 Good morning. I'm Reed Kramer of the New America Foundation, and I'd like to welcome you here for this event, 50 years since the war on poverty, looking back and moving forward. And I've actually been looking forward to this event for some time since my colleague, Sean from Steadini, began talking about organizing this kind of discussion that would examine the historic legacy of our social policy system and see how it's impacting current policy debates. We quickly teamed up with some colleagues. Melissa Boteak at the Center for American Progress agreed to co-sponsor and participate. And Willie Elliott from the University of Kansas and also a senior research fellow here at New America thought he would use the occasion to release a new report from his Assets and Education Initiative. And that report, which there are copies available, is called Harnessing Assets to Build an Economic Mobility System. And it's available online on the event page as well as hard copies here. We'll hear from Melissa and Willie in the second panel. But I'll note, if you want to join the conversation online, you can do so by using the hashtag TalkPoverty and then follow us at AssetsNAF, NAF, or at half and 10. My remarks will begin with the observation that really the dynamic history of the 1960s is providing a pretty amazing set of 50th anniversary events to commemorate. Last year we had the historic Civil Rights March on Washington for 1963. This past fall was the assassination of JFK. Next year it will be the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. And these were all watershed moments in our nation's history. And I think there's really a civic obligation to take a moment to reflect upon them and consider their impacts. The war on poverty is particularly worthy given the large scope of programs that were created, that were launched at this time. And as we're going to hear from our historian that we've brought in our ringer, Alice O'Connor, who's joining us from UC Santa Barbara, the war on poverty was not just one thing. It was a multifaceted effort that acknowledged the significant scale of the problems at hand, the need for interventions that cut across program areas and also the structural obstacles that were created by the economy and really the legacy of racial discrimination. So when LBJ announced in his State of the Union in January 1964 this ambitious goal to improve the outlook for the millions of Americans that were living on the outskirts of hope, I think it's important to recall he'd only been president for seven pretty tumultuous weeks. And it was in March of that year, 64, 50 years ago this month that he forwarded the initial legislative package to Congress that would eventually become the economic opportunities, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Many of the programs that were part of that effort or related efforts continue. To serve to this day as part of our social safety net, they were either created or bolstered as part of this effort and it was a bipartisan effort, important to note and that this includes food stamps, SNAP, Social Security, other cash assistance programs, things that we traditionally think of as the social safety net. However, if we focus just on these programs, really we're not getting the whole story. There were efforts around healthcare with Medicare and Medicaid, there were job and employment training programs like Job Corps, Vista, education was a big part of the push with Title I and Head Start and there were even others, so it was really a large undertaking and I think to the credit of the architects of the effort, they really were acknowledging some really important interconnections, ending discrimination, creating economic opportunities, these were the strategic objectives that we're trying to unify the effort and then this would lead to a full employment economy. Another point that's worth kind of recognizing is the context at that time was really the civil rights movement that was making very strong demands on the system, that was really creating this impetus for action. So numerous programs were created that had specific activities, but from another perspective, war on poverty expanded federal government's reach in these broad areas of health, educational and kind of economic outcomes. So these were big aspirations and it's fair to ask, what was achieved? Now we have a contemporary critique of Paul Ryan and some of the other conservatives in Republican voices in Congress and they're claiming that poverty won and that might be more simplistic than I think we're looking to get to today, but really they're saying that government has unwittingly created some poverty traps. It's government policy that is preventing people from moving forward. So the Ryan report that came out recently kind of catalogued all of the programs that the federal government's involved in that are kind of in play here and they're complex, they're overlapping and even the generosity of them is undercutting work efforts. So that's their critique. I think it might be less relevant in terms of how we think of the war on poverty than it is for looking at the contemporary set of means tested federal programs, but it is part of the current dynamic. And I think I would argue that war on poverty vision in its original manifestation dramatically changed what the expectations were for the society. What constitutes a fair and a civilized society? And then it reaches into a lot of other things beyond these means tested programs like labor standards and legal representation and the right to vote. These are all things that were part of the broad effort. Further, I think there's a case to be made that we've seen some objective progress for starters. Poverty has declined since the early 1960s. It's declined by more than a third by many measures. Then we can look at 2012 alone and see that public policies lifted probably around 45 million people out of poverty. You know, there are limitations with these systems. We have cash assistance like TANF programs that don't expand during a recession, but the counter cyclical nature of food stamps and SNAP program did have a very significant mitigating effect. So it would have been a lot worse without these kind of programs in place. We can also acknowledge that too many Americans still live on the economic margin that regardless of how we measure poverty, we've got persistent levels of poverty. We've got scandalous rates of child poverty in this country. We've got increasing indicators of inequality and really a lot less mobility than people assume. Given the pervasive partisan dialogue that's out there in the country and in Washington, I think it's a challenge about can we do better? And generally in the current debates, the left wants to talk about inequality as it's becoming more apparent with more evidence. The right is countered that by saying we need to talk about mobility and people's ability to rise up the ladder. I'll say that that actually creates a little bit more common ground than we might assume, and it might be the basis for a renewed policy effort. The mobility framework can be very constructive, I think, in how we think about poverty. And it leads to questions about what are the tools and the resources that a person needs to make progress in their lives. And this is where the asset's perspective comes in. This is a lot of the work that we do here at New America. Historically, poverty is focused on income because it's a proxy for consumption. It's a way to look at how people's immediate needs can be addressed. But I think we know that economic well-being isn't determined at a single moment in time. It also, the hardship involves deficits of getting access to resources, information, and other kinds of opportunities. And when these deficits are compounded over time, it can be particularly debilitating. And this is where mobility matters. For many families moving up and out of poverty and to achieve kind of economic stability and security, it's going to require both income and assets. People can't just be expected to spend their way out of poverty. They need to gain access to the kind of resources that can help them move ahead. And this is where even small amounts of savings that are available for families to access when there are income disruptions or unexpected events can be very, very, very meaningful, even modest amounts. The other part of the theory is that having a small amount of assets even can change, have behavioral effects, can change the way you think about and plan for the future. So anyway, that's the theory of how assets matter. And I think increasingly we've seen evidence, an evidence base, that this theory has some validity. So if that's true, it has implications for how we conceive, design, and implement social policy. And that's the theme of a book that was just released this week. I was co-editor of with my colleague Trina Shanks from Michigan. You have a handout that was on the table coming in. And in 13 chapters, it looks at the rise of the asset building perspective and how it's impacted social policy thinking over the last 20 years. One of my chapters in that book identifies an agenda that builds upon a policy agenda that uses the assets framework to construct an anti-poverty agenda. So there's a number of policies that are highlighted there, ways to help families save, a way to reform the tax code to create meaningful incentives and kind of fix its more regressive features, ways to help families acquire assets like affordable homes in appropriate manners, and then ways to connect children to savings platforms as early in life as possible. There are many details that remain to be addressed about these ideas. But I think there are real advantages in incorporating the asset's perspective into policy efforts. And I think this work has really helped advance the conversation. Today, there's a lot less focus or, on some circles there's still a focus. But in others, I think it's more acknowledged that poverty is not the result of individual defects and people confront conditions beyond their control and they're going to strive to better themselves and move up the ladder. And the puzzle then is to look at what policies can create the right kind of support structures. I think there's also a widespread recognition that there's not a one size fits all solution. For some, it might be education and training that might make a difference. For others, it's stable housing and a good job. For others, it might be how to start an enterprise of their own. And these kinds of interventions, they're going to play out over time. And I think an anti-poverty agenda needs to recognize this. And this kind of approach has really germane to people up and down the income ladder. So while there's a case to be made that building up assets can make a difference for people who start out with less, assets are inextricably linked to a whole range of economic security aspirations for most American families. And assets really are this key to mobility as we're going to hear about later today. So there's more information in the book, but for this discussion, I'll just emphasize that the promise of this framework is its potential to attract support across the political spectrum. And it's really kind of valuable, I think also as a lens to look back at the contested history of the war on poverty and to look forward to future policy discussions. So that's what we're going to do this morning. We're going to continue this exploration. We have two panels for you today. The first is going to look at history and the evolution of social policy efforts. And the second is going to consider how we can update our anti-poverty policy agenda in a contemporary fashion for the 21st century. My colleague, Rachel Black, is going to moderate that second panel. But I'll just quickly introduce our panelists on the first session. We're going to be started off here by Alice O'Connor. I mentioned Professor Historian from University of California at Santa Barbara and author of Poverty Knowledge, Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor. And actually her and the other extended bios are in your handouts and also available on the web. And then Sean Fremstead is going to offer remarks. He is a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Sean's looked at the impacts of current policies and has also written about the bipartisan roots of anti-poverty programs. And I'm also very pleased that we'll be joined by Keelolo Kijikazi, who is a program officer at the Ford Foundation. She's done great work there and she'll offer her perspective on how philanthropy generally and how the Ford Foundation specifically has really played an influential role in this history and also has shaped policy making efforts with the evolution of their grant making strategy. So that's the lineup for today, for this morning. And let me, I'm fortunate that you all can join us and let me just turn it over to Alice. Thank you. I'm gonna clap there I guess, yeah. Okay, well, thank you Reed and thank you for convening this. And thank you all for coming. It's always hard, Washington, DC is one of the easiest places to get an audience to talk about poverty and that's really refreshing. But one thing I wanted to thank you especially for is mentioning this, or is situating the war on poverty within the broader context of the great society. In fact, we're doing a lot of work at UCSB, a lot of public programming to acknowledge that all of these 50th anniversaries that are coming up, including the war on poverty, are not just momentary things and are not, shouldn't be understood in isolation from one another. But are really very important moments in the history of democracy. And that is what, it's one of the framings I hope you keep in mind as I'm going to very, very quickly, race through in not enough time. I'm going to really give you a very sort of broad overview of the historical roots, purposes, programs and some of the lessons I think we can take away from the war on poverty. So, I hope this is big enough. What I'm gonna talk about, I'll try to sort of distill it into asking the question, why poverty? I mean, why rediscover it as historians come to talk about it. Why does poverty emerge on the public agenda in 1964? What was the war on poverty? Why didn't we win? And I put that in quotes because I don't think that's really the right way to think about it. Although, of course, the win-lose, the win-lose question was invited by the way, the moniker of the war on poverty in the first place. But also, I want to then talk about some of the insights and challenges and lessons for looking ahead. So, why poverty in 1964? I mean, after all, in historical memory, but to a large degree, to some degree in historical reality, and I say some degree, we had achieved an astonishing degree of affluence and an astonishingly widespread degree of affluence in the United States. By the mid-1960s, and certainly among the things that we had achieved is a greater degree of shared prosperity, which is to say an extended period of growth in which the income quintiles had a fairly equal share in it than ever before in U.S. history. So why is it that poverty reemerges on the agenda? Well, the first thing I would say is that despite those that sort of vaunted imagery of the affluent society at the time and now, there was trouble in the affluent society. And that is nicely captured in the Council of Economic Advisers' report of 1964, which accompanied Lyndon B. Johnson's first State of the Union address in which he declared unconditional war on poverty, and I should add he declared unconditional war on poverty and unemployment, which I'll get to in a minute. I'm not going to go through all of these things. Whoops, I didn't mean to do that. But just to underscore if I can figure out this laser. There we go. Just, again, one-fifth of the nation. If you think the famous framing in the New Deal, one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed. Well, if we're in the affluent society, we shouldn't be talking about one-fifth of a nation falling below a very minimal, very, very minimal poverty line of $3,000 a year. A lot of these things, though, a lot of these trends that are outlined in the report, again, I will not cover each one, remain familiar, familiar stories today. I'll just point to the bottom one here. At that point, a quarter of poor families headed by a woman, but disproportionately, half of all families headed by a woman are poor. This is not an unfamiliar dynamic to us today. But the other important thing I think I would point out here is that the heads of all poor families, where are we? One-third of poor families are headed by a person over 65 and almost one-half of all families headed by such a person are poor. Now, that is something that has changed quite dramatically. And that has changed dramatically because of social policy. Let me just note there, though, that doesn't mean we have actually solved the problem of our elderly citizens in need. Millions and millions of elderly people are living just above the poverty line. And some would say not particularly in adequate circumstances. But in any case, so there's trouble in the affluent society. And that's very much reflected in this incredibly important Council of Economic Advisors report. The other thing I would point to, a series of in the affluent society, a series of recessions throughout the 1950s that had left the mark. And that, by the early 1960s, had essentially created a campaign issue such that Kennedy runs on the, in 1960, runs on the platform of getting the economy moving again. But also, the economy was still in the doldrums. The Council of Economic Advisors report also complains that unemployment is unacceptably high. In fact, astonishingly high. It's 5.5%. We need to do something about that. The other thing, though, I want to point to about that is that there was a tremendous amount of discussion, especially towards the late 1950s, about the threat of automation. And that is actually a term, it's a more encompassing term, that I think we're pointing to a lot of structural dynamics in the economy that were evident at the time, that were disproportionately affecting, well, low wage workers. And there were plenty of low wage workers at the time. But minorities and women as well, who were really stuck in the parts of the economy that were going to be most affected by structural economic change. And that's kind of captured by this slide here, or this image here. Labor, and a lot of people within the labor movement, were fighting for a response to the threat of automation by calling for a shorter work week, a 30-hour work week at the same, essentially, at higher wages. And in fact, the next chapter, Chapter 3 of the Council of Economic Advisors report actually addresses that issue. So the bottom line is there's trouble, and there's economic trouble in the so-called affluent society. But there's also a lot of political dynamics. There's a tremendous amount of political push for a war on poverty. First of all, quickly, presidential politics, many of you may have heard the story of the Kennedy campaign in 1960. Kennedy, among a sea of people running for the nomination, including Hubert Humphrey, wants to distinguish himself. And he's not considered a particularly attractive or electable candidate at the time in a lot of ways. But one of the ways he distinguishes himself, and in particular appeals to the voters of West Virginia in the Democratic primary, is to say, I am the person who is going to be able to, A, understand and do something about your poverty problems. And that's one of the things that's actually credited with helping Kennedy win the nomination and win the West Virginia vote in the primary campaign. Kennedy's also making a pitch to the African-American vote, but very specifically the urban African-American vote. Not particularly by presenting himself as a racial progressive. He was far too careful a politician for that. But by actually, again, presenting himself as the person who understood and was going to deal with the problems of poverty, as well as getting the economy moving again. Fast forward to the re-election campaign in 1964, and in the year leading up to it before Kennedy's assassination, the campaign is looking for a theme. It's looking for a theme that's, again, helped to boost Kennedy's economic agenda, which centered around a massive tax cut that was going to stimulate the economy, but also to draw in the sort of draw on the compassion of the suburban vote. And they were circling around a lot of things, but poverty was one of the things that they were thinking about, a battle on poverty, as they called it, as a way to distinguish Kennedy and to boost Kennedy's presidential campaign. But then we have to understand the politics of personality going on, as well. Because once LBJ assumes the mantle, and in those seven weeks when LBJ is trying to figure out what is he going to do, not only to sort of continue the Kennedy legacy on the one hand, but on the other hand, to make his mark, to say, I am the president, this is my administration. There's a lot of things in the archives about LBJ reporting to people, I like that poverty program. That's my kind of a program. And as history has it, putting his stamp on it. So here is LBJ at the State of the Union address declaring unconditional war on poverty. So he immediately escalates it. Not quite as much in dollars as one would have liked, but certainly in rhetoric, from a battle to an unconditional war. He essentially says, let's really ramp this thing up. I'm going to make it my signature program. And since I'm bringing in presidential politics here, I can't help but throw a few slides about the Johnson treatment in here. This, I mean, actually, this gets to some very, very important things about presidential politics. And it's not just the politics of personality, it's the politics of presidential style. But it also is the politics of having an enormously ambitious agenda. And well, knowing how to get it through. So here is LBJ as the new dealer. And essentially that is how he came up and came of age. And that is very much how he thought of himself as a new dealer. Here is just the Johnson way, a person of the people. Here is the famous Johnson treatment, getting his way in Congress. And there are just dozens and dozens of images of this. And in fact, there's a play on Broadway now that's, what's it called, All the Way or something like that? Is it All the Way? Yes. And evidently, Brian Cranston does an excellent job of sort of capturing LBJ's treatment. And this one, I really love this slide because to me it kind of captures. Kennedy trying to reign Johnson in. You know, it's the sort of like, this of course, there's famous tension between the two. But in a way, this is I'm going to continue but really I'm going to break loose of the Kennedys. So there's also, and I'll be quicker on some of these other politics, but it's important to understand, I have 10 minutes left, oh, I have to move it. There's an element of Cold War politics, global politics. Not just Cold War, but global politics as well. And there, you know, not only I've got some slides here about the famous kitchen debates in 1959 when Nixon actually gets up and says we are a classless society. Now think about it, I mean, this is a president using the language of class in an interesting way, but also this is, Kennedy comes into office and declares the 1960s, he goes to the UN and declares the 1960s the decade of development. So we are going to end poverty worldwide in our struggle with the Soviet Union for the control of the third world on the one hand, but also, you know, in this effort to show the world the way of the future. So that was an important, I think, element as well. But I really want to emphasize more, even more important than any of these other things is the social movement politics of the day. There's an absolutely huge amount of pressure and no question about it is throughout the archives that Kennedy administration is looking over its collective shoulder at what is happening in the South in particular, but also in August of 1963 what is happening at its doorstep. You can really read this in the archives at some of the internal meetings when they are talking about what's going to happen with this march on Washington and what are they going to bring up. So there's not only that, but there's a lot of movement building going on around the country. Cesar Chavez is organizing farm workers in California. The thing I really want to emphasize about that is that let's not forget the march on Washington in 1963 is the march for jobs and freedom. This is about the politics of class as well as race. And a lot of historical scholarship has really brought that to the fore, but it's an insight we too often overlook. The other thing I wanted to point to is in this slide here, this is a slide from, and I can't seem to get this, okay. This is JFK and Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. Now I bring that up because this is the politics of winning the South in a different, this is a different kind of Southern strategy, right? This is seeing where the Democrats can selectively form alliances with the non-segregationist progressive Democratic Party represented by people like Terry Sanford who actually helps to launch an enormously ambitious initiative funded by a humongous grant of $7 million by the Ford Foundation called the North Carolina Fund which was about organizing county by county, town by town around issues of race and poverty. And again, playing that very, very delicate politics of class and race in the South, in North Carolina. Things have changed in North Carolina today or maybe not. Then the politics of publicity as well. This is familiar to many of us so I'll just quickly point to the role of people like Michael Harrington. But again, just simply one among many, putting poverty in the headlines, you know, in a media that was not as fragmented as it is today where a headline could actually draw attention and start a conversation that would be sustained. But also really important interventions like Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame that was about hunger in America and released on Thanksgiving Day in 1960. The important thing about that was essentially, you know, he's making the point that these are the people, these very, very incredibly low wage workers, these people working at slave wages who have made your prosperity and your dinner possible. So that was very important. And then I would wanna point to the role of ideas and ideology at the time. This, we know that post-war liberalism was very much about a belief in the role of government and the commitment to activist government, but it's worth underscoring it today. And there was not an excuse about the commitment to activist government at the time. Carrying that out and continuing that idea was a commitment to Keynesian economics. What's important about that is absolutely the focus on growth, but also the idea that government has a role in actively managing the economy in particular through fiscal policy that is progressive rather than fiscal policy that is about dismantling government. We use taxes to actually and spending taxing and spending to actually promote the social good rather than to undermine the government. But again, I wanna emphasize here this idea that we're going to finish the unfinished agenda of the new deal. And that is captured in some of the ideas that LBJ puts forth in his famous Great Society speech in 1964 at University of Michigan. Sorry to race through this, but we can come back and talk about any of these points. So what was the war on poverty? Building on all the things I just said, sort of this idea that we have a number one weapon against poverty and that's the language they used and it was economic growth. It was not just any kind of economic growth, it's Keynesian economic growth. It's economic growth at full employment. And this is really the biggest rationale for the Kennedy tax cut that was not passed until 1964, which in the State of the Union address, I mean LBJ's agenda is to get that passed so that he can do the other things that he wants to do. So the full employment economic growth. And I will say, despite their acknowledgement of some of the debates around structural economic change, very limited and I would argue too limited and many people argued at the time, too limited structural interventions to deal with the problems of area under development and some of the infrastructural problems and labor marks they only have five minutes. Okay, quickly then I'm gonna just go through these slides very fast and we can again come back to it. But expanding and building on the social safety net, all of these things, including food stamps even though the actual program was created in 1964, built on New Deal programs. So, and then I really do wanna mention this whole idea of fulfilling these rights. I mean this is a huge part of the unfinished agenda of the New Deal, but I specifically use the language to fulfill these rights because this was essentially the language that was used in the Truman Report, the Truman Presidential Commission on Civil Rights that called for many of the things that were not passed until the 1960s. But the point is all of this stuff is happening, all of this stuff is happening as part of a war against need and a war against discrimination, the broad war on poverty. Okay, so the more focused, narrow war on poverty, no slouch itself is centered on the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Some of the programs read already, mentioned about human capital enhancement, but I really wanna focus on the community action program. I would love to talk about institutional reform because I think it's an underappreciated dimension of the war on poverty, but I wanna get to some other things so I invite you to ask me to come back to my points about institutional reform, because really, really an important part of the war on poverty. But I really want to emphasize this is the part that our debates in Washington, even among progressive allies of things like fighting poverty, tends to leave out when we're talking about the war on poverty and that is community action. The grassroots war on poverty and this was about participatory economic as well as social and political democracy. This was about using, in fact, using a lot of interventions that had been sort of experimented with at the local level with funding from foundations like Ford, these built on the gray areas programs in the 1960s to challenge the local power structure but also to get funding directly from Washington so that poor people could have a say in how the money was spent, which of course helps us to understand why we didn't win quote unquote. Again, we'll talk some more about, there are many, many reasons here but what I want to focus on here is the politics of massive resistance has a tremendous amount to do with the, well, the success that a lot of these community action programs were having specifically at challenging that local power structure and actually empowering poor people to do things like run for office and to do things like run local community health clinics to run local employment agencies, all of these things outside of the range of the local funding agencies and local power structure. But it met, among other things, with massive resistance. Not only, not only in the ferociously segregationist self which it did at every single step in the way. We cannot, cannot underestimate the importance of massive resistance and I really want to say that's a lesson we have to continue to learn because we're right back in the politics of massive resistance today. But it also met massive resistance in the urban north from the big city mayors who used every single possible bureaucratic channel they had to resist having funding funneled into the hands of people they didn't want to have it in the hands of. But also agricultural growers and the South Lowage employers, there was tremendous amount of resistance to the changes and the challenges that the war on poverty presented. So I have to get to a couple of insights from looking back. I want to underscore, I think Reed was getting at this before, the war on poverty is not just what we tend to talk about it today as today when we are defending it against attacks by people like Paul Ryan, it was not just a series of federal interventions from the top, it was actually about the mobilization of ideas, of institutions, of politics, I mean all of those things working together and of people working together. As I've been underscoring here, it was largely fought on the ground which was why it was so controversial but why it had so much potential for change, I would argue. Poverty didn't end, absolutely that does not make the war on poverty a failure. In addition to many of the other things that come up when we're saying we didn't fail, the war on poverty didn't fail, look at what happened to incomes, I want to underscore some other things. Yes, it did show that the power of social policy to improve well-being but it also left an amazing legacy that is lasting today. All of these community action agencies, all these struggling community-based institutions, one of which I will refer to the California Rural Legal Assistance Program still running strong, one of the best legal assistance programs in the country and that is one of the legacies of the war on poverty, civil law, representation in civil law for poor people. Couple of things about the challenges ahead. I think when I talk about overcoming the great divides, yes, we're familiar with these great divides of our polarized politics and of our hugely unequal economy but I really want to get us to focus on the great divide between then and now, the aspirational divide. We seem to have given up as a nation and certainly as a progressive coalition with the politics of high aspirations, with the politics of actually saying it's in our capacity to end poverty and I know it's controversial in Washington to say such a thing and it sounds completely naive but I am absolutely convinced that until we actually return to that politics of high aspirations, we are not going to make progress against economic inequality. The other thing I would say is we absolutely need to overcome the myths of failure. One myth of failure, of course, is the one we hear constantly from the right and let's not forget. I mean, this is not really an alternative analysis of numbers. I mean, it is fabrication and it's easily proven to be fabrication but also the myth, I think, that we lost the war on poverty because we tried to do too much. I think that is a historical myth that we need to get over as well. So recapturing the narrative which is not actually really by fighting against Paul Ryan's lies because as long as we do that, we're stuck in his framing and the rights framing of the issues. We need to get beyond that and to say this is about creating a just economy which of course is my second point about broadening the reform conversation, not just about tinkering around the edges and not just about improving the lives of individual people and families. That is very important but we need to get going on how we are going to reform the horribly skewed economy that we're living in right now. We need to, I think, return to the politics of class but a politics of class that is raced and gendered in ways that the war on poverty was actually pushing toward and that absolutely is possible and in fact it's necessary. You can't have a politics of class without a politics of race and gender as well and then two final points, never, never, never, never underestimate the power of massive resistance but also don't underestimate the power of grassroots activism either and this is a slide of the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina. Okay, I went over time but thank you. Okay, we'll just leave that then. I'll just stay up here. I'll just go ahead and get started here. Well, that was great, Alice, thank you so much. I think one of the things I really appreciated about that is sort of the historical depth. I think it's something too often in DC we have very policy sort of statistical based discussions of this and it's kind of really refreshing frankly to kind of bring the history in. In thinking about the context and substance of the war on poverty, I just wanted to highlight a few things and some will echo Alice's remarks. First of course, this notion that the context, the economic context, even the global context was fundamentally different. When you look at say between 1947, 1964 when Johnson declared the war, family incomes at both the middle and the bottom had increased by more than 50% in real terms and actually top-end incomes had increased too but not as quickly so you had inequality declining. So you really have this sort of, I don't want to replay the shared prosperity stuff given the extent of racial, gender, other sorts of inequalities going on but it was a very different context than we have today. I think the other thing to remember is it was no accident. We sometimes see the 50s as kind of a dead era of social policy but of course you had the accumulation of the New Deal things going on, things like the minimum wage, the creation of collective bargaining. You had the rollout of social security was always being expanded during this period even in the 50s it wasn't kind of a forgotten thing. You also had massive spending on transportation infrastructure. I mean it was really a peak period in the 50s job creation and I think that, one of the lessons I take from this is that kind of stuff needs to be part of any war and poverty agenda. You have the GI Bill too of course and you had a marginal tax rate of I think it was 91% up until 1993 or 63 I mean. We would, second I think there's a tendency in both the media and politics today to think of the war and poverty is mostly involving what conservatives call these days welfare basically any, today it's kind of any means tested program in that vocabulary but also what liberals call the safety net which is a kind of similar, you know typically liberals will include certain social insurance programs that don't have a means test but I think there's still something of a limited framing but you know clearly the war and poverty as Alice showed was not so substantively narrow just a couple of things to highlight. I mean welfare in its kind of AFDC guys kind of pre which was the precursor of temporary assistance for people who aren't as old as some of us in the room. Welfare was just not a big part of the war on poverty and actually people were as conflicted and there was as much upset about welfare in the late 1960s as there was in the mid 1990s in many ways and there was kind of reform efforts and the legislation that happened in the 60s on AFDC was more conservative. It was things like getting rid of work penalties what's the tax rate on income in AFDC was 100% in the, for most of the 60s. It was things like creating the first work program the work incentives program. You know I think you know what much more this period was about was the creation of things like social security, Medicare, Medicaid those I think are the most significant legacies. For children and not only adults I think it was very much an opportunity focus. I mean you see this in the Equal Opportunity Act. It was about promoting equal opportunity through healthcare, nutrition, education. I've got this sheet that we put together to kind of give you a sense of the breath and you know gives you a kind of feel for how different it was. And of course tax cuts were explicitly part of this at the point. So in many ways you know this was the first sort of you know some of it was almost supply side in kind of the thinking. Third I think it's very important to mention I think you know it was Nixon's war on poverty too. I mean Nixon didn't use the word war on poverty. He was no fan certainly particularly of community action and of the OEO which he essentially dismantled. He had his own kind of vision of it. But it was the Nixon administration that built on and institutionalized many of the things that were started by LBJ. So in May 1969 for instance, Nixon told Congress the moment is at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself. That was his sort of war on poverty, declaration and then it was legislation adopted pursuant to that that really made the food stamp program legislation in 1971, 1973 that made the food stamp program a truly national program with national eligibility standards, national benefit standards is essentially optional up to that point. It was Nixon's family assistance program which almost looks radical today would have again created national eligibility standards basically federalized AFDC. That didn't happen but one of the options was the creation of the supplemental security income program in 1972, which essentially nationalized sort of the state and local disability programs, income support programs for people with disabilities. And also really you see a lot of that leading into the creation of the EITC and the Ford administration and the Congress then. Now, Nixon was no liberal at heart, he was of course operating in a relatively liberal time but you've also got people like F.A. Hayek kind of the conservative icon today saying he was writing in the road to serfdom, the case for the states helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong and basically calling for sort of basic income, health insurance, et cetera. You've also got I think a good argument to me that there was a lot of sort of, maybe not conservative but very sort of neoliberal policies going on in parts of the war on poverty. I mean, Hyman Minsky who's an economist, late economist whose ideas of kind of experienced a revival, ideas particularly on recessions and financial dislocations, he argued that at the time that the war on poverty was basically conservative because it was born out of the neoclassical theory in which it's the poor and not the economy who ever blamed for poverty. He was much more focused, he was arguing basically for a job creation, public jobs kind of expansion program. You've also got somebody, Paul Krugman wrote a couple of days ago about Arthur O'Koon who was LBJ's chair of economic advisors. He was somebody basically who thought we should do some redistribution but it hurts growth and it will hurt inequality and we have to be very careful and do it right. And that's not necessarily a view that even the IMF holds today. So fourth, I think I'd stress this thing about, Alice mentioned the push that the AFL-CIO was making for cutting the work week. I mean, this was not a high watermark period for labor. They didn't get much of what they wanted in the 60s. They didn't get the minimum wage. You didn't see this job creation. And then finally, I think it's worth remembering that the men involved in the design of the war on poverty and they mostly were men, white men in particular, held very traditional roles about ideas about gender roles. Robert South, the historian had a great book called All in the Family where he talks about kind of the male breadwinner liberalism model of a lot of the people in the war on poverty who were planning it and the idea that it was gonna be men who were, they wanted to basically have men be the breadwinners and lead families. Something like the jobs core actually as initially designed would have been limited to men under this sort of this idea. You had things like in 1961, you had Kennedy's commission on the status of women. That called for, it's actually kind of depressing to look at it now because it calls for paid leave, childcare funding, all this stuff that we're still calling for. But that was out there, but I think it kind of got ignored essentially to a large extent. There was a period when in 1971, Congress, Walter Mondale passed basically guaranteed childcare, a great comprehensive child development bill. That was sort of where Nixon retreated and vetoed that bill kind of citing his concerns about how it would damage the family. And I think a lot of that was about extending childcare, not just to the poor, but to working class and middle class families. So just to conclude a few broad conclusions, I think it's very important to move beyond sort of reductionism in anti-poverty thinking and policy today. So that means not reducing policy space, poverty policy space as I think the Ryan report does to just means tested programs. I think it means not assessing the warm poverty base solely on the poverty rate, which is a pretty flawed measure as it is. Certainly the poverty rates a lot lower, but we have all these other indicators, infant mortality, various health measures, educational attainment that are much higher and are really because of warm poverty programs. And I think the question then is, well, why isn't poverty low? And a lot of it has to do with this kind of disconnection between productivity and compensation, the rise in wage and equality. I think it means having a new script for a new time. I think we should avoid the idea that we can redo the war on poverty script. So whenever I hear things like about the invisibility of poverty, I wanna say, well, I think the problem is today, poverty is visible, but in ways that are very problematic, it's a sort of stereotypical and negative portrayals of poverty. And we need to think about, what's the story today rather than retelling that story? And then finally, I think it means not falling into the trap of thinking that concern about inequality, concern about sort of runaway undeserved gains at the top are simply a distraction from kind of serious work on poverty. We really have to think of these things as interconnected. And if we wanna make progress today, we really need to tackle both poverty and inequality using all the different policy tools at our disposal. So I'll close there. Good morning, it's good to see you here. So recently, in his first address to the Ford Foundation staff, after being selected as the new president of the foundation, Darren Walker recounted his earliest experience with Ford. It was at Head Start, where he was one of the earliest enrollees in this groundbreaking program. In 1965, that was when he enrolled, Ford funded the research at Yale University on early childhood education for low income children upon which the Head Start program was based. Darren noted that he grew up in a small town in Texas within a family that had limited financial resources. Head Start helped to create a trajectory that took him to college, law school, and the Wall Street. From there, Darren elected to shift gears and go to work for the Abyssinia Development Corporation. Community Development Corporations were an outcome of the Gray Areas Program and this was a Ford funded six city pilot project that laid the groundwork for the community action programs. Ford also created and funded the Local Initiative Support Corporation and Intermediary for CDCs. Eventually, Ford would also support the Abyssinia Development Corporation. From there, Darren went on to become Vice President of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and President of Ford. This is not surprising because the tenants of LBJ's War on Poverty were directly aligned with the mission of the Ford Foundation. First, people should be economically secure. Two, those impacted must have a voice in the decisions made about their lives. And three, the focus must be on structural barriers to achieve real change. Social justice demands that human beings be able to meet their basic needs and this requires poverty alleviation. Poverty alleviation through safety net programs is essential for people with limited means to survive. But survival is not sufficient. Survival is an objective, but the goal is for every person to reach their full potential. President Johnson said our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but to cure it and above all, to prevent it. Again, this view was directly aligned with that of the Ford Foundation and in the mid 1990s, Melvin Oliver came to Ford as a new vice president. His research along with Thomas Shapiro showed that while there was a gap in the income received by white Americans and African Americans, this was far outstripped by the wealth gap or the difference in net worth of families on average between the two communities. Oliver and Shapiro's research demonstrated that this racial wealth gap is not explained by income level, rate of return on investment, level of education or family background. Instead, they asserted that the racial wealth gap is due in large part to structural barriers for communities of color that exist within the same policies and programs that create wealth for white communities. A case in point is the New Deal legislation that created the Home Owners Loan Corporation to help homeowners avoid foreclosure during the Great Depression. The legislation assisted white homeowners to preserve their assets but out of the nearly one million loans made, not one went to African Americans. To address the structural barrier to economic security, Oliver created the asset building program within the Ford Foundation. This approach was based on Michael Sheridan's theory that by providing low income communities with the same kinds of incentives and structures that upper income communities enjoyed, low income families would save and invest in long-term assets and become economically secure. Over the last two decades, the Ford Foundation and other philanthropies have supported research that has established one that low income people can and do save when provided the same incentives and structures as upper income individuals. Low income communities that participate in asset building programs, invest in long-term assets like homes and hold on to them. In fact, participants in these programs were far less likely to have been subjected to subprime loans and far less likely to face foreclosure than similarly situated individuals during the recent financial crisis and subprime debacle. Research also shows that current tax expenditures for asset building are skewed to upper income communities and are not effective. Ford and other foundations also supported policy analysis that developed the environment for the enactment of legislation such as the Assets for Independence Act that created a federal pilot project providing financial support for community-based organizations in developing and administering individual accounts. These are match savings accounts for low income people to save for homes, post-secondary education, businesses, and retirement plans. Policy work also led to the introduction of a bipartisan and bicameral measure called ASPIRE that would create a child savings account program that would provide every child with a $500 account to be held until the child turned 18. And in addition, another 500 for every baby born into a low-income family and match savings for contributions made to low-income children. And policy analysis led to the introduction of measures that would restore the solvency of social security without burdening low-wage workers and improve benefits for workers who remain financially vulnerable. In addition, Ford Foundation supports advocacy at the national, state, and local levels to inform policymakers, the media, and the general public about the need and potential impact of equitable policy, equitable policy change, and would enable the financially vulnerable to become financially secure. Our grantees have laid the groundwork for equitable policy change, but a permanent, inclusive, and progressive policy has not been enacted at the national level. The need is clear. And while the income gap of white communities to communities of color is two to one, the wealth gap is six to one. The research by Thomas Shapiro shows that this racial wealth gap has tripled over the last generation. A just society is one in which every person is able to reach their full potential. Now is the time for equitable policy change that would enable people with limited resources to save, invest, and move from economic insecurity to sustainable economic upward mobility. Thanks. Okay, we're gonna get some questions from the floor now. Do we have a mic floating around? Let's see. We're gonna probably do a couple right in a row so you can give me your topics and questions, and then we'll have the panelists ask. So think of your questions, I see a few hands. And I just, it's really great to have Killolo here to review some of the impact that the Ford Foundation has had over time. They were actually there at the beginning. They've been there throughout. They played a role in kind of the evolution of the policy thinking, and it's pretty remarkable. And I guess I just wanted to start with a question for Alice, which is almost how much of this stuff was happening beforehand. You mentioned this kind of Truman report that was, were the policy makers kind of their analysts thinking and then the moment arose, because you spent a lot of time giving us a little bit of the history of these kind of conditions that were all aligning. And this was a big moment with a lot of demands, a lot of tension. So what was the kind of trade-off between ideas that were in the mix previously and ones that were kind of, when LBJ made his speech and then all of a sudden two months later they're ready with a legislative package? Yeah, well, I mean, I think just am I, okay. I'll just speak like this. I mean, I think at any moment of major policy reform, I mean, look, take the New Deal, like the Great Society, and that's why, again, I think of them as really important moments of democracy building. Those two big initiatives draw on things that are, I mean, some people talk about being on the policy shelf. I don't think that actually gets at the dynamic. These are ideas that have been cooking for a long time and that had been actually in the works. I mean, the New Deal is building on social reform, legislation and policy conversations that had been going on for decades. Similarly, the Great Society did as well. One thing about the Truman Report, I mean, actually, that's not, that's actually, that is a call, that is a call for what we need to do to achieve a civil rights agenda, including doing things like desegregating the Army, including fair housing legislation, including overturning racial covenants, that doesn't even happen. I mean, that happens overturning racial covenants, but it's not until 20 years later that that agenda is realized and that's not about narrowly construed policy ideas. That is actually about movement building and activism. Now on the other hand, sort of on the policy idea front, some of these experiments that were happening at Ford and other places, but really especially at Ford with the Great Society and a lot of experimentation around what do you do about the problem of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, that's sort of the development of policy ideas that do end up in the mix, in the conversation. And so when the moment is there, the people at Ford talked about, suddenly we had Kennedy in office and LBJ in office, we had somebody we could talk to and to feed and it creates a pipeline for policy ideas. Well, it's interesting that you need the moment but you need the incubation of ideas that take some time and there's someone involved in that work here, maybe I shouldn't get too discouraged when things don't get done. Okay, so I'm gonna call on like four people right in a row, you're gonna stand up and quickly ask your question or comment. My friends here are gonna use their pens and fingers to jot down things so they can then answer. So let's go right here. It's two women, you have one too, right? No? Okay, one, one, two, three, and then four. I'm working largely as a volunteer in the community on SNAP and hunger. As I read the press and talk to people, the level of contempt for the poor and the distrust of the poor, the image of the poor seems to me worse than it's been in many years and I would like to know if that's just in my head or it's real and if so why? Okay, John? Yeah, thank you, outstanding panel. Two related questions regarding kind of the politics of ideas primarily for Alice, I suppose. One, there was a development say in the late 70s of philanthropist funding and often founding these conservative think tanks or greatly expanding them. And often in my assessment, these think tanks were often emphasizing kind of broader ideological issues and offering a sort of a broader vocabulary for thinking about these issues. And often the liberal philanthropists were funding work that had a more empirical, often technocratic quality. And it seems to me that very broadly, what one had in terms of the conservative perspectives was an emphasis on framing issues, often in an extremely effective way and really looking at kind of fundamental underlying philosophical issues versus an approach of kind of getting the facts out for the liberal approach. Yeah, Khalil, we're gonna have you talk about that in Alice. I've just got to add to that. No, no, just talk about what, for Alice, what vocabulary do you think is most effective for this kind of progressive vision of egalitarianism and social justice and that clearly the libertarian, the Hayekian, Friedman vocabulary resonates deeply with many Americans and it really taps into part of the American political psyche. What frameworks and vocabularies and framing do you think are most effective in the US for promoting this agenda? Okay, thanks. And then we're gonna go all the way in the back. Well, actually, we'll start here and then we'll go to... Sonya Michelle from the University of Maryland. I've often, I'm glad that Sean Fremstead mentioned the predominance of the male breadwinner wage ideal during this period. And one of the things I think we didn't mention is that even though welfare reform, welfare bills were actually, welfare policies were becoming more and more punitive with the work program, some things like wind and other things. But at the same time, because of the predominance of the male breadwinner ideal, even though childcare was supposed to be included in these policies, it was never, the states never really picked up on it. So this is kind of a factual question. I mean, do you think if childcare and training had really been instituted during this period, the rise in female poverty might have actually been less than somewhat? Okay, and then last one, and I've kept track, so you guys aren't off the hook just because they're a lot of them. Hi, thanks. Don Mathis, Community Action Partnership. Thanks for a great panel in New America. Mike, I wanna take Professor O'Connor up on her invitation to ask about institutional reform and community action. I started in community action in 1974 in Wilmington, Delaware as a Head Start teacher. There were National Cards troops on the streets nine months with weapons because of the Civil Rights thing. That was where my Head Start Center was. That institutional reform continues today. The president has proposed a 50% cut in community action in his current budget. Can you talk about institutional reform and give us a little what you were teasing us about? Thank you. All right. Comments, contempt for the poor, politics of ideas? I'll take the first two. I think that your observation is very real in terms of this contempt and maybe increasingly an increase in the comfort in which people have been expressing this contempt for the poor. I participated in several focus groups across the country about two years ago and I was so taken aback by the extent to which people show this contempt for low income folks and really disturbed by it. But what I also observed was that folks who were expressing this were like a stone's throw from being in that situation themselves. And some folks were actually in that situation. They had gone through foreclosure and were living back with family members, et cetera. And my perception is that this contempt is based on fear, fear that one may slide or become too close to that which one is afraid of. So distancing oneself from the situation that one is concerned they will end up in. Then the question about framing and the... You fund both evidence and discourse. I do, I shouldn't say I, we do. Yeah, I would agree that there has been... I would say considerable success by conservatives in framing issues and focusing on values in terms of their framing of issues. And there is kind of a, I will say stereotypical approach by more progressive organizations of hammering away at the facts with the, I think, perception belief that one can change opinions by informing them with facts. And I would say that it really takes a little bit of both, that people's beliefs are based on emotion and that just factual information doesn't reach one's emotions necessarily and that you have to be able to tap into the values that people hold and understand why they believe what they believe in order to inform that belief. And so your framing of an issue has to, I think always be factual and I have concerns with framing that is seemingly successful but doesn't rely on facts. I think it should be factually accurate but also have an understanding of why people believe what they believe and be able to speak to that. Sean? Well, one quick thought on this contempt for the poor thing, whether it's increasing, I don't know actually. I think one of the things is there's a lot of, one of the things that I think the right kind of with the idea stuff, thinking back about Charles Murray in the underclass debate, there was a real successful attempt to racialize, particularly welfare. And you see when you read something like the work of Martin Gillins, the Princeton political scientist and he really explains this I think pretty convincingly. And so you have cleavages where people will say, I mean, I'm sure this was some of the polling, a cap is done also, so is this. I mean, people are supportive of assistance for the poor but they detest welfare. And so there's these kind of cleavages that you have to kind of look under. What about the vocabulary for social justice though? I mean, like how? How to, I think part of this is, I do think on the left, I think we often talk about poverty and the poor in a way that does implicitly otherize it. And I think that's a problem. I did something looking at how people self-identify in class terms recently. And it's very interesting. I mean, it's about 50-50 now in terms of people identifying as working class versus middle class. And that's actually the case too with very low income people. If you look under people under $20,000, the majority of them identify as working class. The other big group identifies as middle class and then a small portion, and these are very low income people identify as lower class. I mean, it's black women who have the highest kind of self-identification as working class. I think there's a way we haven't kind of come up to this reality that, we're talking about the working class here and it's a diverse, it's not the old white guys that you think of that we talk about in politics. Oh, can I just say one thing about the childcare thing? Because I think that's very important. I think, I mean, I think, I don't know, I think it would have been lower. I think people's lives would have been a lot better too and kids would have been better off is probably the important thing. And I think it would have changed the politics. I think it would have, I think it wouldn't have been a bunch about welfare, hysteria. I think it would have been, women's work was increasing, single women's work, women, and women did this amazing, when you look at their educational attainment, I mean, it's really extraordinary and it didn't, there was no big bang in 1996 where this all happened because of welfare reform. It was something happening for 30 years. And I think, we don't tell that story very well. I think it's often, we often focus in on 96 and say that was a disaster and all this stuff happened, but you know. And now we can take a class in community action and in institutional reform, but what are your three comments there? Oh, so just on this childcare point, I think a really good way of thinking about this too is to know that, or to recall that when Head Start was started, universal kindergarten was not, kindergarten was not available everywhere. And so there was a problem, OEO was really worried about this problem of the over-income people who wanted access to Head Start because it was such a great thing. You know, we want pre-K and kindergarten for our kids too. And so I think that similar dynamic, this is a real cross-class kind of a program in childcare. Contempt for the poor, I think what has made it extremely powerful, I would agree, there's always been huge amounts of contempt for the poor, white, black, working not, you know, but especially in the United States. But I think what makes it especially potent right now, A, it's politically acceptable, if not actually, it's actually politically promoted. It is accompanied by an extreme contempt for liberalism and for the idea that we have a collective obligation. And also though, you know, it sort of builds into one of the problems with the war on poverty was that it did perpetuate this notion of the other America that actually, you know, was actually quickly demolished this notion that the poor are some sort of submerged third or fifth or something. It just was actually readily demolished by evidence. And we haven't found a way of talking about poverty in a way and this is why bringing back the language of class I think is so important. On institutions, yeah, there's a lot going on there. OEO itself was an institutional innovation, this idea that we actually need a federal agency that is buying for advocacy for low income people. That was an institutional innovation. But also at the community level, it was operating on a lot of different levels. Number one, we have way too many fragmented services. We actually need a kind of institutional innovation that acknowledges that people don't live in silos the way that policy happens. They actually live full lives and they need some way of having a more holistic way of working, you know, of achieving some kind of economic security. But also there was some of the institutional innovation that had a lot to do with volunteerism. You mentioned you're a volunteer now. It was actually like recalibrating the relationship between federal government and civil society in such a way that they weren't seen as competing either or is it actually was about this notion of partnership so that you could actually draw on the volunteeristic energy without saying this should be about charity. And so I think those are among the things. The other thing I would mention as an institutional innovation, the notion that the council of economic advisors could be an advocate for the poor, that was kind of novel. It certainly is novel if we think about it today. And then in terms of the politics of ideas, I completely agree. But the one thing I would add to that, number one is that it is based, often it's based on a false premise that empirical research itself doesn't have an ideology. Of course it has an ideology. And those think tanks are not willing to acknowledge that they have ideas and that's a huge part of the problem. The other thing I would point to when you talk about what kinds of vocabularies speak to me anyway. Well my go-to has always been the economic bill of rights. You know, FDR's economic bill of rights which is purposely framed in the language of early, small R-Republicanism. So we're adding the freedom from want to the classic four freedoms. The freedom of religion, the freedom from fear, freedom of speech and freedom from want in order to be a fully participating citizen of a democracy, one needs to be able to live free from want. That is an old idea in the American vocabular and I think we need to bring it back. Thank you. All right, thank you for the first panel. You can help me thank them. And we will shift here with the second panel. Rachel, give us a moment as we all shift seats here. Hi everyone, we're transitioning to our second panel here. My name is Rachel Black. I'm with the Asset Building Program here at New America and I'm gonna be ushering us through the rest of our conversation this morning. To sum up what I think I heard in our first segment, the war on poverty was the product of a specific place and time. It was an outgrowth of specific economic and social conditions and it was a product of specific political actors and their priorities. But a lot has changed in 50 years. The nature of work has changed. The structure of the family has changed and along with these changes there's also been a shift in what a modern family needs to get by and ultimately get ahead. So the question that I'll be putting to our panel here is what does a 21st century anti-poverty policy agenda look like? So to kick us off, we'll have Melissa Boteak. Melissa is the Vice President of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress. She's also the Vice President of their half and 10 campaign and we heard Sean talk about how poverty really can't be conceived of as a monolith and we know that the way that well-being is conceptualized is very diverse and Melissa and her team at half and 10 really produced sort of the standard bear of capturing sort of a holistic picture of well-being in their annual indicators report. After Melissa, we'll head over to Elise Gould. Elise is the Director of Health Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute and as one of her roles there, she is the co-author of their State of Working America. This is something that a former colleague of mine called The Book with All the Numbers in It. I think that this was a sort of complimentary reflection on what a comprehensive resource it is. After Elise, we'll hear from Willie Elliott. Willie Elliott is the Director of the Assets Education Initiative at the University of Kansas. There he is really pioneering research and making the connection between savings and children's educational outcomes. We're also very proud to claim Willie as a Senior Research Fellow in the Asset Building Program and if you didn't see them on your way in, I encourage you on the way out to pick up their new publication, Harnessing Assets to Build an Economic Mobility System. You can also access the report as well as other supporting documents at assetsformobility.com. And finally, we'll hear from Josh Barrow and he'll tell us if any of the promising ideas that we've heard from Melissa and Elise and Willie are actually gonna go anywhere in the current political environment. Josh is five days in at the New York Times where he's a National Correspondent and he'll soon begin writing for a new Times website focused on economics and politics and data. Although I suspect for most people in the room, Josh's work is most recognizable by piece that he published last year in Business Insider called The Problem with the Republican Anti-Poverty Agenda is that it doesn't exist. So we'll tease that out a little bit more in his comments. After each of the panelists make their comments, we'll open it up to question and answers from you. We also want to encourage people viewing on an online audience to participate in this conversation. So if you have questions, you can tweet them to us at assetsnaf and use the hashtag talk poverty. And with that, I'll turn it over to Melissa. I want to thank Rachel and Reed in the New America Foundation and my colleague, Sean Fremstead, for inviting CAP to cosponsor this event. I've been asked to touch on a few things today and to focus my comments on income assistance and the safety net element of our war on poverty programs and my fellow panelists will be talking about some of the issues surrounding the labor market and assets. So I'm going to touch on first, the role of public assistance and work supports, some of the successes that we've had over the past 50 years, touch on the question that Alice raised in terms of why do we still then have such a high poverty rate and then turn to some of the challenges and holes we have in our system of work and income supports and where we can go from here to begin creating a 21st century safety net. So the first thing I want to emphasize is that when we speak about the role of income assistance and work supports, many of which were either created or built upon during the war on poverty, there's two key points. One is that the safety net, and I use this term loosely, Sean mentioned that's a very narrow term, but for the purposes of today, our system of work and income supports I'm referring to as the safety net. It's not something that happens to other people. Poverty isn't something that happens to other people. Over half of all adults are going to spend a year of their life in or near poverty. That means that many adults and of course children are going to encounter elements of our safety net. About half of adults with children are going to use the EITC at some point between 1979 and 2006. And so when we're talking about the safety net, it's something that we all have a stake in personally as well as from this wonkish policy angle. It's something that we all need to be concerned about. The second is that in addition to the humanitarian justification for a robust system of work and income supports, there's a strong economic justification. If you look at the most recent recession, programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps, Unemployment Assurance, were some of our strongest anti-recessionary tools in terms of filling in for lost demand when the economy tanked. And so we all have a stake in a strong and robust system of work and income supports not just for our personal what could happen to us there by the grace of God go I, but for our overall economy which affects each of us every single day. And so I wanna start with those two framings because I think a lot of what has happened over the 50 years is that the issue of poverty and the safety net has become someone else's problem, it's become othered. And I think when we start from a shared framework of this is something that we need as a society, it opens up the conversation as something that can be a little bit more constructive. So given that, I think re-raised in the opening, one of the things you often hear conservatives say is that we waged a war on poverty and poverty won. But rather than speak in proverbs, I'd like to actually look at what the track record is and let the safety net and the system of work and income supports that was established or expanded upon as the war on poverty speak for itself to the extent that inanimate objects can speak for themselves. So the first is that there's a great new study and if you haven't looked at it yet, I'd commend you to look at it, that came out in December last year from Columbia University. And it showed that when you take the safety net into account and a poverty rate that looks at these programs, there's actually a pretty strong track record. The poverty rate between 1967 and 2012 fell from 26% to 16% today when you take those programs into account. When you subtract those programs out, the poverty rate actually went up. And so we see our safety net really overcompensating for an economy that is not working for too many people, which I'm sure my colleagues later on the panel will touch upon. So it's not the war on poverty that's failed, it's really the economy that's failed. And as Reid mentioned, 45 million people were lifted out of poverty last year by various elements of our safety net. The report that CAP has out in the back has a few examples. Senior poverty would be about five times as high without social security. Medicaid is associated with a drop in the infant mortality rate. Our nutrition assistance programs have all but ended extreme hunger and malnutrition in the United States. If you look at pictures from Appalachia or inner cities in the 1960s, children with protruded bellies. We have other problems with nutrition and people struggling against hunger today, but we've mitigated a large portion of the problem because of a bedrock system of SNAP. So then why do we still have 15% of the population living under the traditional poverty rate at about 46.5 million people? It's funny, there's been a lot of talk today about we need to do a better job communicating and I think that we do. But a new poll from half intent shows that surprisingly a lot of the American people really do get it, they understand. When we've forced a choice in this poll between poverty as an issue of personal responsibility or poverty is a problem because jobs don't pay enough, cost of living is too high, things haven't kept pace. Two thirds of Americans agreed with the structural cause of poverty, including majorities of conservatives. So I think that overall the American people do understand that poverty is a structural problem. In fact, 61% of Americans in the same poll said their family's income is falling behind the cost of living and 25 to 34% of Americans report serious problems keeping up with their bills. And this is not separate from the conversation about the Chandra's unincome inequality. If you look at the top 1%, the top 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth and the share of income going to the top 1% has more than doubled since the war on poverty began. So we've seen sort of our economy growing apart and this influx of low wage work. And at the same time, we're asking why we've seen an expansion in the safety net. In part, it's a response to an economy again that is not working for too many people. So our next presenter is gonna cover more on that front. I'll leave her to it, because she's, I'm not gonna take her points away, but one thing I do wanna point out that shows this interaction is a recent study that Kat put out that showed that if you were to raise the minimum wage to 10, 10 an hour, poor the Harkin Miller bill that's out there right now, we'd see a $46 billion reduction in food stamp spending over the next 10 years. So there is this interaction that's going on between lack of good jobs and use of the safety net that I think it's important to explore and why I'm so glad we're all on the panel together to kick off that conversation. So while I wanna emphasize that all the solutions I'm about to put out on the safety net cannot really be considered in the con without the context of the broader economic trends, I do wanna say that our safety net is imperfect. And so I've been asked to focus a portion of my remarks on some of the ways in which we can modernize our safety net and make it work better for a 21st century economy. I don't have time in the next, I think five minutes to go through an entire discourse on the safety net, but I'd like to flag a few holes that I think are worth discussing and some of the solutions that I hope, or conversations that I hope can help us put on a path towards solutions. One of these holes that I wanna flag is something that actually has begun to be raised recently in discourse, which is the issue of benefit cliffs. Particularly in the area of childcare, there is a phenomenon where in many states, if your income goes up even just so slightly, you're put over the eligibility level for childcare and all of a sudden you lose your benefit. And this can create a system where if you get a raise at work or you work more hours, you're actually worse off because you're losing the childcare that allows you to be able to work in the first place. And so one of the solutions to this is to be able to gradually taper off benefits as income goes up, not cutting benefits back so short that there's always an incentive to work, that will just make people worse off and undercut their ability to make ends meet. The solution is to look at a program like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one of our most successful anti-poverty tools where benefits and the tax credit rises to incent work and then slowly tapers off as your income goes up. That's one way to structure safety net programs that have these cliffs in them so that moving forward, people are able to progress towards the middle class without suddenly losing important work supports. Another issue is access to work and income supports. This is actually another area where the Ford Foundation has really been instrumental, is in, you know, sometimes in some safety net programs, people are going to multiple offices to try and get access to benefits. They are the bureaucracy on the ground and administering them particularly because of asset tests that I'm sure will be raised later on in the conversations, trying to verify people's assets can create enormous amounts of paperwork and can make it difficult for low-income people to access the benefits that they're eligible for to get a hand up. There's a lot of different ways that we can address this. There's the work supports program that the Ford Foundation and others are leading that is actually piloting a lot of really innovative strategies in the states that are streamlining access to work and income supports. There's one-stop benefit centers that streamline, create a single point of entry for people to be able to get multiple benefits that they're eligible for. But this is one way to sort of both ease state bureaucracy as well as enable low-income people to get the help that they need in a efficient way. A third issue is something that we've raised sort of we touched on multiple times throughout the conversation but haven't really taken head on, which is TANF. The system that we have for our temporary assistance is in many fundamental ways broken. States are incented to find ways to kick people off the program as opposed to find ways to actually reduce poverty. And this is important ways we can address this are things like creating subsidized jobs, making sure people are able to get the education they need to get better wages in the long term. There's a number, I could spend my whole conversation talking about TANF but I do wanna flag it as put a pin in it as one point of conversation where we really need to figure out how to make our welfare system work better and have more of an explicit emphasis on poverty reduction. Another is childless adults which is the only group that our safety net and our tax system taxes deeper into poverty. And so this is actually a fairly easy fix. The president proposed in his budget a very exciting initiative, Expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for Childless Workers. And this would help make sure that those workers are able to benefit from tax credit that also rewards the time that they're putting into to work and digging themselves out of poverty. And then finally, this is not really a sexy issue but inadequate funding is a big hole in our safety net. You have one in four individuals who are eligible for some kind of affordable housing who aren't getting it. It creates a lot of issues with squeezing other expenses, forces some families into homelessness. That's just one example. But I mean, I think it's very, we can talk about how to reform safety net programs make them easier to access but at the end of the day if we wanna get people out of poverty it's gonna require a combination of economic reforms that are going to make our labor market work better for people as well as investments and work in income supports that are gonna provide people the pathway they need out of poverty. So just putting that out there. And just to sum up, I think we called for the need for to put our money where our mouth is a new social movement. I have some good news on that front. Our recent polls showed that 70% of Americans support a national goal to cut poverty in half and 10 years and that even when you qualify it with you have to spend more money and raise taxes and you have to ask business to do more even when you put all those qualifiers on it that would make support drop, people still wanted it. And so I think that there is a latent appetite for the kind of national commitment that we wanna help drive as part of this conversation and I'm excited to continue the conversation with my fellow panelists so we can talk about how to get there, thanks. Great, thank you for having me and great fellow panelists in the earlier panels. Fantastic ideas and really enlightening issue. So Melissa already mentioned that the economy has failed the economy has clearly failed American families and what's been going on in the economy in terms of economic inequality and what maybe we can do with the labor market is what I'm here to talk about. So here's what we know about inequality and I'll just do it briefly as you've already heard we write a book at EPI, the state of working America you can get all the numbers and figures there we're a bunch of data nerds and that's what we like to do. So you're lucky that I wasn't asked to do PowerPoints there'd be lots of charts and all sorts of things you're saved from that but if you want that you can find it on our website. So for the last three decades workers' wages have not kept up with our growing economy. Today workers are more productive than they were 30 years ago and yet they have little to show for it in terms of wage growth. Economic growth has created the potential for growing living standards but unfortunately that didn't materialize. The overall story in recent decades is one where the wages of the vast majority fails to rise with a growing economy. Between 1979 and 2013 productivity grew 64.9% while wages at the median only rose 6.1%. The growing gap between productivity and wages is due to a pulling apart of the top of the wage distribution. Workers have to be near the top of the wage distribution to even see average gains in the economy. And what about those workers at the bottom what we're talking about today? Transfers are important to families at the bottom but they depend on wages from the labor market for the majority of their income. The hourly wage is the bottom fifth so the bottom quintile of the distribution saw declines over the last 30 years. In fact the inflation adjusted wages of the 10th percentile of the wage distribution fell 5.3% so they fell 5.3% between 1979 and 2013. The declines among the lowest wage workers are relevant for the minimum wage which I'm gonna get to in a minute. These workers did not see gains but losses in hourly wages. And today's low wage workers are more educated than they were 30 years ago. Furthermore low wage households are working more today than three decades ago. It is clearly increasing hours and not increasing hourly pay that has served to increase annual wages. So low wage workers are more educated, more productive and work more than ever before and yet we see the gains through a growing economy continually passing them by. We've already heard some about the trends in poverty. Some great research that's come out in the last year from Columbia University has taken the supplemental poverty measure which is a more comprehensive measure of the official then the official poverty measure trying to take into account different government tax and transfer programs. And what they've done is they've created a historical series which is great to look past history of what has happened not only with the official poverty measure but also with this new supplemental poverty measure which takes many of these government programs into account. And we can compare poverty rates within and without these government programs within and without the tax and transfer system. What we clearly see with their data is that taxes and transfers have taken us part of the way in reducing poverty and for this I'm talking about the period 1967 to 2007 though obviously poverty was exasperated in the Great Recession and its aftermath. But market-based poverty, so the pre-tax and pre-transfer poverty rate failed to decline in that period that 1967 to 2007 period. So market-based incomes failed to decline, failed to reduce poverty and in fact the poverty rate rose dramatically over the last five years while it didn't decline in the 30 or so years before that. So we've made some progress on the tax and transfer side and no doubt more needs to be done. Melissa's pointed out some great policy directions we need to move in but we seriously need movement on the wage side if we're truly interested in improving living standards for those at the middle and bottom of the income distribution. And also I just wanna note as a side comment that the role of inequality has dwarfed everything else in terms of rising poverty, most notably family structure, one thing that people like to bring up on the other side, which has played a small and diminishing role in poverty in recent years. In fact over the last 30 years the role of income and equality in increasing poverty is over four and a half times more important than family structure and six times more important over the last decade itself. Given their overall trends and inequality it's not surprising that market-based poverty has failed to see any gains in recent decades. And while I'm 100% behind strengthening the safety net we need to really tackle these on all fronts that we can from SNAP benefits to housing vouchers to unemployment insurance. It is also clear we need to work to reduce poverty by improving labor market for low wage workers. So how do we do that? We want an economy with broadly shared prosperity. There's no magic bullet. But a laundry list of policies that increase from increasing the minimum wage to promoting collective bargaining to making full employment a high priority by reducing excess unemployment to better regulating financial markets. Today given the political context and hopefully I'll get some positive feedback from the end of the panel I'm gonna talk about the minimum wage. The first thing that's important to note about the minimum wage is that it's not primarily an anti-poverty tool. It is a basic labor standard. The federal minimum wage is currently more than 25% below its real value in the late 1960s. So it has eroded dramatically. When labor standards erode both low and moderate income workers see downward pressure on wages. So partially restoring the minimum wage which is what raising it to 1010 by 2016 would do. We mean both low and moderate income workers would see gains. Of those who would get a raise if the minimum wage were increased to 1010 over 50% are in families where the total family income is less than $40,000 but around 90% of them are in families where total family income is less than $100,000. That's a feature, not a bug. Boosting a labor standard helps not just the poor but also the middle class. And the minimum wage is well targeted to those who truly need the extra earnings. The roughly 25 million who would get a raise if the minimum wage were increased to 1010 are not as we sometimes hear teenagers working after school jobs for extra spending money. The vast majority are adults who depend on the earnings from their minimum wage job to make ends meet. Just 12% of workers who would see a raise are under the age of 20. The average age of workers who would see a raise is 35. Just 14% work less than 20 hours per week. On average workers who would see a raise earn half of their family's total income. Many are parents. If the minimum wage were increased to 1010 an hour nearly one out of five kids in this country would see at least one parent get a raise. The bottom line is that an increase would go primarily to workers who depend on these earnings to get by. I've emphasized that the minimum wage is the basic labor standard. But it's not to say that raising the minimum wage to 1010 wouldn't reduce poverty. It absolutely would. On net it would get billions of dollars to people living below the poverty threshold. Five billion according to the recent CBO report and raise many over the line. The poverty threshold we can argue is a pretty arbitrary line but CBO's estimates that it would bring nearly one million over that line. And their estimates are simple simulations. The most rigorous academic work shows that it could bring more than four million people out of poverty. But by either estimate the minimum wage is a tool for fighting poverty. Furthermore it would do it without increasing the federal deficit which in the current political climate at least doesn't mean it's dead in the water. And as Melissa pointed out it can even reduce SNAP spending perhaps other policies as well. Though I might suggest instead of taking that reduction in spending maybe redirecting that money towards work supports. For instance reliable high quality affordable childcare so people can actually maintain that employment. I'll end with a brief discussion of the relationship between the minimum wage and the EITC which is another policy I think it's really important to keep in mind. First there are two these are the two main policies we have in the country that are designed to address the problem of low wages. The minimum wage provides a floor for the wages people get in the market. And through the tax system the EITC provides subsidies to workers who earn low wages and also live in low income families. Opponents of the minimum wage tend to see the minimum wage and the EITC is competing with one another. Supporters of the minimum wage on the other hand tend to see both policies as crucial and in fact strongly complementary. And here's why the minimum wage is so important to an effective EITC. The EITC substantially raises the after tax wages of workers who are eligible for it so it increases the incentive to work. But in doing so it actually serves to lower the wages offered by employers because workers eligible for the EITC are likely to accept lower wages because they know they will get that subsidy. In other words because of the existence of the EITC low wage employers can pay their workers less. This means that low wage employers actually capture a significant chunk of the total expenditures on the EITC. That means that the EITC which was designed as a subsidy to low wage workers also effectively functions as a tax subsidy to low wage employers. That's why the EITC needs the minimum wage. A higher minimum wage puts a stronger floor under the wages that low wage employers are allowed to pay and thereby limits their ability to capture a bigger share of the total expenditure on the EITC. It's probably important to note that the CBO report that came out last month highlights that issue. Citing studies that conclude that more than a quarter of the total expenditures on the EITC is captured by low wage employers. The CBO concludes that an increase in the minimum wage would shift some of those benefits back to the workers they were intended for. When thinking about how efficiently the EITC is targeted that's really an important thing to keep in mind. The bottom line is that a higher minimum wage is one way to help reverse this country's four decade long upward redistribution of wages and incomes to help reduce poverty. Another way is a more generous EITC particularly an expansion of benefits to childless adults and non-custodial parents because those groups are hurt by the negative wage impacts of the EITC but don't get substantial benefits. But at any event the big takeaway is that we should do both as part of the 21st century anti-poverty program. Thanks. So first I want to say I'm thankful for the opportunity to be here and to talk, I think AF. I also want to thank Ford Foundation and Charles Stuart Mott for their funding. Really I guess before I became, I don't know, we started this AIDI, I think ADII Institute or a center, I didn't think about how important funding is. And we have a limited amount of funding and so it really allows you to think in independent ways which I think is important. It's something I want to touch on just quickly before I get into my scripted remarks is I think how we have thought about the poverty issues, we've totally lost the conversation around it and I say the progressives kind of lost the conversation in such big and important ways that it even shapes the kinds of questions that we ask. It shapes our vision of what we think is impossible. It shapes our fight for what we fight for, you understand? We're fighting for things that are only incremental steps and I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole, maybe because I grew up poor and homeless at times and I just want to see people have better lives. Do I want to see them get just beyond poverty when we know the poverty level is so meager and so insufficient? Or do we want to really make a difference in their lives? What Americans want is an opportunity to fight and to have the opportunity to be in the middle class, right? And in the middle class has to be fabricated in the society we live in today. It takes institutional interventions to make sure that we have a strong, robust middle class. And so I just want to start off with that kind of conversation that we really need to think about. Exactly what we think is possible has been shaped by others. It has been shaped by others. We have to reimagine how we think about poverty with questions we ask and what really is possible. And because I only have a limited amount of time which is a necessary amount of time, I need to read. So I'm going to read to you so I can stay on point but I'm already behind because I had that off tangent there but I'm sorry. Many Americans assume that wealth is generated by income and income is generated by hard work and ability. This equation comforts our collective psyche, validating the American dream. If this was really how the US economy worked, anyone would have a roughly equal chance of making it. If they apply their talents in effort. However, in the assets education initiative New Report, harnessing assets to build economic mobility system, we posit that initial asset levels may be critical for determining people's ability to build future assets in future income. In other words, labor income alone may not be enough for building assets, or economic ability for that matter, where you begin may have quite a bit to do with where you end up in life. Building assets and moving out of poverty may require an initial level of assets to begin with. In a society such as America where there are large wealth disparities, initial assets may lock certain groups of people into patterns of poverty. At some point, ask me a question about patterns of poverty. That's the thing that really bothers me are the patterns of poverty, where generations of families remain poor or near poor with little hope of escape. In addition, the systems with which one interacts throughout life may influence one's economic trajectory. For example, the current bio-focated welfare system facilitates higher income families in accumulating assets while either discouraging lower income families from accumulating assets, or at the very least, doing little to facilitate asset accumulation among lower income families. As a result, we pause at the bio-focated welfare system may end up exasperating wealth inequality in America for all the perpetuating patterns of poverty and then endangering the American dream, which the American dream with I think while we have this conflict or contradiction between low income people because we understand and believe in the American dream that effort and ability equals desired outcomes in them wanting to start new programs and stuff because it fights against those two things. In harnessing assets to build an income mobility system, we use longitudinal data from the panel study of income dynamics. I'm gonna skip through the methods parts, you can find it in our report and I'm gonna just get to the findings because I've used up some time. So findings on the association between initial assets and future assets. With quantile regression, findings suggest that families at a 75th percentile enjoy over five times the return on asset holdings experienced by families at a 25th percentile. More specifically, those at the 25th wealth percentile experience a 35 cent return for every $1 increase in net worth compared to a $1.81 for those at the 75th percentile. However, it's important to point out that even low wealth families benefit from having more initial assets. This suggests that families at any economic level may experience greater potential for upward mobility if supported by policies that facilitate asset building. Findings from growth curve models that we did by income level for higher income families which here is defined as 50,000 or above, which is quite low, that initial income is associated with more rapid wealth change among high but not low income families. This could reflect a number of factors including the ability of higher income families to save more quickly. We also find that initial wealth is associated with slower changes in wealth of high income families. For lower income families below 50,000, results suggest that they accumulate net worth at similar rate regardless of initial income. This is relatively promising, suggesting low income families have a similar potential for asset accumulation as those earning more. With regard to the association between initial assets and future income, based on the quantile regression results, when controlling financial family income, net worth only consistently contributes to future income among families with high initial net worth. This may suggest a threshold relationship that is a certain amount of net worth is required before we see an association between net worth and increases in income. However, this made us think what would happen if we broke out income into its different parts, labor, capital, and transfers, reflecting the different strands through which American households generate income today. When we do this, we find unlike net worth, initial capital income is consistently associated with family income. For each $1 increase in capital income and 2007 family income before the recession, increases by $1.22 at the 25th percentile and $5.26 cent for those at the 75th percentile. After the recession in 2011, it increases by 58 cent for those at the 25th percentile and $1.29 for those at the 75th percentile. Looking at the growth curve and lag models that we did for higher income families, we find initial wealth of buffers, higher income households, more from income change than lower income households. It's important to begin to think about how assets also affect income because a lot of our thought has been around income and consumption, but really they're connected, they're tied, and each are important. So initial wealth buffers, higher income households, more from income change than lower income households, thus it appears that wealth helped to buffer higher income families from income change during the recession, but did not play the same role among lower income families. Moreover, among higher income families, there appears to be some evidence of a virtuous circle where income predicts net worth and net worth predicts income, which perhaps reflects the more complementary nature of income streams in the economic lives of these relatively advantaged Americans. It is important to note that income appears to be a more consistent predictor of net worth than net worth is of income among higher income families, so more research is needed. Findings for lower income families, they are consistent with the idea that low income families may face a ceiling on what they can earn. I think it's as important as we spend so much effort and energy, rightly so, on increasing work participation, is that it has limits to what it can do, and it cannot create economic ability in the way that we think it can, at least in my estimation. It's an important part of it, and we need to continue to do it, but there might be ceilings to that process. So in conclusion, in sharp contrast to the myth of a blank economic slate in which an individual's future prosperity aligns with his or her effort and ability, evidence presented in his report begins to suggest that initial asset levels may significantly influence the power of labor income to generate additional wealth and income. If this is true, labor income alone is not enough. To combat poverty and provide economic mobility, U.S. households' income should be thought of as a three-legged stool, and this is really the main point of our report. We need to focus not only on labor income, but also on capital and on transfers. They play an important part in the overall process. Only as integrated approach is likely to provide real economic wellbeing for Americans. However, as it stands now, transfer income is often at odds with the creation of capital income among low-income families. The consumption-based arm of the welfare system focuses on providing recipients with enough income to achieve subsistence, not on building the assets that will help them achieve economic mobility. Yeah, we'll stop there. In fact, programs in this arm of the welfare system have means tests that ensure that once households have a monocom of assets, they are no longer eligible for the program. The income threshold for determining eligibility is similarly low, ensuring that most households lose access to the consumption supports. Soon after they have enough income to barely be not poor. By definition, structure and objective then, these programs are not designed to help Americans build assets, human or financial, needed to assure that all Americans have equal opportunity for moving up the economic ladder. The United States needs a policy intervention capable of transforming our bireficated welfare system into a unified economic mobility structure. The policy development proposed in our report is economic mobility accounts. EMAs are a tangible way to implement a rethinking of the U.S. welfare system, moving from a bireficated approach that delivers desperate effects to a unified commitment to economic mobility opportunities for all, essentially building assets for everyone. EMAs lifelong integrated, progressively funded savings accounts designed to assist account holders in attaining major financial goals in each life stage may build on the promise of greater prosperity articulated in the war of poverty. Acknowledge the families today, economic structure and delivering a real upward mobility for most Americans and envision an asset-empowered future for all. So I'm done, but quickly is we don't believe that savings by itself is enough. We do believe that income savings in transfers together can be enough to eliminate poverty. We need to find ways to have these different parts of the personal income work together and strengthen each part of that. We focus so much on just income for the poor in getting them just above poverty, knowing that most of them are gonna fall back into poverty at some point. We need to strive a little bit farther and a little bit longer. We need to help them build their assets so that they can move to the next job level. And so their earnings earn them enough to make it in society. So thank you. Great, thanks. It's great to be here today. This has been a really interesting discussion and I will try to pour cold water on everything. So as both Melissa and Elise noted, the supplemental poverty measure fell from about 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012, which points to both a huge success and a huge failure in the war on poverty. The huge success is a 38% relative reduction in the poverty rate over that period. And the failure is that more than 100% of that shift was attributable to transfers. So we had no progress at all on changing market income in order to live people out of poverty. And so actually, if we're talking about was the war on poverty a top-down effort or a bottom-up effort, the top-down effort appears to have worked quite well, although there is more room. The bottom-up effort, maybe we would have had even a growth in pre-tax poverty without those efforts, but really where you can see the effects is through the transfer programs themselves. So where does that leave us today in terms of what's politically feasible to further reduce the poverty rate? So first, I mean, there's more room for more poverty reduction through tax and transfer programs. And in fact, that's been a huge part of the political story over the last six years through this economic turmoil. You actually only had an increase of about half a percent in the poverty rate through the recession and the weak recovery, which is a remarkable achievement given that we went through the worst recession since the Great Depression. Part of that was automatic stabilizers and part of that was policy choices, a temporary increase in SNAP allotments, several extensions of unemployment insurance benefits and now benefits coming through the Affordable Care Act. But I think we've mostly run that out politically at least for the medium term. There are a number of some economic but more political limits on further poverty reduction through transfers. One is simply that as we lean more and more heavily on means tested entitlement programs to reduce poverty, you necessarily have increased problems of poverty traps where people face significant marginal tax rates as those programs phase out. That can be adjusted through some of the things that Melissa mentioned with eliminating benefit clips and better synchronizing programs. But there's also just a fundamental problem that the bigger you make those benefits, if you wanna continue to phase them out, you have to phase them out somewhere. We also do have a long-term fiscal gap that somewhat limits our ability to make commitments. That problem is generally overstated politically in Washington and it's been somewhat alleviated by improvements in healthcare inflation. But there's a related political problem which is that there's a bipartisan consensus that any new government program now has to be paid for in some way because increasing the deficit would be a really big problem. And so that I think is what will ultimately kill a lot of ideas that look politically promising for more poverty alleviation through transfers such as the president's proposal to expand the earned income tax credit. There is openness among Republicans to an increased earned income tax credit for childless adults. In fact, Marco Rubio has proposed one. But I do not think that Republicans and Democrats will be able to agree on how to pay for an expanded earned income tax credit. Rubio would like to pay for it by reducing the EITC for adults with children. I don't think the president will go for that. And I think the best marker of this right now is that we can't even get agreement on another extension of unemployment insurance which has often been a matter of bipartisan consensus. So right now I'm not hopeful about more improvements in poverty through transfers. So the other question is what can we do to change pre-tax income, to bring wage growth more in line with economic growth and to raise the wages of people with low and moderate incomes? The first thing on that list is minimum wage. And that is something that I think, well it's already happening at the state and local level and I think you will continue to see state and local increases there. It pulls well even with Republicans. But there does seem to be strong Republican resistance at the national level to doing it. But there is room to do this at the state and local level and the consensus of the research is that the disemployment effects within the range that we're talking about are somewhere between small and zero. And so I expect to see more minimum wage increases. There's also more room on macroeconomic policy to tighten the labor market. I think people don't talk enough about monetary policy as a poverty and inequality issue. A greater focus by the Federal Reserve on maintaining full employment would promote wage growth. It would not only protect people in recessions from unemployment but it would increase the labor share of GDP. This is an issue that conservatives focus on a lot. They're very concerned about a Fed that they see as run of muck. I rarely see liberals talking about it. In fact, I tend to find the most vocal voices in favor of loose money are a small but very noisy group of conservatives who promote market monetarism. And it's remarkable how aggressive the Fed has been in spite of the fact that nearly all the political pressure they face is from the right. So I think that if the left took up the issue of monetary policy, there would be some room to nudge the Fed and therefore achieve wage growth. There are also theoretically opportunities on fiscal policy, but that relates closely to what I said about transfers. I don't think that there's politically a lot of room for more fiscal stimulus. You could also have policies that promote more union density and more worker bargaining power. I think politically the time, it's been a challenging time for that. I think the time that you might've gotten card check done was 2009, 2010 and that didn't happen. One thing that I find very interesting is yesterday the council of economic advisors had a briefing on the economic report of the president which talks some about these issues and has that chart on how all of the reduction in poverty is due to transfers. And I asked Jason Furman at the briefing what does the administration see besides the minimum wage as policies that can be used to address that gap and to get wage growth in line with GDP growth. And he didn't say anything about macroeconomic policy aimed at a tight labor market or about unionization or worker power. All of the policies that they threw out were education and human capital policies, universal pre-K, college affordability programs, efforts to hold colleges accountable for quality and cost, apprenticeship programs. And these have merit and I think in the long run could promote low and moderate wage growth but they are both very long run policies. It's gonna take a long time for universal pre-K to show up in the form of higher wages and lower poverty. And it also looks to me like a missed opportunity. Again, this is something that the right is focused on, macroeconomic policies, opposition to unionization. It's something that the left has not taken up as much as it might. Finally, I'd note on the asset side, you had a very small bore program that the president rolled out in the state of the union called MyRA that is designed to promote savings among people who don't have access to retirement accounts through work. I see that as a program that would have probably positive but very small effects on poverty and on savings. I would note that historically programs to promote saving tend to accrue their benefits mostly to people at the upper end of the income spectrum. And I think there are structural reasons that that happens. Partly they're done through the tax code, tax benefits tend to be worth more to you if you pay a lot of taxes. And then also you just have a higher capacity for savings among people with higher incomes. So I think that it could be promising to get people at the lower end of the income spectrum to save more but it's always going to be a struggle to make sure that those programs actually produce benefits in the area where you are aiming them. And then Mataglacius wrote in his last piece for Slate about a week and a half ago about the new burrito economy and how he said, imagine a burrito stomping on a human face for the rest of history. It's basically about how it's a trend in the economy that we've seen the last few decades and will continue to see of growth in low wage, low skill jobs. And there is something that can be done through policies like minimum wage increases to increase those workers' income and some of that will happen. But ultimately, there's only so much you can do to increase the numerator of the living standard of somebody who has relatively low skills. You can't push their wage above the productivity that they produce. What you can do is change the denominator, which is to say bring down the real costs to the things that make up their standard of living. A big part of the reason that we've had income concentration at the top over the last few decades is a cruel of rents to people who own capital. And that's through all sorts of things. Intellectual property policy, regulations of real estate that have protected incumbent homeowners and people who own valuable land at the center of cities, licensing restrictions that drive up the costs of things like medical care that people consume. And so policies that drive down those costs can increase real living standards for people with low and moderate incomes and somewhat reduce inequality. That's again a long range policy, but it's something that I think could be more politically achievable than some of the other, than things basically that cost money. Childcare is an example there. I think expanded access to childcare would do a lot to raise living standards and to reduce inequality, but it runs into a lot of the same problems as transfer programs, i.e. that it costs money. So I would just say in summary, you wanna right now look for ideas that don't have fiscal costs. That's I think part of why people have focused on the minimum wage, but a broader agenda than the minimum wage will have to be a little more creative to work. Great, thank you all for your really thoughtful comments. We have about five minutes. So rather than my taking my own prerogative to monopolize the panel with my own interests, we'll go ahead and hit the ground running with your questions. So as soon as we identify where our microphone is, it's right there. So similar to Reed's previous directive, Pithie, questions, make sure that they are questions. So your fellow audience members can make sure and get their questions in too. So if we could see a show of hands, I think Alice in front has one. Okay, I'll make it quick. Are you embracing a Henry George type of, I mean, you really sound like Henry George when you're talking about rents, but I am quite serious about that. You know, well, it doesn't have to be a single tax, but a much higher taxation of rents from. Yeah, I mean, I would love to see a land tax. I'm of the view that a federal land tax is unconstitutional. I know that that's a controversial issue, but I think it would be a great thing for state and local governments to do. I think it's, I live in New York City. I think it's odd that Bill de Blasio has focused so much on trying to tax high incomes when the city could probably more politically easily and more in a more economically friendly way try to tax the value of high-end property in the city. That way the Russian billionaires who are buying up all the condos in the South Central Park who don't pay income tax in New York because they live in Russia would actually end up paying in. So yeah, I think there are real opportunities there, but it's also, it's not just about tax policy. It's also a part of why economically productive American cities have become so unaffordable to both the poor and the middle class is just that we have a limited stock of housing units. And I think this is something de Blasio is getting right. Not only is he focusing on making sure that there are affordable housing set-asides, but he is taking the approach that you need to allow people to build a lot of units in order to be able to get more people into the city and drive prices down. So Willie, I wanted to ask you to go back to the issue that you said that you would talk about, patterns of poverty? Yeah, I think one of our biggest problems is not that there's poverty, but that poverty is persistent among certain groups over time. And to me, that's the bigger issue. We don't want to create, in America, we believe in effort and ability, and we really strongly, and we all buy into that. We're not socialists, but what it frustrated is when we see the same groups of people continuously falling into that, and we begin to understand why that's occurring, that there's structural reasons for that to occur. So what we wanna do is reverse those structural things, eliminate patterns of poverty, and that should be our main goal. There are gonna be some people in life who don't put forth the effort, and are gonna struggle, right? It's just a reality. It's hard to say in a group like this, but we wanna be assured that they have the opportunity, and that's what the government should focus on, not on what the individual is doing, but on what they need to do to create and eliminate patterns of poverty in society, what we have, because it's not that black people are inferior to white people, but black people have worse outcomes than white people all the time. I wanna eliminate that part of it, and so that it's some white people, some black people, some different kinds of people, women, men, are having problems that aren't structural in nature, and we won't see patterns among groups. We'll see just a random selection of people. That's my thought. Yeah, I was gonna say, I wanna build up in that, because I don't think it's just a problem with the very bottom. You have about a third of the country living below 200% of the poverty line, and if you look at some of the longitudinal data, most people are cycling in and out rather than this chronic state of economic insecurity. So while I would support efforts that target those who are very, very disadvantaged, I think there needs to definitely be a complimentary focus on the broader low-wage labor market issues as well as the working income supports that reach further up so that there's actually a straight pathway out. I'm all for tackling deep and concentrated poverty. I think it's critically important, and I think it's often the thing that's not easiest to talk about, and so it gets ignored in our public discourse, but I wouldn't say that that's the most important thing above others. I'd say it's one part in the system, because I think the low-wage labor market work is really important. Right, I think also I think what often gets missed is when we talk about mobility, we forget that increasing mobility also means that some people are falling, and that's why it's so important to lift up the bottom, and that's why I think I would focus more on income and equality, on wage inequality, because I think that mobility is great, I believe in opportunity, but when somebody moves up, maybe makes us a middle class, and we have a more mobile society, that means someone has fallen down from middle class. We need to make sure we have an adequate safety net to make sure that we have reduced inequality and lifted everybody up so that nobody has so far to fall. I would add to that. As we fight for this adequate safety net, it can't be just moving people into near poverty. It's moving people from abject poverty into near poverty so they can return to poverty time and time again throughout their life. In that way, in that sense, focusing on economic mobility is important, but all the time having a base, but how do we define that base? What is the floor below which people should fall? And I think right now, we fight for moving people into near poverty and call it victories, and I think we need to start thinking about how do we move people farther than that? And on your political feasibility part of this, I am frustrated with the idea all the time that what we do and how we frame things is whether or not it's politically feasible. What will work? What will make people better off? That should be our question. What do we need to do to improve their lives in if we need grassroots movements to make it politically feasible? Let's do that. Let's fight for something that's worth fighting for. I don't have much longer to live here in life. I'm 43. And I want to fight for something worthwhile. I don't want to fight for near poverty. Right, well that's exactly what Alice was saying in the first panel, let's be more aspirational. I definitely agree with that. And we think about mobility. One of the things also we want to think about is, well if we want people from the bottom to get up to the top, then we also have to remember that, well that means that we want those rich people, those rich kids to have to fight for everything that they get. We don't have a society where that occurs. And I think, sorry, one more thing on Lily's point about making sure that there is, you know, equality of opportunity. I think two things we haven't touched much on, but what I want to raise towards the end of our panel is some of the demographic shifts that have happened over the past 50 years and also moving forward, both racial as well as gender. You know, we have a situation now where back in the 1960s, women were about, you know, a quarter of breadwinners or co-breadwinners. And today they're close to two thirds of breadwinners or co-breadwinners. Society hasn't caught up. We don't, the only country doesn't have paid family leave. Only industrialized country that doesn't have paid sick days. Not no sort of comprehensive childcare system. And that is sort of driving some of the feminization of poverty in some ways. And the race issue, I think is also, we're not, it's not only a moral issue, which it absolutely is, it's also an economic competitiveness issue. Because by, you know, 2042, we're gonna be a country in which there's no clear racial and ethnic majority. And the high levels of racial and ethnic disparities among young children today are definitely going to follow us into the future if we don't take immediate action to really invest in closing them now. Okay, we're gonna shoehorn one more question in here. So, hands up. Okay, right next to you, Juliana. I just wanted to ask Melissa, she started to answer it there. You know, what is the potential for a movement of women around these work family issues? Because the wage gap, the, you know, women are a great success story the last 50 years, except not in the last 12 years, wage gap has stopped. Women's increase in labor force participation has stopped. You know, and what is the potential there? And just thinking about Darren Walker, one of the things that the anti-poverty movement did is to mobilize women in those Head Start centers in which when he was a child, I was a college student working a summer of 65 in a Head Start program. It was a lot of mobilization of the moms, and that was what, that was part of it. The moms were thought of as a constituency that would be mobilized and they were. Thank you for that question. I think that there is a lot of potential. You're beginning to see at the state and local level, states beginning to take up things like paid sick days in Connecticut or paid family leave. I think the minimum wage also is a women's issue considering that two thirds of minimum wage workers are women. And you're beginning to see sort of this momentum at state and local level that's, you know, absent a function in Congress that wants to actually pass legislation. Some of our best bet is at the current state of play is to begin to percolate at the state and local level and build those movements. And also to begin to do the public education necessary to lay the groundwork for some of these larger changes we need to enact to really move the dial in a big way in an aspirational way. I'm a big fan of the FDR story of where he told the labor leader, go out and make me do it. I think all of us hopefully will leave this room with a imperative to go out and make our elected officials do more on this issue because it's only gonna happen through effective organizing. And go to halfandten.org to get involved. Willie, who are you talking about? I'm sorry, I wanna say one more thing. A student once asked me, a Jewish student asked me, what is it about being black that is so bad in a sense? Really, it was kind of a question that he asked. So I'm paraphrasing, but that was a basic question. And I thought about it, and that was a good question. Why do black people continue to fail? What's so bad about being black? It comes back to this opportunity thing. It is that who cares if someone hates you, it doesn't like you, right? That matters, but it doesn't really matter. What really matters in our society is that you block my opportunities for moving up the ladder. That's what's been unique about being black in America. In my mind, it's not that they don't want you to marry their daughters or whatever else. It's the fact that they block your opportunity. When I come in, when somebody comes in my class who's black, they have a bar to reach as higher than everybody else. I shouldn't say my class in a sense. I think it's the same for women for other kinds of isms, right? And so that's the problem. I think it's what opportunity comes in. What you want is a fair opportunity to fight to move up the ladder. Just give me that. You don't have to sit next to me. You don't have to be my neighbor, but give me a real opportunity so that I know when you tell me that you're failing because of your effort and ability, it's because it's my effort and ability. And I can look myself in the mirror and say, work harder, son, work harder, because you're not doing enough. I want that kind of opportunity in this country for everyone. And that's why opportunity is so important. Opportunity demands that there be a base, a floor below which people can start at. That's what initial assets levels are about. Give people enough assets so they can compete with everybody else. Yes, have a floor, but give me the opportunity to rise or don't critique me when I don't rise. Don't say it's my fault. When you haven't given me the structural opportunities to succeed in the first place, that's what makes a black man mad. That would make some struggle in life. Until we understand that, and I don't think it's different for women, Native Americans, for all these different groups. I'm using black because, hey, look at me. I'm black. I can't hide it. Right? It's been my experience in life. That's the thing that we need to fight against and change. That's what we're up here doing. That's what I'm doing. And on that note, unfortunately we're gonna have to call the event to the close. Thank you all so much for coming. Please join me in thanking our excellent panel. They will be sticking around for a few minutes, so if you have questions, please come on up.