 Hi, I'm Rachel Black with the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation. We've just concluded an event called Poverty and Equality, Mobility, Oh My, where we've asked a panel of experts to weigh in with how families are really doing since the Great Recession. And to help answer that question, I have with me Melissa Boteak, the manager of the Half and Ten campaign. Your campaign is focused very much as the name implies on reducing poverty in half by 10 years. Where do you start and what's the scale of the problem? Well, first off, I want to thank you for emphasizing and lifting up this issue, Rachel. It's really important that we paint a comprehensive picture of how well we're doing so we know how to measure our progress. Half and Ten campaign, as you said, to cut U.S. poverty in half and 10 years established a baseline with the recent report we just put out at 2010. So we're looking to cut poverty in half between 2010 and 2020. When we say cut poverty in half, Half and Ten is of course looking at the national poverty rate, both the traditional and the supplemental income poverty measure. But we're also looking at what are the levers of opportunity to move the indicators in the right direction because there's a lot of families who are earning a little bit above the poverty line but are still struggling to make ends meet. And so some of the things that we're looking at on that front are indicators relating to good jobs. So these include things such as median wages that reflect good paying jobs, paid sick leave so that parents don't have to make the impossible choice between caring for a sick child and losing their job, things such as high school graduation rates and a percentage of workers who have an associate's degree or higher so that we're looking at the skills level of workers. So that's one bucket. Another bucket is looking at strong families. So here we're looking at things such as single earner versus multiple earner households and how that affects family stability. We're looking at access to health insurance, teen birth rates and foster care placements that we get a sense of how family structure impacts the ability of families to move out of poverty. And then the final bucket is just something that I think you and I both hold near and dear is economic security and that includes asset building. So our family is able to save enough for the future both as a short term cushion as well as to make the long term investments to join the middle class. Are they able to access benefits like SNAP and childcare or SNAP slash food stamps at childcare when they need it? And how are family expenses driving families into poverty? So those are a couple of indicators that we're looking at when we're tracking our progress to cut poverty in half and see how folks are doing. So we know that the Great Recession has driven by any measure that you apply more people into poverty. In terms of measurement of economic growth, 2001 to 2003 was an expansionary period and yet as you mentioned during your presentation there was actually a growth in poverty. How do you, what factors do you attribute that to? So you can see if you look at the data that this was the first economic expansion on record between 2003 and 2007 where profits are going up, productivity is growing up, but yet median wages for the average family are going down and the poverty rates are rising. So what's going on? I think first off you saw almost all of the gains from that economic growth concentrating at the top. Some of that has to do with our tax and transfer policies, the Bush tax cuts heavily concentrated at the benefit to those at the top of the income scale. But you're also seeing a disinvestment from a lot of programs like job training and education and things like that that really promote mobility and enable families to move up the income ladder. In addition, since 1973 really we've been seeing a divorcing of the economic growth from how low income families are doing. That relationship used to track a lot more closely and now a lot of times low income and moderate income families are not sharing in the gains from increased worker productivity. One of the things that you mentioned in your presentation was that in spite of both experiencing economic hardship, the response to poverty of the U.S. has been very different from that of the U.K. How does the U.S. compare to some other comparable countries in terms of policies that help expand the financial security of low income families and present them some of the levers of opportunity that you mentioned? One of the things I showed in my presentation was a graph comparing the U.S. and the U.K. poverty rates over the same period adopted from a presentation by Jane Waldfogel. One of the things that shows is that at the same time that the U.S. poverty rate is going up, the U.K. poverty rate is falling and it wasn't as though they weren't experiencing any budgetary or recessionary pressures. Part of that is that the United Kingdom decided to set a goal to cut child poverty in half and to end it within a generation. It was across the party in the political system there and they began to invest in martial the resources to do that. In the age of budget cutbacks, I think they're beginning to see that they need to make some tough choices. But you can see on that graph just the impact that focusing on this problem makes in a similar developed country. Similarly, I think Indy made a very interesting point in his presentation where he showed that both poverty and inequality, two measures that we're very concerned with, the United States doesn't look so bad when you look at a pre-tax, sorry, pre-tax, pre-transfer. It's when you add in our tax and transfer policies that you see the U.S. is actually exacerbating inequality where there's other countries that are developed such as Sweden are taking steps to mitigate it. And that's a policy choice. Thanks for bringing that up. You mentioned both economic as well as policy influences that help drive outcomes when we're looking at poverty. Certainly the Great Recession had a very sizable impact, but we are seeing signs, if not very slow signs, that our economy is recovering. But as you mentioned, even before the recession trends were that poverty was on the rise. What are some of the policy opportunities moving forward that we should be looking toward to make progress against poverty? I think the first thing we need is an emphasis on good jobs because a good job is the best to get out of poverty. To that end, I think we both need to be focusing on policies to create full employment. That's investing in things such as infrastructure, school repair, creating subsidized and transitional job opportunities for low-income workers to connect to the labor market. Things such as extending unemployment benefits, because when you put money in the hands of people who are out of work, they go and spend it in the economy that keeps small businesses humming and enables them to hire other workers. So there's a number of things we can do on the full employment front, but we also need to really take a look at job quality because we have too many folks in this country who are working full-time and still poor. And so to that end, I think we need to look at some reforms such as increasing the minimum wage, guaranteeing some degree of paid sick days coverage. So again, parents aren't having to make those impossible choices between taking care of their health or the health of a loved one and losing necessary pay or even their job. I think we need to be looking at some issues also of job preparation and so reinvesting and reforming our workforce development system so that workers are being trained to connect to medium and high-skilled jobs. You know, one of the things that often gets lost when we talk about the way that we design measurement tools is that in this case when we're talking about measuring poverty, we're really talking about measuring people. Something that the half-and-ten campaign has done such a great job of is elevating the voices of people who are living in poverty and really highlighting some of the policy opportunities and programs that have been working in their lives. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and maybe even a story that really resonates with you? Sure, so half-and-ten along with our partners at the Coalition on Human Needs and I should mention that half-and-ten is a partnership of Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Leadership Conference in Civil and Human Rights and Coalition on Human Needs. So we all came together and said again this budget debate is about more than just numbers, it's about people, it's about jobs, it's about communities. And so we worked with partners across the country to elevate and bring the voices of low-income families to bear on the choices that were being made in Washington about the very programs and policies that affect them directly and their voices are too often marginalized. And so we have been about 150 stories available at www.half-and-ten.org backslash stories that talk about the value of the programs such as the earned income tax credit and SNAP food stamps or housing vouchers to enable the American dreams and enable families to ultimately join the middle class. And I guess I'll talk about two stories that really stick out for me. One is where the safety net can really make a difference for someone and where the safety net is working. And so that is Melissa in Missouri who talks about Head Start. She said she was on housing assistance in Medicaid and SNAP and when she was able to connect to Head Start and get the child care that she needed she was ultimately able to have more stable child care arrangement and get a promotion on her job and ultimately get off the safety net. And so she talks about how all those programs kind of work together to enable her to ultimately move out of poverty and build a better life for her and her family. And she won a national award from Head Start. Another example of the safety net working is Tara from Pittsburgh who talks about how she's actually bred for the world activist and director of Just Harvest in Pittsburgh. She once went hungry for a whole weekend because she wasn't on the SNAP program so that her child could eat. And then once she found SNAP she was able to stabilize do well in school and now she's doing great. But the story map also shows where where there's disinvestment from the safety net the impact that can have on families. And so we have a story from a woman named Lynn in Maine who talks about she's been on a waiting list for a Section 8 voucher for over three years. This is a woman with a master's degree. Her husband died leaving her widowed. She fell on her driveway and was fired from her job because she was unable to work. And she signed up for a housing voucher and she's still waiting three years later. She's currently working two or three part-time jobs just trying to stitch it all together and living in a trailer. And she knows that if she could get that voucher and pay a reasonable amount of her income towards her rent and utilities that she would be able to free up that money for other expenses she needs to move her family out of the situation they're in right now. And so when we see one you say you're going to cut vouchers it's not just about cutting a voucher it's about the impact you're having on a family and in a community and I think that her story really underscores that. Oh thank you so much for putting a face on the people and on the policies that really matter so much to people who focus on improving the well-being of families at the lower end of the income scale. You've also developed a whole host of other advocacy resources that you're making available. Tell us what those are and where we can find them. Okay so if you go to halfinten.org www.halfinten.org you're going to find a whole bunch of data and story resources that can help you make the case for cutting poverty and creating greater opportunity. And so among those besides the story map we have with this indicators project I was telling you about at the beginning a website where you just put back slash indicators and you can find about 13 different indicators for your state and you can rank them you can download a fact sheet you can find out where your state's doing the worst and has the most areas of improvement on policies and indicators relating to good job strong families and economic security. We also have interactive maps on our website where you can find the poverty data for your state and congressional district with breakdowns by gender race and child poverty and then other interactive maps that show you what's at stake in the deficit reduction debates by showing hardship as well as safety net usage for every single congressional district and state in the country. So these are great places to kind of download the data and the personal stories that can help you build a case for making the kinds of investments we need to cut poverty in half and rebuild the middle class. Sounds like a great set of resources and it's also my understanding that you have some indicators related to asset building is that just a rumor? No it's true it's true we do have a we have an indicator that relates to whether the percentage of the population that is unbanked and in the section of our report that talks about economic security there's a discussion of predatory lending and asset poverty and the need for policies that enable families to build long-term assets so I encourage everyone to check that out at the indicators website. I know I will. Thank you so much for joining us Melissa and in addition to learning more about the unbanked as well as a host of other policy issues related to asset building you can check out assets.newamerica.net. Thank you so much for joining us.