent five years as President Obama's director of domestic policy. She's joined New America as our vice president for policy and technology and the director of the New America National Network. We're thrilled to have her here both tonight and in the long run. After our panelists have had a turn, you'll get your turn. If you're here in the audience, we'll have microphone runners so you can ask some questions of your own. If you're watching online, you can tweet questions at us using the hashtag toxic inequality. So again, thank you so much for being here and welcome. When the event is over, we'll have a little reception. Books will be available for sale. Tom might wear it out. Wear his hand out signing for you if you like. So thank you for being here with all this. Let me welcome my friend and our partner of many years, Andrea Levere from CFED to say a few words about their work on the racial wealth gap and Tom in particular. Thank you, Justin. And thank you all for hosting this event. I just happened to meet Justin last Saturday when I was coming out of my Pilates class and going into the Trader Joe's. And there he was with his little son, who was absolutely adorable and refused to do that anything his father told him to do. So those are the great lessons of life that we do. So thank you again. Seven months ago at CFED's Assets Learning Conference, I had the honor of presenting the Assets and Opportunity Award to Tom Shapiro and his partner, Melvin Oliver for their groundbreaking book, Black Wealth, White Wealth, a new perspective on racial inequality. That book was written in 1995. So when you think about how Tom was thinking about these issues, he was looking at them in a way that nobody else was looking at them before any of us had the imagination to do so. He took that book and updated it in a 10-year anniversary edition in 2006. And what we'll see today is it really prophetically defined our conversation. I can remember how hopeful we felt last September about the possibilities of addressing both wealth inequality and the racial wealth divide. In the belief that the collective advances in research, policy, practice, and philanthropy had the power and influence to truly change the structure of opportunity in this nation. Our challenges today are different, but our commitment remains stronger than ever. For nearly 40 years, CFED has focused on the issue of wealth inequality before anybody had the name for it. We have pursued a mission of building assets for low-income individuals and communities to strengthen financial security and expand economic opportunity. But despite the success of many of the asset-building programs and policies that we have advanced, the level of income and wealth inequality has increased to historic levels, as high as it's ever been since the Depression. And while Americans of all backgrounds have experienced this issue, particularly since the recession, it is communities of color that suffered the most and have had the hardest time recovering. The end result of that, as Tom points out in Toxis Inequality, is that African-American and Latino families face a racial wealth divide today that sees them owning just $11,000 and $13,700 respectively in median wealth, compared to $142,000 that white households own. As a result, Tom's book aims to, and I quote, illustrate how deep structures shape well-being and create inequality along economic and racial lines. In 2015, as a response to this unconscionable reality, CFED launched the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative under the leadership of Didrik Asante-Muhammad and Lillian Singh to not only affirm our focus on reducing wealth inequality, but to really address racial wealth inequality in a much more comprehensive and targeted manner. As I think about this work, I have no doubt that it has been influenced by all the conversations and analysis that Tom's work decades ago created for all of us to rethink this problem. Over the past two decades, Tom has continued to explore the role that wealth plays in communities of color, and as Justin said so articulately, the role that public policies have played in this problem. Ten years ago, he followed up his work in black wealth, white wealth, with the hidden cost of being African American, a book that explored the relationship between family wealth and its generational impact on the racial wealth divide. By interviewing nearly 200 families, he gave us deeper insight into how this growing problem personally impacts the economic mobility of families of different races. Building on these insights and interviews, Toxic Inequality revisits these families and their stories to see what has changed in all the years since he first spoke with them, how their children are doing, how they fared during the recession, and most importantly for all of us what lessons we can learn from these findings. Toxic Inequality paints a vivid picture of the toll that inequality has on these families, the way these families use assets to manage crises and create opportunities, and the real reasons why some families advance and others don't. The book also lays out, again as Justin said so clearly, how the hidden hand of government has created the vast gap in wealth between white and black and other Americans of color, and how public policy even in these difficult times can be used to address this growing policy problem. At the start of the book, Tom affirms that policy solutions must be bold, transformative, and at a scale sufficient to reach the families and communities most affected by toxic inequality. And the truth is, we know what works and what doesn't. Tom reports that the 97 families who gained wealth over the 12 years that separated our interviews did so because they owned homes and neighborhoods that allowed their home equity to rise had good paying jobs with robust benefits and received financial assistance from extended family networks. So as we face a political environment where the future is uncertain at best, we need to work together in new and more ambitious ways to bring new evidence, champions, and campaigns to what is the task of our lives. As Tom said, placing people, families, and communities at the core of our values and our policy direction can also make America a better nation. It is my privilege to welcome Tom Shapiro and Janelle Ross to the stage. Good evening, everyone. Nice of you all to come out. And thanks for sitting down with me, Tom. I should just preface this by saying that this is actually the first time I've met Tom in person, although we've spoken on the phone many, many, many times in the course of reporting out stories, including stories about what was happening to people of color in the recovery. So I guess we should probably begin with this. I think that I'm taking my cues from Justin here. I think that this is probably a room where the concept or the idea that the racial wealth gap is not this sort of naturally occurring phenomenon like a cyclone that we can't fully predict or begin to get our hands around. But rather something that was built out of some very specific decisions that were made or perhaps oversights in the best of scenarios and has been sustained by that very same sort of set of activity. So if we begin there but recognize that there are people who may need a solid set of facts or a solid argument to make that case. What are, I guess, three things that a person needs to know to be, perhaps I should phrase it this way, what is the thing that in your mind makes the argument irrefutably that the racial wealth gap and all of its implications are in fact our very own doing. This is a product of American making. Wow, great question. First, let me thank New America and CFED for hosting this incredible reception and I feel so humbled by the introductions. I'm actually not sure what is left for me to say after Justin and Andrea. Except those are expectations one could never possibly meet. Jenna, let's try and go at that question maybe in one or two ways. One of the things I try to do in toxic inequality is to crack open that window to the past to get an understanding that when we look at things today in the United States there's a long history and some people don't think that that history matters. Particularly Jim Crow, slavery, whatever happened in the past pre-Civil War, pre-1960s, whatever date that that's that horrible past. It's got nothing to do with where we are today. That's a story that doesn't hold up. It doesn't hold up by the evidence. It doesn't hold up when we actually look at American history. So let me give just a couple of quick examples and I want to end with one that is still very contemporary because I think that it really bridges the past and the present very, very well. If we look at the Federal Housing Administration, that incredibly wonderful piece of legislation that's passed in 1934 and 1935 that changed forever the rules of the game about how American families could finance homeownership. Prior to the mid-1930s a family literally had to reach in their wallet and pull out about 95% of the purchase price. Homeownership rates were pretty low as you could understand and then we could borrow the other 5% or 10%. Well the Federal Housing Administration rules on how we finance homes totally flipped that script in that after World War II when the economy started to recover and homeownership actually became a possibility once again. Americans now, American families could now buy homes with 5-10% down and borrow the rest over 30 years. We started to see as the economy was growing an incredible boom in homeownership. Homeownership today provides two-thirds of the wealth for the broadest band of American families between the 20th percentile and the 80th percentile. The band of us, the 60% in the middle, two-thirds of our wealth is in home equity. It's not in the fantasy story of what we scrimp and save and out of our paychecks and that's all important. But two-thirds of it comes through the vastly institutional mechanism of homeownership and all of the rules that Treasury, Fannie and all of our agencies administer around that. Great, I would argue, great piece of policy with one major exception. We knew we were going there. African Americans and Latinos were virtually excluded from buying homes by law in many states and if the laws had changed then by custom. And even when African Americans and Latinos were, quote, allowed to buy homes legally, the communities that they were, quote, allowed to live in and reside in and buy homes in were very different than communities that white middle and white upper middle class families lived in. So the wealth that was created, and the homeownership rate today, by the way, that gap between white, just white black is about 25%. So that's part of the legacy. Part of the legacy of how Americans accumulate wealth is founded in that profound institutional mechanism of how we buy homes and it has very little to do with individual motivation. So that's one example. Let me carry that forward just one step further. Most young American families today can't afford down payment. We get it from our parents and our grandparents. We get help on our down payment. So go back. Which families, which families in African American community, Latino community, white community is more likely to have parents and grandparents that have enough financial resources and willingness to help them with the down payment. So that gets transferred, it's exactly a way inequality created in the past gets transferred from one generation to another. A second example I would use for the great question would be social security. Another, I think, classic, incredible, in many ways, one of the most progressive policies we have in the United States in terms of the senior poverty that is alleviated, in terms of the disabled workers that are protected, in terms of the children that are workers that have been killed on the job and elsewhere are much more secure with that. Also passed in the mid 1930s. And the story is similar in that social security and there's a historical debate about how this happened. But to get social security passed there were occupations that were named that were excluded. And those occupations were agricultural occupations, domestic occupations, some service occupations, and railroad workers. Railroad workers is a different story. But those other occupations, domestic work, agricultural work, were exactly where African Americans and Latino workers were. So by what sounded like perhaps a universal, it's not race conscious, it's not race coded, it's just occupations. It was a hard mechanism to get people to contribute and have employers do it. That was the story that was run. The reality, the impact was for 30 years afterwards, those people in those occupations were excluded. When those workers started to retire, they didn't have enough hours. They didn't have enough months. Some had zero months in social security. So their senior security is then impacted. What they're allowed, what the wherewithal that they have to pass on to their children is also much more limited. So even something as current in social security, it's not so much in our distant past. Very similar, deeply racialized dynamics are the root of the creation of that kind of wealth inequality. I would maintain. So having laid out and made it a clear and solid case for the fact that we have in fact been making policy in ways that affect different Americans in different ways. And sometimes those decisions were in fact intentional. Having made that case, I think the thing that really struck me about the book is you went to a place that is really challenging but central to have a discussion about the nature of inequality and why it must be a larger public concern and it is not simply a moral issue. But I do wonder if you would make one more sort of case, make a case if you would for us. What are the economic and civic reasons that inequality in particular racialized inequality with regard to wealth and as Justin put it earlier, the movement beyond simple survival but wealth generation and sustaining ones wealth. What are the fundamental civic and economic reasons that the model in which we are currently operating is a bad idea and possibly unsustainable? Wow, so I titled the book Toxic Inequality very intentionally and actually had to, I won a little fight with the publisher to keep the title. They said people might think it was about the environment. I said if we get that clunky subtitle up there, people will understand that it's about everything evil. So we won that one. It's important to me and we need to turn the cameras off and nobody take notes because I'm about to say something I don't want to be quoted on. Inequality is not the issue. We've always had inequality and I don't say this but we always will. Every recorded history of a society we know about, there's inequality. The issue is about the level of inequality, that threshold, how it's created and how groups and individuals internalize that in the sense of their understanding of how it's made and what it means to get past it. For me, the title of Toxic Inequality is an attempt to differentiate very strongly where we are right now in the United States and I would argue where we've been for a while. We're just dawning aware of it at the present moment, I think. To distinguish where we are now from where we have been and the factors that distinguish it for me are some of the following and we mentioned a couple already so I don't need to go into them. It's the historic highs in both income and wealth inequality to data that take us at least back to the beginning of the depression if not earlier than that. Quick data point, 1% of the society owns about 42% of all of our financial wealth and those figures keep getting worse and worse. Second part, that widening of inequality is not occurring in an era where the standard of living is increasing for everybody. It's not occurring in an era where it's easier to attain economic and social mobility. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Widening inequality, economic, is occurring in an era in which mobility has stalled at least for 20 to 30 years. I would take it back to the beginning of the 1970s. It's harder for families to get ahead and the living standards have stagnated. I think for me this image works. If we think of economic mobility as a ladder and we climb the rungs and we want to do that over our lifetimes, we want to get to a rung a better place than our parents and grandparents, what's happened in the last 30 years is that the rungs in that ladder have gotten further apart. That's one reason why economic mobility is so much tougher today. The third part of toxic inequality for me is the widening of the racial wealth gap. For me, this is absolutely central to why I do this work and why I've had such great partners, many of whom are in the room, and I stand on great shoulders for a lot of this work. The widening racial wealth gap, one might assume that post 1960 where we have hard fought victories, legislative victories around where people could buy homes, the rules of financing, the opening of the access to college and higher education, public facilities and others, that post that 1960 era, whatever the racial wealth gap that was delivered by our horrible historical legacy, might stay at a steady state. We enter a new era in the mid to late 1960s and if there are no worsening or improvements, we stay at whatever that gap was. Wrong. The data tell us a very different story. What the data tell us, when we look and follow the same set of families, not the 200 that we looked at for the book toxic inequality, but taken from a pretty random representative sample of American families. We look at those families between 1984, which is not a trickier. It's the year wealth data is first available in that study. We take it up to 2013, a long band, the same set of families. The racial wealth gap quadruples. In constant dollars, it goes from $84,000 in 1984 to $245,000 in 2013. We just have to smack ourselves upside the head with that, I think, and ask what is going on. So that's the third part, and let me just sort of wrap up the animating part of the title for me. This has been occurring in an era in which there has been profound pandering to racial anxieties and fears of immigrants in the United States, which we have had for a long time. There's no romanticizing about this. We didn't start it with the last electoral cycle. It's been with us for a very long time. But it clearly has been ratcheted up by media, politicians, so-called pundits and some columnists as what I would consider the big distraction as the answer to why we're having this stagnation in living standards, why this great inequality is being put on the backs of those that can least afford to deal with those issues themselves. And a lot of it is being put on them, primarily families and communities of color and immigrants. We see this in a lot of ways. We want to talk about mass incarceration, mass deportation. I think it's part of that picture. And that delivers to us, that puts us on the stage here tonight. That puts us right at the current era where the racial anxieties and the fears of immigrants have, I think, really run rampant enough to provide the platform and the stage and the frame for the narratives that we have to talk about and, unfortunately, that we have to confront. Well, I'm definitely glad to hear you raise the term narrative and also distraction, because that's exactly where I want to go next. And I really just wanted to kind of lay down a foundation. So we're all operating in the same place, but I really want to talk a little bit about those stories. And I honestly think that it's a powerful piece of work that you've done here in making the case plainly, that there are some ideas that are absolutely in the conventional wisdom firmament, but also ideas which animate our politics at every level in every way, from local races for dog catcher to the president of the United States, and stories about belonging and deserving and effort and ability that are part of the toxic inequality tale. So I guess I wonder if you would identify for this audience, and I perhaps, at this point, yammering on, but I wonder if you would identify for this audience what you see as the most important narratives of distraction and myths that have truly helped to drive and sustain a toxic level of inequality in this country. Well, I have to answer that one. So with the fear that we learned from our communication experts, you never repeat a myth because you reinforce it. Let me just go to where I think we want to go with it. Let's start with two fundamental areas here. One is that there is a very core understanding in American society around two things, around one, how we attribute our own personal success, and second, how we understand and attribute the failure of others. And they're two sides of the same coin. For our own ideological and cultural reasons in the United States, we want to attribute our own success to our own doing, our own well-being, our own character, our own thrift, our own hard work, and a phrase and a word, our own deservedness. Let me just tell one quick story from the book if we will. Can I talk about Carol Clark? No, I'm actually going to talk about a much more modest family. There's a family in St. Louis, and we first talked to them in 1998, had just moved down the Mississippi River because they wanted to get away from a community that they thought was becoming too diverse for their own tastes. They wanted a safe and high-quality school system for their daughter. Now, how were they trying to do this? Like most American families, they didn't have the cash in hand, so they were holding garage sales every Sunday. Now, when you hold a garage sale, you can only sell the stuff once. And you've got the same neighbors that are coming by for it, so it's kind of diminishing set of returns very quickly. So this quickly runs the gamut for them. A couple months later, after they start the garage sales, they tell the story of their sitting down at dinner with her mother, and they tell the story about, you know, they wanted this better life for themselves, this better community in their own sense of understanding, but the garage sales wasn't returning anything more. The mother says something like, oh, gee, that's too bad. My granddaughter is the most precious thing in my life. Literally reaches into her purse, pulls out a check, and writes a check for $30,000. And that $30,000 turns into the down payment for the family to move to what they define as the better community further down or further south on the Mississippi River, a little south of St. Louis. Later in the interview, we're talking to her, we're asking, as we did with all the families, tell us a story of how you bought this house. She tells a story of buying the house totally amnesiatic about the $30,000 check. And thankfully, it wasn't an interview I personally did. Thankfully, the interviewer said, well, I remember you told us about, you know, that your wonderful mother who wrote this check for $30,000. And here's the key for me. The key for me is the response. Yes, she did it, but we deserved it because we were having the garage sales. Now, a lot, millions of families hold garage sales. But millions of families don't have mothers that write $30,000 checks. That's the moment in which the success she defined for the family as her own deservedness. Now, the flip side of that is a little harsher. And that's the way we attribute the failure of others in a society. Whether it's by individuals, but for the conversation tonight and for the book, it's how we attribute it in terms of group-based inequality. And the meme here, the frame is that for a long time in American society, we have gone back to individual failure. The failure of a group, the failure of a family has something to do with their lack of thrift. Their lack of ability to defer consumption, but it usually gets nastier. Those are the polite term. It's the lack of control about not having sex before marriage, about not having kids before you're economically ready. I got that on a radio call show last week, by the way. It's very much alive. And that's a harder narrative to confront. That's a harder narrative to confront. One of the ways I try to do it in the book and probably don't have enough time for me to yammer on at this particular juncture. But I tell the story. I would love to tell the story in a lot of detail about Tina Medina and Peter Ackerman. Tina Medina, both were five-year-olds when we interviewed their families in 1998. Tina is African-American. In St. Louis, Tina drops out of high school when we interviewed her and the family 12 years later in 2011. I think we got back to them. The story is often narrated. Well, here's another black family that didn't have enough cultural, social capital, or whatever to pass along college aspirations so their daughter dropped out. And she was working then as a receptionist at a local hotel in a pretty dead-end job, to be frank. Peter Ackerman was in college at the University of Missouri at Columbia. White family, very lily white suburbs. It's also St. Louis. I learned both those to be St. Louis families. And people could narrate Peter Ackerman's story as well. Peter came from a family that valued higher education, passed along those values, and Peter worked hard. Those things may or may not have happened. I doubt it, frankly. Here's the deeper story. The deeper story is that Peter Ackerman's family worked both of them for a long time at a large organization in the St. Louis area that had a very robust set of benefits for them, including paying for their health care, including paid sick day leaves for both of them, including contributing to a mandatory pension retirement scheme that that organization matched every $1 that they were mandated to put in. Their organization matched it with $1.70. And finally, the last part of the benefit, their children's college tuition would be paid for. So when I actually totaled that up, we actually look at what I would consider a very profound structure that tells a different story about what makes higher education much more possible for one individual and much less possible for another. Quick end of the story. When I totaled the robust benefits, what I call employment capital of the Ackerman family, it amounted to $30,500, including money they didn't have to pay for college of the organization's contribution to their pension plan and their health care coverage. $30,000 that the Tina Medina's family did not have. I want to add a layer of complexity because it is very much a part of our lives and certainly in this town it's unavoidable, but there are, I think the things that you've identified without doubt, the sort of selective amnesia about advantage and the sort of group guilt and character failings myths are powerful and real and with us always and baked into much of our policy. However, I think there's something else here which is those are ideas that I would venture to guess in a room like this. You can probably guess 50, if not more, percent of the people in this room understand fundamentally what's wrong with those ideas. What you do not get, I would say, wide circulation is a conversation which you raise in this book which is there are progressives myths that are comforting for certain people to hold onto and I would say the number one myth in my experience coming to many events like this and interviewing many, many people over the years, I have recently given it a new name but I would say it is the progressives myth that are fundamental challenge at this point in this country because we do have legalized equality and we have removed the fundamental structures that kept people out of physical spaces that the fundamental problem in this country at this point is not race but class. And you know, as I'm sure you have many, many times in forums like this received the question isn't it class, not race? I consider that sort of the standards hypothesis at this point and I think it was very appealing to some people in the 2016 election but I do wonder if you would speak just a bit too why it is important that, and you make this case in the book, why is it important that people complicate their understanding of inequality and fully take on board the tremendous disaster of race and racial inequality in this country? Great, another great question and I hope this is one that we will all get to be part of the ongoing conversation but it needs to be part of the solution and it needs to be part of a bolder and brighter vision for all of us. One of the reasons that I wrote the book was to bring those two sides of the conversation together and try to illustrate that you cannot understand one without the other. That they're very much a part of American history and we also have a part of that American history of progressive movements and others making that division more artificial than it need to be for political, philosophical, all kinds of reasons. If we were to look at, and we mentioned the tax code earlier, Justin brought up the tax code and it's a brilliant piece of work that CFED has been doing for a period of years and the numbers I give in the book might be a little different from their recent numbers but the story is the same. If we just were to look at the amount of public investment for home ownership in the United States including the mortgage interest deduction, the exclusion of property taxes, the exclusion part of the capital gains you don't have to pay when you sell the home. There's a whole constellation of goodies that go with that. I think the figure that CFED came up with was about $90 billion a year just for the mortgage interest deduction part of it. Figures I looked at had it closer to $200 billion when you add in the other parts of it. No matter what figure you accept of those, the distributional breakdown of it tells the story. It tells a story that absolutely in the moment of the filing of taxes, the federal government not literally but symbolically is writing a check to all of us to take those advantages of the tax code. It's one thing to think about if it were flat and even and demographically distributed in all kinds of other ways we could be much more progressive about it but that's not the story. Approximately 72% or so of all of the money that we invest as a public good in home ownership around the mortgage interest deduction goes to the top 10 to 20% of income filers. Now, think about that distribution for a moment. That distribution means that wide swaths of white families are included and wider swaths of families of colors are included in that. And that suppresses, as it moves capital, as it moves wealth to the top, that suppresses the wealth development of this 80 to 90% of American society. And that's the... Think about coalitions. Think about constituencies in that moment around changing and transforming something like the mortgage interest deduction and the possibilities of that coalition because it directly impacts the wealth development for most whites and for virtually all African Americans and for virtually all Latinos as well. Now, we are working at the Institute, I direct the Institute on Assets and Social Policy. We are currently trying to figure out a way to model what the racial and ethnic distributional breakdown is of that public investment in home ownership. The CFED does great work in looking at it by income levels and I think it's going to be dynamite which is why I keep sort of beating my staff up. Let's get to this, let's figure this out. If we ever come up with what I would consider legitimate numbers and data that breaks that 200 billion or 90, whatever you think it is, down by racial and ethnic groups, I think that is going to be. I've got sense of what it is but I'm not going to foreshadow that at the moment. Lastly on this, whatever that figure is that we spend for home ownership in the United States, dwarfs what we spend for families that can't afford secure housing through rental assistance, through public housing, whatever those mechanisms, we think it's between 40 and 50 billion a year versus the 90 to 200 billion we spend for home ownership. A sense of priorities that are totally out of whack if we really were to think about what's the public good that's being advanced in those moments. If we were to shut the doors here, I bet within five minutes we could come up with five to ten better solutions that doesn't take that long. The tools are there. It's really a question about the constituencies and about the political will to get it done and the roadblocks that stand in the way. Well, just to the thing, I need to wrap this up so I'm going to ask one more question that I'm going to wrap up here. I do want to ask, I think you, for those who haven't read the book, this is your spoiler here, but I'll just say, I think in the course of this book, I counted up at least eight solid absolute statements of these are the policies that are fundamentally fueling and maintaining the racial wealth gap today. This is not just what has happened in the past. This is actively happening today. You are voting for the people sustaining these policies. You are staying silent as these things happen. It is a list that implicates us all, but if I got this right, I've got at least eight, but there are probably more. The mortgage tax credit, state funding levels for colleges and universities, the amount of inheritance that's excluded from taxation and the rate at which that which is taxed is taxed, public subsidies to private colleges, beginning with their tax-free status and then their growing endowments, failure of pale grants to keep pace with college costs. I think there are a few more, but I saw those as sort of the majors. Are there any that I left off that you would identify as majors? I think it's a good list. There may be others that we can surface or lift up in the conversation as well, but I like to... I don't want to say I'm advanced in age because this work is so important in many ways. It's what keeps me as young and is deeply passionate about it as I am and as hopeful as I am. So, you know, I think that we want to keep moving that forward. Well, let's talk politics. I guess we'll add some people and we'll talk a little about politics and political reality. So, I think Jeremy and Cecilia. Hello. Hi. Well, I hope I'm going to make it through this evening without having a coffee that I have like the world's worst cold that has been with me, so I'm really holding on here, but I wanted to... I think if I could. The reason that I went in to ask that last question is because I think that fundamentally what we have to understand and what I meant when I said that these are ongoing active policies that indict us all truly, even if it's by silence, is that there are constituencies for each and every one of those policies and there are active voices that not only campaign for them and lobby for them or even if necessary convince other people who do not benefit from them that they should support them and it creates a political dynamic where what we fundamentally know or what the data tells us perhaps does not, doesn't matter. It certainly doesn't guide us or lead us. So, that's the reality when you are talking about inequality in this country in any way. So that being said, I think we should maybe talk a little bit about constituencies and as you mentioned, the idea of who the political coalitions might be and the sales pitches, the language, the discussions that have to be had in order to transform what is a long term American phenomenon at this point. It's part of our history and our present. So maybe we should just start with what do you, and I'll start with you Cecilia because of your work, but I do wonder what do you see as the sort of principle hurdle to politically speaking, not in terms of policy, but politically speaking, what do you see as the principle hurdle to a serious fact based and therefore racially conscious conversation about wealth inequality in this country. How long have we got? Well, give us your short version. So first of all, congratulations on what is really an important book and the notion of expanding the conversation. Sorry, that's my king. Income inequality to wealth inequality I think is a really, really useful contribution to the debate. Look, I wish I could tell you I felt super optimistic that we have the capacity to enact a lot of the policy recommendations, although I was thrilled to see such specific policy recommendations, but I think building a constituency is really critically important and I think that that at some level hinges on our capacity to be persuasive that one, that this is an historic problem that we didn't just get here yesterday, that we got here at some level intentionally over the course of not just decades, but centuries, but that the effects of that that it is in all of our mutual interest to undo the effects of that. This is both a question of fundamental justice, which it is, but also a question of our capacity to move forward together and to move forward as a society. And I don't think, I don't believe that we yet accept that as a fundamental premise. And I think, as you say, the constituencies for the policies which are unequal are very strong, but they're also perpetuated in ways that I, you know, I just came out of eight years in government that I found very noticeable and I'll give you a very quick example and that is a couple of federal budgets to go the Obama administration proposed among the things he proposed, which actually you talk about in the book is the 529, changes to the 529 proposal, which is how people like me amass college savings and people like my kids. And we essentially proposed ratcheting that found in favor of a more progressive policy and just got our heads handed to us in part, and I was part of the budget briefing where we were attempting to defend this, which we frankly quickly capitulated on, because every reporter in that room who was asking those questions had a 529 proposal, had a 529 plan for their family and they saw themselves as squarely in the middle class, although if you look at the numbers they are, they are not in the population that we were seeking to benefit nor the population of greatest need, but in their mind there was no question that this was a middle class to sort of working class proposal that would benefit the kinds of people that we were talking about and they were just wrong about that, but there was absolutely no, you know, data was not going to help in that situation because they had a personal stake and it wasn't them being selfish, it was them not applying the analysis that they thought they already understood. And that's the thing that I think we, a challenge that we face, which is both helping people understand the history, helping people understand what is ultimately in our mutual best interest to move forward, and that is a devilishly difficult thing to do. So I'm going to throw this next question, which is also political in a sense, but it is absolutely sort of a follow on what Cecilia has just said, which is knowing what you know in the course of trying to implement really practical, pragmatic idea, what is it that people seem to need to know, want to know, what is, if there is any, what is the sales pitch that seems to allow people to let go of, or at least back away from some of these very powerful, almost religious levels of devotion to some myths about the nature of hard work and who works hard and who deserves a certain degree or standard of living in this country. What, if anything, have you seen or heard that seems to come close? You're just hitting us with. Thank you, Tom, for the book. It's a great book, and we've just been a joy to work with you all these years. So one thing that I think about, so I'm going to blend the two of the first question in this one, is when I first came to Washington, there was this narrative that you can't talk about race. Don't talk about race as a policy professional. You will lose the argument. People will run out of room, blah, blah, blah. I don't want to hear it. So one of the things that Tom has done for so many years and really brought us to is given us language to talk about race and a policy conversation, which we started to see some ground being made in circles around Washington. Now some may say that that's because of the, you know, we had a black president in the Obama administration. But actually, we were having these conversations in Republican offices and, you know, conservative Democratic offices. It was a clear recognition that the issues of race were affecting their home districts and their states. Then the election happened. And then I saw this shift back towards, well, let's only talk about the white working class and the white poor and rural poor because that's, you know, that's a safe place to have a conversation about poverty. And one thing that we at CPD did was we said, you know what, we can talk about both at the same time. Right? Because if we don't talk about race, as Tom points out, probably on black wealth, white wealth, as you talk about toxic equality, we are not going to have policies that are going to actually have impact in those communities. History has shown us that race neutral policy does not reach where it has to reach to have impact. Now, so while we think about it is, we're actually thinking about it the other way. So if we have policy that has a racial wealth analysis over it that we believe is going to touch households of color, we think that the poor whites will benefit too. You know? Something like the earned income tax credit is a good example of this. Families under a certain income threshold get the earned income tax credit. They get a refundable tax credit, a tax time that boosts their income, sometimes by 20-25% in the giving year. We know that a large number of families of color fall underneath that income threshold. But guess what? A whole lot of poor whites do too. So what we've got to do is do the analysis to make sure it's going to really go where it needs to go. And then we've got to make the sales pitch to people about how this is going to actually help their day-to-day lives. It's going to make a difference in their day-to-day lives. That's where you're going to start to see more widespread support. And maybe you can start that. Maybe. I'm not going to put it that way, but maybe you can start to penetrate some of these pervasive myths, because if people feel like they're going to benefit, my hunch tells me they're not going to really care who else. Interesting. Tom, I wonder if you have anything that you would want to add to that at all. What's your sense? Sure. So I try and think about moving forward. And I've been taken by the expression visionary opposition. And that means a couple of things for me. It means fighting for the kinds of reforms and changes that build constituencies. That is that symbolically work with families and communities that are affected and relates concerns back and forth and is understood in a way that whatever gains happen, they then are part of the constituency that needs to keep fighting to make that change more long lasting than just the next budget cycle or just the next electoral cycle. It also means to me the kinds of reforms that not only build constituencies, but that at the same time loosens the structural bonds of oppression and that loosens those institutional mechanisms at the same time. I don't think this is a great example, but I want to go back to the constituency building for a second. I think there are a lot of lessons in the defeat of the attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act. I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned in that. One of them is that maybe the story is not over, but we'll leave that aside for the moment. But a lesson I really want to lift up is that constituencies understood that something was about to be taken away from them that they have, and that was a strong motivator. And I would suggest it is a lot more difficult to take something away from constituencies that they think they have than to symbolically talk about a proposal that divides folks by race and class. And that's one of the reasons for me that I think medium term and long term the sense of building constituencies with the reforms we're trying to make, whether we actually make them, but certainly in the case making for them is I think absolutely critical. One last point here. I hope it's not a cautionary tale, but we need to rethink what we do. We need to rethink the venues and avenues that we pursue change. In the Obama administration, thank you. I think the notion was that government is our friend, and we try to influence it in very different ways. And if we don't go the legislative route, there's the administrative route. And we talk to Treasury, and we talk to State Treasury departments, so that, for example, in the State of Illinois, a broad coalition, it took them a decade to get on the legislative agenda and to pass a pension savings plan for those families, for those workers that work at employers who didn't offer them, if you had 25 employers or more. And it took effect, I think, July 1 of 2015, a decade's worth of constituency building, open, public, transparent work. What happened in Washington last week? A group of Republicans overturned the law that allowed states to do that. And we don't know now what the impact of a decade-long constituency building might be because it wasn't protected in a way that didn't quite maybe understand that a little turn of an administrative law behind closed doors in Washington might change a long-term gain. So we need to become smarter and learn some of those lessons as we move along. Just reacting to the first part of what you said, if one of the lessons of the debate on the Affordable Care Act is that it's really hard to take away from folks something that they have and will be willing to fight for, I don't know how you reconcile that with a proposal on the mortgage income deduction. That's the Affordable Care Act debate. Look, it was not a foregone conclusion that it was going to end up the way that it did and there's still maybe a fight to fight. It feels to me like the mortgage interest deduction is a much higher hurdle because it's been around for much longer and the people who benefit from it think of themselves as middle class. And we may be about if we have a tax reform debate and this is an argument that my former colleague Ron Klane has been making, there should be a conversation about a middle-class tax cut, which may be the right political conversation to have. I promise you if we get to that conversation it's not going to be aimed at the folks that you were focused on in the book. So this is a very hard thing to build a constituency around that can be affected. I wonder if there are perhaps, in this moment in particular, since we've begun to talk a bit about our contemporary political situation, I do wonder if there are ways in which you all see, and I guess we'll have to be honest, in the 2016 election into the present, were there ways in which you all saw that some of the myths that Tom discussed in his book, some of the narratives that Tom raised in his book, I think the Selective Amnesia being one of them, but also notions of deservedness perhaps being another. What were the ways that you all saw that play out to build coalitions that have created our current political reality? They're big, I know, but I'm curious about what you have. What comes to mind for you? Well, one thing that confounds me and I'm trying to figure out, so I'll have to answer. But there's a lot baked into our tax code that if you break it out in peace, cuts against a lot of these narratives about American values, for example. One value is that you should become wealthy and well off by the sweat of your brow and the stick-to-it-edness of your effort. But that doesn't reconcile with, as Tom talked about in his book, placing a preference for income made through investments, basically putting money away and letting it do its thing, and wage income, which is earning your way by the sweat of your brow. Those two things don't reconcile. So for me, what it sets to me is a basic fundamental misunderstanding about how our tax code works and how we redistribute wealth in our country. Again, that word redistribution often is framed as redistributing this way rather than the way it actually is distributed. So I feel like the challenge that I think about everybody gets me up, is how can we start to make that evident to people because it really flies in the face of a lot of the kind of American values that we hold dear. So that's one thing. I completely agree with that, and I think of the range of policy proposals that are proposed in the book, that's the place where we may have the most leverage exactly the reason that you cite. That people don't know necessarily that this is a thing. And look, explaining that it's a thing is not particularly easy, but this notion that people whose wages are taxed, but people who earn arguably the same amount of money but just through their investments are not taxed at the same rate feels like a fundamental injustice. It gives us something to push against, which connects to values and frankly limits in an interesting way the class of folks that would see themselves as being negatively affected. And I wonder whether or not the fact that we're in this moment where an administration has assembled which is made up of really, really wealthy people where there is the possibility of constructing an argument that these are folks, that there is maybe some self-dealing going on, or that certainly folks, we're going to end up in a debate on tax policy. The folks sitting in the building where I used to work are likely to benefit from it differently than perhaps the people on this panel are. That gives us a foothold into the debate which we may not have had. And we ought to think about using it thoughtfully and finding ways to use it effectively. I would second and third both of those. I think there may be, if we get wise about it, there may be a moment for transparency here for making that argument around no tax reform without returns, no tax reform without understanding the interest of people trying to rewrite that code so that we understand it better. And I think that that may go a long way. I would also like to go back to one of the issues that Jeremy raised. And that is, and Janelle too, I'm sort of hesitant to say this, but sometimes it's just plain old meanness that gets embedded in policy and in thinking. Sometimes we have this sort of great conversation around implicit bias. What about explicit bias? We don't have that conversation very much. And I would point to, and I'll go there, I'll make the point, we publicly subsidized savings for college education for a lot of folks, whether it's through 529s or through other vehicles in the United States. And the federal government, we publicly invest in that as a public good. Half of the states in the United States still hold it against social welfare assistance if poor families are putting money aside for their children's higher education. They could possibly lose their benefits, their eligibility, or have those benefits lowered. And I dare say that's, I'm not sure that's lack of understanding. I think there's a huge deep streak of meanness about those people, and it becomes sort of philosophically important to define an other that the rest of us define our success against. I'd like to go one step further and say, I mean, even in our, yes, even in our discussion we've discussed this, and we've mentioned race, but we've not talked about the way that race fundamentally informs what people think that people deserve, but also who deserves what, right? And if nothing else in the 2016 election, what you saw is the kindest interpretations that do not bring up words like white supremacy. The kindest interpretations are that people who are so filled with anxiety about their economic conditions and the prospects of their children have somehow, in the course of the Obama administration, become aware of trends that began 30 to 40 years ago, but they have become aware of declining opportunity and the inability to climb and shrinking job prospects and flattening wages and stagnant wages. They have become aware, they are angry, and they want someone to be punished. They want their money back. They want their standard of living back. They want their status back. In keeping with what you were saying, the idea that those people who are receiving public assistance shouldn't be able to save for their children's education is without doubt, in part, funded, like fueled or supported. It's undergirded by the idea that those people are black people, or it's people of color who are taking my money, so why should we care if they're able to send their children to college, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess I have to say that if we're having discussions, for instance, about this will help poor white people, too, is that or is that not ultimately a capitulation to the idea that unless you speak to white people and their concerns and make them primary, that you can't get anywhere politically on the initiative. I think the way I respond to that is I don't think, so I think if we say that we are for the work of reducing inequality, I'll make one point, now I'll make another one. We should also care about poor white people. Because if you get it to that dynamic about is it inner city blacks in the Chicago versus poor whites in Appalachia, that's a losing conversation. So whatever you do has to have that, what I think what I was saying earlier, if you have a full analysis, a full understanding of how this policy of implemented will have an impact on both, you probably got a good policy, but that means you have to talk about race. To the point about meanness and down this line, I mean quite frankly, to go to where I think you're going is, you have to call it out. We do. So we have to call out when we're saying that immigrant families can't get a certain tax benefit. We have to say there's no reason for that. They're paying taxes, they're earning income in this country. There is no reason to do that other than to be flat on me. Like that is what it is. And I don't see any way around that. Because what happens is, and what I've watched happen in Washington is the thing that keeps me up at night when we do coalition work is that's how they start fracturing coalitions. Okay, we'll give you that policy you want, but we're not going to give it to those folks. So then everyone else says, well, that's really good. Maybe we'll take it, and then that's where the coalition fractures. So I think to get there, you have to have really strong coalition that are willing to put their own self-interest on the line in order to keep the coalition together and then be willing to call out, like that is what it is. I think I fundamentally agree. I think there is no question that there is resentment against the notion that there are people who are portrayed as kind of getting over while doing nothing, and we have contended, not just in this last election, but for a long time, that people feel there's a sense of unfairness because they see themselves working really hard and struggling more and more, and they perceive other people as doing less and reaping the benefits of whatever the first group's tax dollars pay for. I think that's real, and we have to acknowledge that. And I don't know if folks saw President Obama's interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, but they sort of got into it right back and forth on this very set of questions, and I have to say, look, I worked for a very optimistic man who refused to, even with his knowledge of that and his experience of the level of resentment that was leveled against him and his family, who never gave up on his sense of the fundamental goodness of the American people, and I think it's possible for both things to be true, and I think it is important to acknowledge the history as you do in your book and understand it, but also invest in a politics that appealed to what's good about this country, what's good about our capacity to build a society where we are fighting for each other. I haven't given up even after the experience of the last few months on the notion that that's possible that we can build a politics and a policy on those principles. That is the best of who we are. That's what our politics should be appealing to. That means a commitment to justice and calling out injustice when we see it, but also means not giving up on the capacity to persuade people in the middle of America that this is their fight too because this is how we move forward together. We're still the same place that elected Barack Obama twice. We didn't stop being that place, but it turns out we're the same place that had Jim Crow laws and all kinds of other terrible things. We didn't stop being that place ever either. We have to reconcile all of that in order to forge the future that we're talking about. Tom calls on the book. We still have to deal with a lot of policies that are dividing people physically in this country. Segregation and housing still exists. The federal HUD is still bringing redlining cases against financial institutions. In order to address a lot of these issues, we still got a lot of stuff to clean up. As if this divide between these two worlds is imagined. People are literally not physically in the same place, and we need to deal with that. We still got a lot of work to do in that area as well. They don't physically live in the same place. Their kids don't go to the same schools, and we know they don't go to the same segments or sectors or occupations when they go to work. I think that we should perhaps open up the discussion just a bit. To the audience, I think I'll just lay down a couple of small ground rules or requests. I think it would be great if all questions ended in an actual question mark. Maybe we should all try to keep including myself our little mini-sermonette to a minimum today. Just in the interest of time. I think if everyone would wait for a microphone because there are people online who are watching so that they can hear you. If you're off mic, they won't be able to hear you. And then finally, if you will, say your name, and if you're with a particular organization that you'd like to share with us, let us know. There's a young man here in the front who put his hand up first, so I'm always like that. Let's do it. Hi, I'm Michelle Lim, and this has been a very interesting panel. My question is really concerning some very wealthy industrial donors such as Mercer's and the Koch brothers. So what has their role been in I think supporting the myths and false narratives that have been holding back the progress, and I think it's by logical conclusion that they're really supporting themselves and their businesses by perpetuating these narratives. So great, let me kick that off. Yes, you're absolutely right, but it's also complicated. And I would suggest that a lot of their advocacy and lobbying is in their own self-interest, but a lot of the lobbying and advocacy is also about engaging and changing the rules of the market that allow them to sustain their profitability over long periods of time. Let me give a specific example. One of the policies we talk about in the book is the estate tax. And for me, it's symbolic, but it's more than symbolic. About 18 of every 10,000 deaths in the United States, those families will be eligible to pay the estate tax. 18 out of every 10,000 deaths. Why is this a huge issue? It's a huge issue for the families involved. And if we look at who does the lobbying around that to raise the ceiling on what's excluded, currently $10.3 million for a couple is excluded, and then the tax rate is 35%. 35% not of the $10.3 million, but of the first dollar over the $10.3 million. So the tax rate is nowhere near 35%. All right, just a little walk for all of us there. The advocates, the lobbyists on that include... It actually goes through a Koch Brothers mechanism, but they aren't the biggest donors. The biggest donors are families that produce things we eat and places we buy things and markets. The Wegman family, the Mars family are two of the five largest donors who have lots of people they want to pass their great fortunes to and pay less amount of money to it. Now, I think that the narrative around that is that a lot of Americans don't want to make the estate tax even more progressive than it might have been in our past because of the American sense that we too someday might be that wealthy. And we too might not want to be taxed on the $10.3 million in first dollar. And that's part of the cultural myth, I would suggest. But that's an easy one to break down and is broken down. My point there is the question was about wealthy families and lobbying. I think looking at the estate tax and how that's lobbied is a good illustration of that. And some of that you can pick up in the book. Good question. Maybe we'll go to this gentleman right in the back in the center. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you. My name is Chris. I grew up in Trump country, if you will, with a bunch of folks who I've spent a lot of time talking with over the last six or eight months. And I'm taken with some of the things the gentleman on stage right, is it Jeremy? Jeremy. Talked about earlier, about messaging and about framing issues. And I come back to the classic line that perception is reality. The folks who I grew up with who overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump, they don't believe they're racist. And that is their perception. And the reason they don't believe they're racist, and I think most all of us in this room would look at them and listen to their opinions and argue that they are, but they grew up in households where the n-word was common. Yet they would punish their children for using it or for playing hip-hop records that have it. They voted for President Obama. Their perception is that they are very different than their parents and their grandparents. Their perception is, and arguably this is demonstrably true, that they work harder than their parents did, but relative to what's around them, they are worse off. Their perception is, and again, arguably this is true, that their parents grew up in a world, and their grandparents grew up in a world where there was minimal welfare, but they grew up in a welfare state. And over the last 40 years, while there's been lots of welfare, they're worse off. And it's very difficult to reach folks like that with the kind of facts that you're sharing today because those facts are counter to their own facts of experience. Now, they don't know what's happened to the welfare state. They don't know why 50 years of welfare hasn't changed the inequality you're documenting, but they do experience that after being involved as payors of welfare over the last 50 years, from their experience, they're worse off. How do you attack that? Because that's not the world we experience inside the Beltway, but it is the world in awful lot of Middle America experiences. From a policy perspective, I would argue that you attack that by putting forward policies that focus on dealing with economic inequality, some of the policies that are proposed in the book, and making sure that you're conducting a conversation which helps people see how they are connected and how they benefit. I mean, I think it's, again, this is something that President Obama talked about a lot in both of his campaigns and throughout his administration. Folks have been squeezed. They are working harder and doing less well. Now, the analysis about why that is and that it's somebody else's fault is inaccurate, but the reality of the economic situation is not. Policies that attack that are, I think, the right policy approach, and hopefully that gives us the space to have a different kind of conversation than these. Things are bad, so therefore I need to make it worse for you. One response, and I don't know how much I can do about that. I mean, I can create policies that I think are going to help, but I think we do create policies that I think are going to help everything. One of the things that I would challenge is that we as a society, so I really can't refute that someone feels like they're working hard and they are angry about that and they have some reason to be angry. What bothers me is that there's no consequences for the people that stoke that anger and point it in the wrong direction. That's what bothers me, and what annoys me, and this is me talking, I'm not talking about this, I'm not speaking. Is that we go into these election cycles and we talk to these voters and we listen to this and we let it go without actually pointing it to where it is. So when people make claims like that the coal jobs are coming back to West Virginia, they're not. Let's stop with that and let's really have a conversation about how we can better the lives of those people there. That's the thing that aggravates me. Again, I'm not into business of addressing that problem, but I think it's a big part of what's at the center of what you're getting at. I think that's an absolute core question. Part of what I was hearing is the reality that families are working harder. So a quick data point. Between 1970 and 2013, American families are working 11% more hours aggregate per year. In fact, families as we get smaller are working harder. Just to try to stay in the same place. That is what needs to be explained and understood about why that's happening and not the distraction. You aren't working hard because somebody else is getting goodies. You're working hard because pensions have been taken away, because wages haven't kept place because there's no robust system of paid sick leave of all kinds of things that have pushed you to work longer, second and third job, pushed other adults in the household into the paid workforce. That's what, if I can use the collective we, that's where we collectively have failed to get that understanding and to engage that. If I could add one thing, I would say facts still matter. And in the... Thank you. They do. I mean, they just do. You just spent a lot of time with them. Right. I spent a lot of time weeping for the facts, but they do matter. In this case, I would just add that I think there's an obligation for people to find a way in their personal lives and in their public lives to confront falsehoods with facts. There are polite ways to do that. There are meaningful ways to do that, but that has got to be a part of this conversation because the people that you are talking about are the primary recipients of welfare. And so if you want to have that conversation and they want to talk about who's been getting goodies, well, let's talk about that. So I think facts matter and I would encourage people to go forward with the facts, please. But that's that. I think we have time for maybe one more question. This woman here in the beige sweater. Yeah, the hell yourself. My name is Donna Bennett. I work in international development, so I'm interested in this discussion from a domestic point of view. I'm just wondering who do you see... I'm asking this to the panel members. Who do you see as the... who can take this forward? Because I feel like the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party I think was complicit a bit in not talking about racialized inequality. There's no appetite, I think, on the Republican side, obviously. Our government seems to be not functioning in the way that it did in the previous administration, so maybe it's a big question and there's no real answer, but how do we get this conversation translated into policy and who do you think is going to champion it and move forward? And can Republicans be convinced to see anything in this to the benefit of their constituents? That's a big question. That's a big question. I think there are some, from my vantage point, and I'm sure Cecilia has some thoughts on this as well, there are some of our current leaders who are taking up pieces of this initiative. So for example, Cher Brown from Ohio is someone that comes to mind who is leading the charge on the earned income tax credit to expand that program to workers who do not have custodial, custodianship of their children. Elizabeth Warren is someone that comes to mind who, you know, with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Dodd-Frank law that was really put in place that has really, I think, hopefully stalled some of the inequality because it pushed out some of the predatory actors really leading the charge to make sure that that agency is still there and protecting consumers. So I think that in this, there are some strong Democrats in the Senate. I mean, with the question about Republicans, I think there are distinct pieces of the agenda that Republicans can get around, get come to. So, for example, the conversation about savings is one that is aligned and a lot of Republicans have had a long track record of supporting. The earned income tax credit is one that Paul Ryan is endorsed and is, and likely will be in a Republican package if he has something to do with it. The trick is how much has to be traded away to get those things. And that's where the rubber hits the road and I can't really say who's going to be the leader on that side to kind of step up and see. Because I mean, and to the point in the back, their constituencies are the ones that are riled up in this way and have these mythical perceptions. I'll just add to that. I don't expect him to run for office, but this has been the work of Tom Perez's life and I think he's very credible. And more importantly, I think he's going to engage in the current role in a way that hopefully elevates our collective capacity to have this debate. Some of the answer to your question isn't about who's going to lead us but at some level how we lead ourselves. I do sense that with all of the stuff that we're struggling that we see going on even in this first not quite a hundred days I think people have also awakened to the notion that that the we may have taken for granted the institutions of our democracy and that they were sacred and couldn't crumble and I don't think we do anymore but at some level the answer to your question is up to us. Right. I'm very hopeful in that I see the fortunate ability I have to travel the country and to talk to a lot of groups like this and ones that are more based in communities with constituencies outside of Washington there's a lot of action going on the Center for Community Change the PICO network there's dozens of organizations like that that could be both national and have local affiliates and they're the ones that need to double down on the work that they do to explain why it is that American families are working putting in 11% more paid working hours over the last 30 years and a lot of the questions that we're talking about and help to make that translation to policy. I also want to persuade all of our very good friends with great hearts that are deeply involved in the resistance movement we have to go beyond resistance yes we have to stop the harm that's being done but we also must keep a bold vision alive we must have a place for us and the constituents we're trying to build to go to while we're stopping the harm at the moment. I think that we're going to wrap things up here but I think there are a few vettels so if you can find a couple of seconds with Tom if you have questions for any of the other panelists you might get a chance and I'll just say for myself that I deeply appreciate the work that you're doing it's so critical and if you haven't read the book you should Tom has a brilliant economic mind but you don't have to in order to follow this book and there's a lot of as I'm sure you can tell from the things that Tom has said tonight there's a lot of detail in here that really frankly is damning in terms of any kind of claim that we don't there's been no recognition of what we're doing or what is happening to our country at the same time there is a lot of information in here and for people who are I am not one of these people but if you are a person who is fueled by a need for a sense of hope and actionable item those are in there so I would strongly suggest you take a look and I think that is all we certainly thank you all for coming this evening