 Hi, my name is Rachel Black with the Asset-Building Program at the New America Foundation, and joining me is Matt Unreth from Wider Opportunities for Women. We have just concluded an event that we called Poverty, Inequality, Mobility, Oh My, and we are asking our panelists, including Matt, how are people really doing since the Great Recession, and you have produced a way of evaluating that. Tell us about BEST and how people are doing according to that metric. Sure. Wider Opportunities for Women has, for over 10 years now, tried to produce a budget standard that provides a sense of how families are doing against a normative understanding of what need is. We look at the true costs of basic expenses for people who are in the workforce and their families. We've produced a new measure called the Basic Economic Security Tables, which looks at the cost of basic expenses plus the cost of saving for retirement emergencies for over 420 different family types across the country, as well as looking at the value of employment-based benefits for those families as well. We produce about 800 tables or over 800 tables for every county and every state in the country, looking at what are the true costs, again, the basic expenses that families face, and then deducing from those costs, what are the incomes that families need to earn to cover all of those basic expenses, and again, put a little bit of money away for emergencies in retirement, and meeting that, that income need we label as economic security. And Matt, how is this different from poverty and how it is what you're considering, both in terms of income and expenses, differ from the threshold that Census uses? Sure. So the Census threshold is a relatively archaic measure. It's about 45 years old. It's a judgmental estimate. Exactly, yeah. And they look at the cost of a food budget, a basic low-cost food budget, and they multiply that value by three, and that's the income level that they define as poverty. Is that as arbitrary as it sounds? It's as arbitrary as it sounds to a degree. In the 1960s, the food budget did constitute something close to a third of a family's budget, but that's no longer the case. And our best actually points to that. The best points to housing, transportation, and child care, which didn't actually make up that much of a budget about 50 years ago, now make up a large majority of a family's budget. But we're measuring something different than poverty. We're measuring economic security. Can people meet all of their basic expenses and live a healthy, productive life, be fully a part of the workforce, and put a little bit of money away for retirement? So poverty and deprivation is one thing, and should be measured and understood. Economic security is something else. So I understand that WOW has just come out with a new report that looks at different demographic groups through the lens of the best tables. What are some of the key findings from that report? Sure. So when you produce a measure of income need and you're trying to label economic security as the question needs to be answered, how many people actually reach that level? So for a single worker in the United States, it costs about $30,000 a year to make ends meet for a family of four. It's close to $70,000. And again, we're measuring a pretty baseline understanding of what need is, so a pretty bare-bones budget. So based on those income thresholds, we compared those to 2009 census data and found that of all the families that have a respective best table that go along with their family makeup, 45% of all Americans lack economic security as we define it. The problem is, of course, as it usually is, much worse for women and people of color. For example, Hispanic single mothers, 91% of them lack economic security. So it's pretty stark data. It presents a significant challenge for us in terms of our policy responses. Well, let's go with that. You have helped paint a very stark picture about the scale of the problem. Help us understand the scale of the policy response that's going to be required to help move that needle. Sure. So as I said, nearly half of the country lacks economic security as we define it. So we're talking about a much different population than those who might fall below the federal poverty level. So increased funding for social services that are only targeted towards people who earn less than, say, $10,000 a year are not going to help all of those families who are just scraping by, just getting by paycheck to paycheck and are one financial problem away from catastrophe. Those programs aren't going to help them become more economically secure. So we need to think outside of the context of, again, basic social services and look at policies and programs that are going to help people deal with their biggest expenses. So being creative and thinking about radically expanding transportation infrastructure that people can get to work via public transportation and not can avoid the high cost of owning a car. Family friendly workplace policies are extremely important so that people actually have the flexibility to work in a job that might be different hours but might pay higher wages. And then we really need to look at making asset building programs more progressive so that they're targeted towards low income families that really have difficulty saving for emergencies in retirement because the costs of housing and transportation and childcare are so high. That's great. And you do have a couple of line items in the best index, both for precautionary savings as well as retirement and other forms. Given the constraints that you outline and the rest of the best, how do you expect that families are going to be able to dedicate part of their limited resources towards non-immediate needs? Right. It's a lot to ask for when a family really is having trouble just paying their bills. It's difficult to think of how they might be able to adequately save for retirement, which could be 34 years away. And it's a large question with not a simple answer. I think that there's certainly a large part of the federal budget that's devoted to asset building. Again, that's more towards those in the upper end of the income spectrum. But creating, for example, universal child savings accounts so that families can start thinking about how to help their child get into post-secondary education, which is increasingly more important for later job prospects, or helping low-income families gain bank accounts or retirement accounts and have that be a part of their thinking in their budget. Because in the best, savings and asset building represent only 3% to 6% of a family budget. So it's a relatively modest amount compared to these other expenses. It's something that doesn't seem like an enormous task when looking at just the breakdown of family expenses. Again, it's really hard to think about saving for retirement when you can't pay your rent. But if we can structure policies and programs that might incentivize families to start thinking about that as an important economic security strategy, that can go a long way. And that's really helpful to say that in our own work we see that really having access to the same accounts and incentives that are available to people higher up on the income scale really become core determinants of whether or not people lower on the income scale can save too. So it really is about targeted policy, not whether or not low-income families can save because we know that they can. They can, exactly. They just have to have the vehicles and policies in place and the incomes to be able to do it. So even within the asset building field, we still need to emphasize the importance of good jobs and having people have access to incomes that can support a family and allow for asset building as well. Matt, where can we go to find out more information about the best? Our website, www.wowonline.org. If you look up the Family Economic Security Program or our Basic Economic Security Tables Initiative, you can find our report, which is available nationally as well as for the eight states that we've released the best for so far. And we just released, again, our demographic analyses. That's also available on our website. Great. Thank you. And for a catalog of policy ideas that span the range of short-term savings policies and programs to those for retirement and longer-term purposes, you can check out the asset buildings program, asset agenda 2011, which you can find on our website, which is assets.newamerica.net. Thank you.