 Welcome to the New America Foundation. My name is Rachel Black, and I work in our asset building program here. Our event today is Poverty, Inequality, Mobility, Oh My, and we're asking the question, How are families really doing since the Great Recession? As it turns out, this is a pretty tough nut to crack, and in some ways it should be. The factors that contribute to a person's well-being are multi-dimensional. So a simplistic measure would give us only a limited understanding of how people are doing to help illustrate the challenge that we have. The Labor Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson once famously said that if your head is in a freezer and your feet are in an oven, on average you're doing okay. Over the last few months there's been a flurry of information as different groups have weighed in on the question of how families are doing. Census and CBO have recently put out reports, and probably most notably and at least most visibly, the signs of Occupy Wall Street protesters. For those of us who work to improve the conditions of families in the lower end of the income scale, all this attention is long overdue, but with this attention there's also been some confusion and even disagreement about what all this information means. A family's proximity to the federal poverty line has long been the arbiter of how families are doing, but the shortcomings of the standard are fairly well understood, including by the Census Bureau. And this year for the first time they issued a supplemental poverty measure, which we'll hear more about from one of our panelists. So this measure is intended to give a modernized view of what a family needs to goodbye, but some of us including the asset building program thinks it probably doesn't go quite far enough in capturing some of the critical components of what a household needs not only to meet their basic needs, but also move forward in their lives. In addition to measuring levels of material deprivation and economic security, there are also a set of indicators that take a look at trends and dynamics on a macro level. The inequality lens, for example, is not represented on the screen right now, so I'll just talk about it. The inequality lens allows us to see how growth and productivity and economic growth have been distributed and who's getting ahead and who's falling behind. In the context of wealth, this picture is stark over recent decades, as you can see. The growth in wealth has been heavily concentrated among families at the top 10% of the income scale, while the wealth owned by families at the bottom 60% has remained fairly stagnant by 2007. The households in the top 10% owned about $120 for every $1 owned by families in the bottom 20%. Critiques of this inequality perspective would say that the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top is less consequential than the ability of families in the bottom to get ahead. Economic mobility and the underlying sentiment that where you start out doesn't have to dictate where you end up at the essence of the American dream. And as you can see, savings plays a really critical role in helping families move ahead, both within their lifetimes as well as across generations. And something that I think is really notable, as you can see in the final representation, is that households who are in the higher income range, savings is much less of a significant factor in staying ahead. So I think this suggests to us that savings policy in particular is best targeted at families at the low end of the income scale. In the end, though, evaluating these approaches is about more than just understanding how families are doing. It's about advancing solutions to help them do better and assessing our progress along the way by applying the perspectives that we're going to be focusing on this afternoon to wealth. We can see that policy supporting the savings of low income families is a good investment. Savings play a key role in helping families achieve economic security in the near term and economic mobility over time. And both of these play a key role in creating sustained paths out of poverty. But low income families have unequal access to these resources. And although low income families have the most to gain from building savings, current policy is heavily concentrated on families at the upper end of the income scale where it's needed the least and has the weakest impact. So by designing policies around the answers to some simple questions like what do people need and who's falling short and what can we do to help them do better? We could not only improve the outcomes for struggling families, we could also improve outcomes for our economy and our federal budget. So these are the questions that we're going to be presenting to our panelists to answer. First to discuss economic security is Matt Unreth, who is the director of the National Family Economic Security Program at Wider Opportunities for Women. Next to discuss poverty is Melissa Boteak, who is the manager of the Haffenton Campaign. Then to discuss inequality is Indy Dedagopta, who is a policy advisor at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And finally to discuss economic mobility is Erin Currier, who is the project manager at the Pew Economic Mobility Project. After our panelists have each made their presentations, we'll begin a discussion and looking at these issues a little bit more in depth. We'll also have the opportunity to hear from you, both those of you in the room and those watching online. If you are watching online and would like to present one of our panelists with a question, you can do so at Imple, E-M-P-L-E, at newamerica.net, or tweet to us at assetsnaf. Again, thank you so much for being here and we'll begin with Matt. Good afternoon everybody. As Rachel said, my name is Matt Unrath, and I'm the director of the Family Economic Security Program at Wider Opportunities for Women. Thank you all so much for attending. This is really great and thank you so much for the New America Foundation for hosting. I'm really glad to have the opportunity to speak briefly about Wider Opportunities for Women and our work advancing our measure of economic security. So I'm going to spend hopefully about 10 minutes or so explaining what that measure is, what it looks like, what it means for our understanding of economic insecurity in the United States and what our policy responses might be in light of that measure. So while this measure starts with a simple proposition that we need to understand what the costs are that workers and families face, what are their costs in being safe and secure, and what are their costs for fully participating in the workforce. And then from then, what is the income that they actually need to earn to fully meet those expenses? So we just create a budget standard. We look at the different costs associated with each of those different expenses, and we find from them the income standard that they need to meet those expenses. So what we're trying to do is place a cost figure to true financial stability, trying to create a target that low-income families can actually strive towards, unlike, say, the federal poverty level, as well as giving an accurate description of costs for policy makers or those designing programs that might support low-income families to understand what those costs are and what need truly is. So I'll briefly mention that while I began engaging this question about 10 years ago in the creation of the self-sufficiency standard, which some of you may be familiar with, and has been created for nearly 40 states across the country over the last 10 years. A few years ago, we launched our Elder Economic Security Initiative, which produces an index looking at the costs associated with being out of the workforce or being in retirement. As you might expect, Social Security and Medicare doesn't actually cover all of the income needs for being in retirement, so there's an important role that savings plays. There's an important role for asset building throughout one's time in the workforce. So a lot of other organizations came to learn that there's obviously an important role for savings for low-income families, but our standard didn't really measure that. The self-sufficiency standard measured moment-in-time expenses and what was the income that families needed just to meet their most immediate expenses. So we needed to create a measure that looked at the income needs to meet momentary expenses as well as to build savings to meet emergencies and to save for retirement as well. So we created the basic economic security tables, which is what I'm going to be speaking about this afternoon. So the best is, it's a basic budget standard. Excuse me, it looks at the monthly costs of basic expenses and the total income that families need to meet those expenses. We produce the best for 420 different family types, any combination of one and two worker households with anywhere from zero to six children of different ages. We produce these tables assuming the presence and absence of employment-based benefits, which obviously affects the cost of healthcare, saving for emergencies if you don't have access to unemployment insurance, and the cost for retirement if you don't have access to an employer-responsive retirement account, for example. And we produce these at the city, county, statewide, and national level. So we are able to produce over 800 tables, 800 different income levels for every county and every state in the country. So this is an example of the best table for a single worker in the United States with benefits. So we have here our different expenses. So we have housing, which assumes that a worker and a family are in a small, modest apartment. Food, which is a very low-cost food plan. There's no eating out, no pizzas on a Tuesday night, no nice meal on a Saturday. Transportation, which is the ownership and maintenance of a small sedan, assuming that a worker does not have access to public transportation, which most people do not. Childcare, which evidently is zero dollars in the country. It's completely free. That's not true. This is for a single worker, so this person doesn't have children. That's why it's zero. But I'll show you different income tables for different families later. Personal household items, which is just anything, you know, toiletries and anything else you might need for your home. A haircut if you're lucky enough to have hair. Health care, which is just a basic health care plan. Again, this is assuming that someone has access to an employer-sponsored health plan. Emergency savings, which is defined by saving for a period of unemployment and retirement savings, which is created using our elder index. So this is really just a cost. I want to emphasize, and I don't have enough time to go into the deep methodology, but I'd be happy to answer any questions. I promise you what I emphasize is this is a measure of very base. This is a very bare-bones budget. This is not a measure of a middle-class lifestyle. There are no vacations, right? There's no entertainment. There's no money for recreation or hobbies. There's none of that in here. This is not a measure of consumption. This is a measure of basic income need. So it's really just the cost of getting by and saving a little bit for the future. In the United States, for a single worker, it costs $30,000 a year to just get by and save a little bit, again, for emergencies and retirement. That income level, I also have here, I should mention, if you can see that children's higher education home ownership, which we include outside of our single budget standard. And again, I can talk a bit more about that later if you wish. Once you add kids to the picture, though, the whole budget standard completely changes. So I learned never to have children because they're way too expensive. Childcare for a single parent with two kids, for example, ends up being $1,000 on average a month. So a single mom, for example, raising two kids needs to earn nearly $60,000 a year just to get by, just to meet her expenses and save a little bit for emergencies and retirement. Your typical American family, two parents and two kids needs to earn nearly $70,000 a year. Again, just for our basic definition, our basic level of economic security. So these are our income needs. And this table is available in the report that you guys hopefully picked up outside. And for those watching online, this is available at our website. So if you break it down into pie charts, I love pie charts, looking at budget proportions. The biggest expenses are, they vary by family type and make up a family, of course, but the biggest expenses are usually housing, transportation and childcare. So for a single worker, housing and transportation will make up nearly half of their family budget. For one parent with two kids, their biggest expense or her biggest expense, if it's a single mom, is childcare. Follow them by housing, transportation. I also know here the cost of savings or asset building, right? Saving for retirement or emergencies makes up anywhere from 3% to 6% of all of our family budgets. So it's relatively modest, right? Saving for retirement or emergencies, according to this understanding, according to budget proportions, is not an enormous task. But unfortunately, if it costs you $70,000 just to make ends meet and you have trouble making your rent payment or putting food on the table, saving for retirement is low-hanging fruit when you're trying to just, again, make ends meet. Important to note, employment-based benefits. For a family of four, they can be valued at nearly $6,000 a year. Again, this is mostly a function of healthcare costs if you don't have access to an employer-responsored health plan. So for those low-income workers who most likely don't have access to employment-based benefits, they're that much farther and are earning low wages, they're that much farther away from being economically secure, because they have to pay that much more into health insurance, that much more into saving for emergencies and saving for retirement. So there's a true value, a true significant value to having employment-based benefits. So we can compare the best to our traditional understandings of poverty and economic insecurity. The best on average is about three times higher than the federal poverty level. So for a single worker that's $10,000 approximately a year, for the best it's $30,000. For a family of four, the federal poverty level is $22,000 a year. For the best it's about $67,000 a year. So again, it's three times higher. But I want to emphasize again that we're measuring something different, right? This is not just a higher standard for poverty. We're looking at economic security. It's a different definition. I think Melissa next is going to talk a little bit more about that and I'd be happy to try to tease out the difference during our question and answer session. The best is two times higher than the minimum wage and significantly higher than the median income for single parents. Significantly higher. And it's about, it's close to the national median income for the standard American family, for two workers, you know, with two kids. So the question, I guess the next question, right, is how many families actually can make ends meet then? How many families are actually economically secure considering these really high income levels? And the report that we released today, which again, hopefully you picked up on the way in answers that question. So using 2009 census data and putting them against the 420 different family types that we have here, which means that we had to exclude, for example, seniors because they don't have a respective best table to compare their situation to. We found that 45% of Americans, of all Americans, lack economic security. So nearly half of the country, nearly half of all the people in the United States that have a respective best to compare their situation to, lack economic security. They don't have the incomes that enable them to meet all their basic expenses and save a little bit for the future. And 43% of all households, right? 62% of all black households and 66% of all Hispanic households lack economic security. 55% of all children and nearly three quarters, over three quarters of all black and Hispanic children live in households that lack economic security. Because if you have kids, you face higher expenses, right? So kids are going to have a face a higher degree of economic insecurity. 82% of households headed by single mothers, 88% of households headed by single black mothers, and 91% of households headed by single Hispanic mothers lack economic security. So only 9% of households headed by single Hispanic mothers actually have economic security or have the incomes or have access to the incomes that allow them to be economically secure. So why, right? It's a very complex question as to why we have data that's that stark that this, you know, half of the country, according to our definition, does not have economic security. And remember, going back to what I tried to emphasize before, this is a very basic definition. This is not a middle class, right? This is not our definition of what the middle class is. This is a very bare bones budget. And you know, we half of the country has trouble meeting at least that definition of economic security. So why, right? Why is that the case? One proposition, one thing I would guess, wow, would highlight was just the wages and incomes that people have access to. Families are trying to meet the higher increased costs of modern expenses with 1970s wage levels. And to a degree, it's almost as simple as that. So we compared the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers job projections for, you know, how many jobs are going to be created in certain industries over the next 10 years or so. And then the Department of Labor also offers average incomes for those jobs, so of high growth jobs, right? So we looked at what jobs are actually going to be created in our economy over the next, but will be the next seven years. Of all jobs, only a third, only 31% will offer economic security to a single parent raising two kids. And only 60% of jobs expected to be created by 2018 will provide economic security to your typical American family of four with two working adults. And that's for all jobs. That's for even jobs with people who have college degrees or bachelor degrees. And obviously the situation is much worse if you don't have a college degree. If you only have a high school degree, then if you're a single parent with only a high school degree, only 13% of the jobs expected to be created in the next seven years will allow you to be economically secure. I apologize for talking so fast. That's my Jersey accent, but if you don't understand what I'm saying, again, you can ask me in the question and answer session. And for single workers, single worker with only a high school degree, only half of the jobs expected to be created in the next seven years will allow that worker to be economically secure. So less educated households are certainly less likely to be economically secure. There's a strong correlation here between educational attainment and households' economic security. But it's important to point out that 36% of households that are headed by someone with an associates degree still lack economic security. So even having that degree does not guarantee you economic security. And the same for households with someone with a bachelor's degree. So households headed by someone with a bachelor's degree, one-fifth still of those households will still lack economic security. So having a college degree does not guarantee you economic security. Though, of course, it may help in getting access to better paying jobs. It's not a guarantee. So we compared workers living below their best index. So is it a function of how many hours you can work? Perhaps you're only working part-time jobs. The answer is no. It's not a function of how many hours you work or the effort exerted that leads to difference in income attained. It's pretty much a function of what incomes and wages are offered through those jobs. So workers below the best work on average 37 hours a week. And workers above the best work on average 42 hours a week, which is only a five-hour difference. But they're both working full-time. Both of those meet the definition of full-time work. And workers living below the best earn median annual wages of $18,000 a year. And workers above the best earn median annual wages of $48,000 a year, which is a $30,000 difference. It's just huge, right? So it's a question of what incomes and wages are available to people on the lower side of the income spectrum. So I'm going to leave it, I guess, to our question and answer session again and our co-presenters to speak about why this is the case, and why I reference 1970s wage levels, but historically has led to half of our country being unable to just make ends meet. But I guess I would end with, we did a polling project two years ago and asked households, how do you speak about economic insecurity? But what language do you use in speaking about your household financial situation? We found that most households completely understand how much it takes to make ends meet. Most households understand that it's $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year just to get by. So we don't have any work to do to convince the American people, per se, that our link-come levels are accurate. But we also asked, what was the source of your greatest financial stress? And this was in 2009, so was it unemployment, was it high medical bills? And what they cited, the source of their greatest financial stress was the simple fact that the growing trend that their incomes are no longer enough to make ends meet. It's no longer enough to cover their basic expenses. So when it comes to policy responses, and I can offer a few, the principal one that we would emphasize is that you just need to create jobs that allow people to support a family. You need good paying jobs. And until our economy can figure that out, you're going to end up with a citizenry where half of Americans just can't make ends meet. So in terms of policy responses, I'll reference just a few. Transportation is one of our biggest expenses, so we need to consider radically expanding public transportation as a viable alternative for people to get to work. If our economy is going to mandate that families need to full-time working adults just to be able to feed their kids and pay the doctor's bills, we need workplaces that are family-friendly. So we need basic days and we need family medical leave. We need those immediately. And that's not a function of, I mean, if you need to working full-time adults just to make ends meet, you need to make sure that workplaces are family-friendly. And I'll leave it to Rachel to ask me questions about asset building practices and how we can help low-income people build up their reserves of retirement savings and emergency savings, especially when incomes are so low. But I'll end, I guess, with our final proposition. I began with a proposition in arguing that we need an income standard that looks at true economic security. What are the true costs that people face and what are the true incomes that they need to earn to meet those expenses? So our final proposition would be that Americans that work full-time should not have trouble putting food on the table at the end of the day and they should not have trouble paying their medical bills. If you work full-time, you should be able to support a family and you should be able, again, to put a little bit away for retirement. You should be able to have a basic level, at least our basic definition of a basic level of economic security. And if our definition of basic economic security is now what half of the country is striving to attain, that's our new American dream. And again, at that basic definition, unfortunately, we still have a long way to go to get there. So with that, thank you very much and I'll pass it off to Melissa. Hi, everyone. My name is Melissa Botech and I'm the manager of the half-in-ten campaign, which is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Coalition on Human Needs to Build the Political and Public Will to Cut Poverty in Half in 10 Years. And I want to thank the New America Foundation and Rachel Black specifically for hosting us here today. So I first want to spend a little bit of time talking about poverty. Why does it matter? Why it's inadequate as a standalone measure? A little bit about the new supplemental measure the Census has just released and then talk a little bit about how are people doing according to these measures. I was asked to discuss both trends over time as well as the impact of the recession on low-income families. And then finally, I think the meat and the potatoes of what I really want to discuss and what I think most Americans are most concerned about is what are we doing to move the numbers in the right direction? What are the policy interventions that can make sure that more Americans are able to join the middle class? So the first thing I want to talk about, I think Matt gave a really important distinction of economic security versus poverty. Economic security is really, I think, as he said, what you need to get by at a very basic level. Poverty is a little bit something different. I think it is a standard beneath which no one should fall an absolute kind of measure. And we all know that that measure is inadequate. We've, Matt's raised it and we've talked a lot about it in the future presentations. But I do want to note that it is important to have this line beneath which no one should fall because it does correlate with different kinds of hardships that we want to avoid. And so this chart, I think, is important to demonstrate certain kinds of hardships that we think no child, really no one in America should have to undergo. These include hunger, overcrowded housing, being laid on your rent or mortgage, not going to the doctor or hospital when you need to, or any of these four hardships. And you can see there is a massive difference between people who are living beneath the poverty line and people who are above twice the poverty line in their facing of these hardships. So just to give one example for hunger, you are six times as likely to be struggling to put food on the table in a household with kids if you're living beneath the poverty line than if you're above twice it. That matters and that kind of distinction in hardship matters. So I think it is important to have some kind of concept of poverty as a line beneath which no one should fall and as a representation of certain kinds of hardships that no family should have to face. And you can see me, Matt talked about the large number of families that are facing economic insecurity. You can see that for households with kids, 52 percent, so over half of households with children who are poor are experiencing one of these four kinds of hardships. In addition to having a measure of poverty, a focus on cutting poverty works. And this chart right here is an example of that. What it's showing is a comparison of the U.S. progress on poverty versus the U.K. United Kingdom's progress on poverty over the same period. And you can see that while the United States is sort of going down and up and at the end of the Great Recession is sort of on a tail end going upwards, the United Kingdom at the same time period, they set a national target to cut poverty in half and 10 years that was across the different parties in their political system and mobilized resources to reach it with focus on both income maximization and early life chances. And you can see the difference that that makes in the policies and the will to implement things to move children above the poverty line. So I want to start off by saying that poverty matters and a focus on cutting poverty matters. However, the current measure that we're looking at is really not telling us that much about how well families are doing in making ends meet, as Matt said. The current measure that's traditional is developed in the 1960s using 1950s expenditure data on food. And there's three big problems with the threshold. I mean, this is organized thematically. One, I think, is that the threshold itself doesn't incorporate the basic expenses that you need. So it doesn't incorporate, for example, shelter, utilities, clothing. You're not able to deduct your work expenses. And the resources that a family has available to meet this threshold are not adequately incorporated into this measure. So we can't really see the impact of public policy. So if a family is receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit or the SNAP slash Food Stamp program, they don't look any different on this measure than a family who is not. And so it's really difficult to see the difference that effective public policy interventions can make. And then finally, there's no geographic adjustment so that a family in an urban area versus a rural area, there's really no difference in cost of living. So those are sort of three big failings, I think, of our traditional poverty measure. And if you look at the traditional one, it says that the current threshold is $22,314 a year for a family of four. And according to that measure last year, 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty. Something that's interesting if you look at the little infographic on the side there is that it says that poverty was calculated in the 1960s by taking cost of an emergency food basket and multiplying it by three because at the time food was one-third of the average family's budget. You saw on one of Matt's slide that today food is about, it said I think 11% of the average family's budget according to their calculations, whereas housing, healthcare, transportation, childcare, all these expenses have grown much faster. And so what that's done is pushed our country's definition of poverty further and further out of the mainstream. So as Rachel mentioned earlier this year, the Census Bureau released a supplemental poverty measure based on the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and then updated with about 15 years of updated methodology research. And this addresses a lot of the failings of the original poverty measure. First off, it takes into its baseline clothing, shelter, utilities, and food, and then allows a family to deduct its work-related expenses such as childcare and transportation or medical out-of-pocket costs that are not available to meet that set of basic needs. The second very important thing it allows us to do is to see the impact of public policies on the poverty rate. So if a family is getting the earned income tax credit or the SNAP or food stamp program or housing voucher, that will register as part of that family's resources that can push them above the threshold. And then the final thing is there are regional variations. So you can see that there are some differences in cost of living in parts of the country. So under this new measure it showed that in 2010, 49.1 million Americans lived in poverty and 16%. So higher than the official measure but not as high as sort of Matt's number obviously of nearly one half of Americans. But I want to make that point as sort of very distinct. The supplemental poverty measure and of course the traditional measure is distinct from a measure of economic security. There are a large number of families who are above the poverty line but still struggling to make ends meet. And as Matt said, if you ask the average American what it takes to make ends meet, they're going to say something more like twice the poverty level or above $40,000 a year. And moreover, when I spoke at the beginning about deprivations, a large number of families between 100 and 200% of the poverty line are also experiencing hardship and deprivations but may not be eligible to access public benefits such as the SNAP program or childcare assistance in order to mitigate some of that hardship. So what we have is a whole large group of people, 103 million to be exact beneath twice the poverty level who are really still struggling but not counted officially as poor by our country's definition. So in response to this, half in 10 recently put out a new report called Restoring Shared Prosperity. There's some copies in the back. It's available also at www.halfin10.org backslash indicators. And one of the goals of half in 10 as I mentioned earlier is to build the political and public will to cut poverty in half in 10 years. But how are we measuring that success? How are we measuring whether or not we're meeting the target? And so of course we're looking at measures such as the supplemental poverty measure but we're also looking at the levers of opportunity that we need to pull on to drive those numbers in the right direction that are going to impact more than just people living beneath $22,314 a year for a family of four or the slightly higher amount threshold for the supplemental poverty measure. We're looking at, for example, good jobs. So how many families are able to access paid sick leave? And I'll actually go to the next slide so you can see some of the things that we're measuring. How many people were unemployed? How many people were able to access retirement and health benefits? In terms of job preparation, we're looking at high school graduation rates percentage of workers who have an associate's degree or higher so that they can access higher quality jobs. So one bucket that we're looking at in terms of measuring our progress towards cutting poverty in half in 10 years is this good jobs bucket and we see that as sort of being a central strategy in cutting poverty in half in 10 years. The second thing that we're looking at is strong families. We know that households that have more than one earner tend to be more economically secure and so there's new data in the report that show the differential between multiple earner households and single earner households. But it also shows that the poverty rate among single mothers goes from 40.7% to 14% when mom has a full-time working job. That's a huge differential and so part of the formula for strengthening families goes back to Matt's arguments on economic security and ensuring that there's enough good paying jobs and work supports for parents in poverty. The final bucket is promoting economic security and this gets at family expenses, it gets at access to help when you need it and it gets to asset building for the longer term. And so some of the indicators that we're looking at here include unemployed workers, percentage of unemployed workers that have access to unemployment benefits, SNAP participation rates, childcare thresholds, as well as the housing affordability gap. So for every 100 very low-income families, how many affordable and available units are there in that area and that's data from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. And then finally, I think very important for this audience and it's interested in asset building is the percentage of families who are unbanked. And so this data sort of gets at our families able to save for the short-term or long-term. Do they have the financial instruments available to them to make those kinds of investments? And what's nice about this website is that it's all interactive so you can click on your state and you can get all the data for your state as well as a fact sheet and bottom-ranking indicators and you can also rank them first to 50. So it's a very nice interactive website to kind of see how you're faring in half at the national and state level along the levels of opportunity that we're tracking. So the next thing I was asked to discuss was trends over time. And so what this graph is showing, I think, is an important point. The first is that we can cut poverty in half. It's not some pie-in-the-sky goal. It's not something that we haven't done before. You can see that when 1949 to 1959, we nearly cut poverty in half in 10 years and then from 1959 to 1973, we cut it in half again. And so here's an example of where a strong economy lifted up all workers, where there was government interventions and the establishment of many public policies that lifted up all workers. So 1973, though, is a pivotal year, though. You'll see it bottoms out at 11.1%, which is the lowest poverty rate that we've ever had. And then it proceeds to sort of go up and down a little bit. And you'll see that if you went to 2010, you'd see it went to 15.1%, which was a very high level, highest since you go looking back to the 1980s. And so why that's important is that this is the income level only. It's not the supplemental level that's looking at all these policy interventions, like the earned income tax credit and SNAP. So the next few slides will sort of show the interventions and the difference that those make. But 1973 was a key year because starting that year, you can begin to see a divergence of wages. And I think there's some really key things to note in this slide here. You can see that the median income for the 50th percentile from 1973 to today in real terms only went up by 35 cents. That's crazy. 35 cents over the past several decades for the median worker. And it's even less for those in the 10th and 20th percentile. Whereas you see the top 10th decile, 90th percent and 95th percent, there were significant gains and wages. And so the trend since 1973 has really been flatlining wages despite economic growth. And this has been particularly pronounced in sort of the lost decade between 2000 and 2010. And really in the lead-up to the Great Recession. Because what we saw between 2003 and 2007 was the first economic recovery on record where profits and productivity went up, but median earnings went down and poverty went up at the same time. So really a disconnect between economic productivity and economic growth and how the average family is doing. And that impacts, I think, all of the indicators that we're talking about today, but had a pronounced impact on poverty. So the final thing I was asked to touch on is policy because it matters. Policy does influence these numbers and in half and tens report that we put out that's available in the back, we intentionally chose indicators that could be influenced by policy choices that we really have a choice about whether or not we're driving these numbers or not. And here the really exact correlation between real median earnings for men between 1959 and 2009 and an exact echoing of that data with the poverty rate. And so there's a really strong correlation between good jobs and poverty, it matters. And so some of the things that we're looking at in supporting here are particular elements of the American Jobs Act. That includes investments in infrastructure and school repair. It includes transitional and subsidized jobs for low-income workers to connect them and it includes things such as extending unemployment benefits, creating demand in the economy that keeps small businesses humming and allows them to hire more workers. Policy also matters in the economic security bucket of the half and ten measurements. You can see the supplemental income poverty measure really shows the impact of federal policies in keeping families above the poverty line. So this little infographic, for example, shows that in 2010 alone the earned income tax credit kept six million people out of poverty. SNAP kept 5.1 million people out of poverty. Housing subsidies kept 2.6 million and the school lunch program kept 1.1 million. So these policies really make a difference and in a way the traditional measure did not allow us to show that. The supplemental measure has really been able to allow us to make the point that whether we choose to invest in these programs or disinvest from these programs does make a difference in our poverty rates. And then finally, I think this is a really key analysis done in the budget and policy priorities that showed that without the safety net the poverty rate would have been nearly twice as high in 2010. So if you were to take away the government's assistance 28.6% of the American population would have lived in poverty. So over a quarter. And so I think that one of the benefits of a National Academy of Sciences type poverty measure is to allow us to see the value of these programs that we often take for granted and to show that government does have a role to play, and moving the numbers in the right direction. And moreover, the temporary assistance in the Recovery Act made a big difference. You can see in the second bar that without it 17.8% of Americans would have been in poverty. So this I think is a critical point to make. So I've already gone through some of the policy solutions. I'm going to right now turn it over to the next speaker to talk a little bit about inequality. First, let me thank Rachel and the New America Foundation for inviting me today to give a kind introduction. I'm going to focus my remarks on income inequality. And to put this into context, I like to think of a ladder with the lowest rung of the ladder representing poverty, as Melissa Apley put it, the level below which no one should fall, economic security as a higher rung on the ladder, income mobility representing the ability we have to move up and down the ladder, and income inequality is a ladder. And I want to answer three or discuss three questions with you today about income inequality. What's going on? Why do we care? And what should we do? And to understand what's going on, it's important to appreciate that we didn't always have rising income inequality in America. In fact, from 1947 to 1973, low, medium and high income families all experienced significant shared prosperity with their incomes roughly doubling during this period. This chart uses Census Bureau data really the only source for looking back this far in time and shows family income growth from 1947 to 1973, index to 1973 levels. The red line on the chart represents the 95th percentile or the top of the income distribution. The gold line on the chart represents the 50th percentile or middle of the income distribution. And the blue line on the chart represents the 20th percentile or bottom of the income distribution. Now, you're probably really struggling to tell these lines apart. And that's the whole point of the chart. Because until 1973 income gains were so widely shared throughout the income distribution. But the story changes a little when we look at more recent decades. Here you can see the loss of shared prosperity in the last few decades. With the top, the 95th percentile income growth. The middle seeing much less income growth. And the 20th percentile the bottom faring the worst of all. Let's examine these trends in more detail by looking at more comprehensive data from the Congressional Budget Office which takes the best numbers from the best sources and puts them all together. This chart shows growth in income throughout the income distribution from 1979 through 2007. What you can see is had just 18% income growth during this period. While higher income groups had higher income growth during this period. What's most astonishing I think is that the top 1% had 277% income growth between 1979 and 2007. To be in the top 1% in 2007, a family of four would have had to have an income of over half a million dollars a year. Now we've heard arguments that we don't care so much about family incomes in a given year. We care a lot more about how families do over time. And the Congressional Budget Office report on income inequality addressed this very question and found that looking at family incomes over a few years doesn't change the story very much. And the reason why this is so is simple. While families do experience changes in income that might shift them from one income group to another. The shifts aren't big enough to affect the overall distribution of income. And similarly under has income mobility risen during this period to offset rising income inequality. But unfortunately the best available research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston finds that in the last three decades income mobility has actually fallen. So why do we care about rising income inequality? First rising income inequality may harm our democracy and political process. Princeton University political scientist Martin Glens has found when looking at issues where Americans at different income levels have different policy preferences, the actual policy outcomes we see strongly reflect the policy preferences of the most affluent and bear much less relationship to the policy preferences of those with low and middle incomes. And as those Americans with the highest incomes live farther and farther apart from the rest of us, their preferences and priorities may diverge further as well. Another reason why we care about rising income inequality is that it may affect the distribution of well-being in America. This chart shows life expectancy for seniors in 1972 and 2001 with the blue bars representing the bottom half of the earnings distribution, the red bars representing the top half of the earnings distribution. In 1972 the gap between the bottom and top half in life expectancy was a little over one year. By 2001 this gap had widened to nearly six years and I think this is the sort of result that most of us would find troubling. And yet another reason why we care about rising income inequality is that it likely makes it harder to reduce poverty which Melissa showed. This chart shows changes in the annual poverty rate from 1959 through 2010 with the blue bars representing decreases in the official poverty rate and the red bars indicating increases in the poverty rate. The shaded areas indicate recessions. And you can see that economic growth in the 1960s significantly reduced poverty but economic expansions in more recent years have done much less to reduce poverty. In fact in some recent years as Melissa indicated we've even seen poverty rise years into an economic expansion. Now it's important to note that also as Melissa indicated the official poverty rate is much more lower than it is today. Former Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Greenspan one set of income inequality. This is not the type of thing that a democratic society, a capitalist democratic society can do. It's not the type of thing that a democratic society can do. It's not the type of thing that a democratic society can do. A capitalist democratic society can really accept without addressing. So what should we do about rising income inequality? First it's important to realize that broader economic forces both national and international not government policy are the main drivers of rising income inequality. But we do need to ask ourselves is government policy leaning against or exacerbating these trends? And one of the most discouraging findings from the Congressional Budget Office report about rising income inequality is that the tax and transfer system has been doing less in recent years to reduce inequality than it did in 1979. I don't have time to discuss all the likely causes and drivers of income inequality but I do think we can learn a few things from looking at that period from 1947 to the 1970s when income growth was so widely shared. MIT professors Frank Levy and Peter Temen observed that this period was strongly influenced by unions, a negotiating framework that heavily influenced wage setting, progressive taxes, and a high minimum wage. They argue that the collapse of these institutions has amplified the effect of trade and technology in widening income gaps. This suggests that slowing the growth of rising income inequality may require changes in both the norms of private sector behavior and government interventions. And I think a range of steps have been taken in this trend. And the near term ending the 2001-2010 tax cuts would allow us to avert to a more progressive tax system and allow us to afford investments we need to reduce income inequality, implementing health reform to expand health care access and possibly even increasing earnings for workers if health reform can successfully control health costs, indexing the minimum wage to average wage growth and increasing demand in the economy while promoting full employment. When we last had full employment in the 1990s with the unemployment rate near 4%, low and middle wage workers saw significant real earnings growth. And in the medium to longer term we should reduce barriers for workers to organize and enact more progressive tax reform that reconsider some of the upside down spending in our tax code. We should also boost investments in early learning and care especially for low and moderate income families to improve educational attainment and support work. And in fact lowering our high levels of poverty would itself help counter inequality especially by reducing the lasting damage of childhood poverty on earnings as adults. But given the significant deficit reduction that I think is inevitable in the coming months and years, our most urgent focus needs to be to ensure that deficit reduction counter and not exacerbate the trends of rising inequality. We've actually done this before and I know we can do it again. In 1990 and 1993 major deficit reduction agreements also moderated growth in inequality in contrast to 1981 and more recently the Budget Control Act which relies entirely on budget cuts for its savings. So we've seen that income inequality is growing and it has not been offset by a rise in income mobility and we care because the rising income inequality may have damaging effects on poverty, on individuals and on our social fabric. But there are a wide range of steps that we can take that would begin to counter and maybe even reverse the rise in income inequality including strengthening the social safety net ending tax cuts and tax breaks tilted towards the most wealthy pursuing full employment and boosting the bargaining power of workers and making investments to increase skills and educational attainment. And thanks for listening, I'm happy to take questions and I'll point you to a forthcoming guide on historical trends in income inequality by my colleagues at the Center on Budget. It's likely to be released on November 28th. Thank you. Good afternoon, my name is Erin Currier and I'm the project manager for Pew's Economic Mobility Project. Thank you to Rachel and to the New America Foundation for asking me to present today about a topic that has been in the news quite a bit lately which is economic mobility. Our project was established to answer a very simple question is the American dream alive and well? Are Americans able to exceed the income and social standing of their parents? And do Americans have equality of opportunity regardless of where they start in life? EMP believes that understanding the answers to these questions about economic mobility the ability to move up and down the income ladder over a lifetime or across generations is critical. And my comments today will focus on the data that we've uncovered about economic mobility and what we believe policymakers can do to change the data that we're seeing. There are two ways of measuring economic mobility and the first is absolute. This is simply a measure of income change over time and you can compare that income change to a person's parents, to their peers or even to themselves over time. What we see in terms of absolute mobility is a glass half full because two thirds of Americans earn higher incomes than their parents did in inflation adjusted dollars. This is true across the income distribution and it's most true at the bottom where more than 80% have higher incomes, higher family incomes than their parents did in the same age. Still, it is important to keep in mind as many of you know as the other presenters said these income gains were not shared equally across the income distribution and especially for families at the bottom of the income ladder in that bottom fifth, an incremental increase in income may not be enough to actually change their position on the income ladder as a whole. We see that especially when we look at the second measure of mobility which is relative. Relative mobility is concerned with a person's rank on the income distribution as a whole. If you consider this inter-generationally or across generations it's a measure of basically how far does the apple fall from the tree. If you were raised by parents at the bottom of the income distribution how likely are you to remain at the bottom if you were raised by parents in the middle class how likely are you to move up or fall down the income ladder over time. This measure shows a glass half empty. This is a horribly complex chart but if you look at the left most column that's basically showing where adults end up when their parents were in the bottom fifth of the income distribution and that lower corner shows that 42% who are raised in the bottom fifth remain in the bottom fifth themselves as adults and those who do get out don't necessarily go far. Another 23% only make it to the second income quintile. The most striking number I think is probably at the top of that column the 6%. That shows that this rags to riches story of someone raised in the bottom making it all the way to the top of the income distribution is much more myth than reality. It does not happen very often. Similarly if you look to the right most column that's the position of kids who are raised in the top of the income distribution. You can see that 39% remain stuck in the top and only another 20% or so fall even to the fourth income quintile. We call this phenomenon stickiness at the ends because you can see that people who are raised on the ends of the income distribution are highly likely to remain stuck there over time. This data reflects all Americans but when we look at different demographic groups we see that people are not equally likely to be in that 42% that's stuck at the bottom. In particular one of the most striking findings of our project has been the differences in mobility for black families and white families. Again horribly complicated chart very similar to the last one it's showing how kids end up where they end up on the income distribution relative to where their parents were with separate columns for families and white families at each of the fifths of the income distribution. The important numbers to look at again are in that left most bottom corner where you can see that 54% of African-American families who are raised in the bottom remain stuck in the bottom over time. One of the most devastating findings actually concerns African-Americans who are raised in the middle. You can see that 45% nearly half raised in solidly middle income families fall all the way to the bottom of the income distribution as adults compared to only 16% of white families. It's not shown here but in terms of absolute mobility only 31% of African-Americans exceed the family income of their parents. Our research has focused on trying to better understand these data and trying to really identify the key drivers of mobility and the things that matter the most for people moving up the income ladder or preventing them from falling down. Not surprisingly and I think well aligned to the other presentations you've heard we've identified post-secondary education savings and asset building and neighborhood poverty as three of the most powerful drivers of economic mobility in the U.S. So what if anything should government do about these data? A few months ago our project commissioned a public opinion poll and we asked Americans what they felt if any the role of government was in promoting economic mobility and what we found is that an overwhelming majority, 83% of Americans believe that the government does have a role to play in promoting mobility for people in the bottom and the middle of the income distribution. That includes 91% of Democrats 74% of independents and 73% of Republicans. So contrary to popular perception there is a feeling across America that the government can make a difference in terms of promoting mobility and this idea of the American dream is one that resonates with Americans. They believe that it's important, they believe they can achieve it, they want it for their children and they want the government to support that. However right now they don't feel the government is doing a very effective job. By a 52 to 27% margin Americans believe the government currently does more to hurt mobility than to help it. The good news is that majorities of Americans do believe that there are things solid steps the government could take to promote mobility through public policy and they identify things that our data show make a difference for mobility including promoting and supporting early childhood education post-secondary education savings and retirement planning and also neighborhood development. Notably the government right now does spend quite a bit of money on mobility enhancing public policy an analysis that one of our principles at the Urban Institute conducted for us in 2008 which reflects the 2006 federal budget shows that $746 billion are spent every year in promoting mobility. Unfortunately the vast majority of those dollars are geared towards the middle and upper end of the income distribution because they tend to be delivered through the tax code. They come through employer related subsidies work subsidies, home ownership subsidies savings and investment incentives that many people at the bottom are unable to take advantage of. Only 28% of mobility spending, all mobility spending reached lower income households and that happened in the form of child health and nutrition programs, work supports and education and training. While this data is from 2006 we know that there have not been substantive changes in the tax code that create a different picture of this now and it shows that we still have a very long way to go in terms of changing public policy to benefit those people at the bottom. From its inception the Economic Mobility Project has been lucky enough to work with a diverse group of stakeholders from across the political spectrum. This principal's group is made up of thought leaders from five think tanks with NDC including the New America Foundation and also the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. This is kind of a strange bedfellows coalition because this group represents a pretty broad swath of the political spectrum. They worked with us in late 2009 to develop a set of policy recommendations that they unanimously agreed would promote economic mobility. In this process they agreed on two fundamental principles. First, they wanted to promote upward mobility for everyone but they believed looking at this data and being a part of our project for so long that the mobility budget really needed to focus on those at the bottom of the income distribution. That more attention needed to be placed on ensuring upward mobility from that bottom and middle parts of the income rungs. Second, they called for a portfolio shift making sure that more investments were made in mobility enhancing policies and also that those policies were geared toward the bottom. We gave the principles two rules in this process. We told them they had to unanimously agree so if anyone felt uncomfortable with any of the policy recommendations they were pulled off of the list off the table and we also told them that they had to base their recommendations in solid data or in policy evaluations that had already occurred so that we knew what they were putting forward was fact based. We were extremely pleased that they came up with 22 policy recommendations. They span the political sort of scope. They look at financial capital, human capital and social capital. If you are interested in those policy recommendations they are on our website at economicmobility.org. As you know the economy is being paid rightfully so to how the economy is impacting struggling families and what the consequences will be for our children. What I have tried to highlight here in these brief comments is that even in the best of times even when we look across generations and don't take into account the current recession we know that American families who are raised in the bottom who start in the bottom are highly likely to leave the bottom and those who fall down the income ladder tend to be stuck there. We also know that there are steps that the government can take to promote mobility and the data bears out that certain levers do matter for promoting people from the bottom. If you have any questions I look forward to answering them during the panel but also included my contact information here and encourage you to contact me anytime via email or phone if you would like to talk further about that. Thank you. And as our panelists get situated up here on the stage if you would all join me again in giving a round of applause to the very thoughtful comments from our panelists I think all of you woven together a very depressing narrative but given very thoughtful very thoughtful consideration to the points that you've made you've clearly detailed I think the scale of the problem as well as the scale of policy response that's really going to be required to move the needle but as India alluded to the deficit seems to be a driving consideration for the movement of all policy and I think as we saw disturbingly in some of the discussions with the super committee even programs that are serving our most vulnerable families seem to be under threat but given that there's also been very compelling research Melissa that's come out of the Center for American Progress showing the drain that poverty itself has on GDP and the IMF recently came out with something demonstrating really the harm that income and equality has on our international competitiveness is it possible that a anti-poverty agenda and a social mobility agenda are also similar to growth agendas and worth investment I can take a first stab at that one and there's a couple of numbers I want to put out there for consideration for folks the first is one that Rachel mentioned which is that inaction is very costly child poverty alone is costing our economy upwards of $500 billion a year in lost worker productivity and increased healthcare cost and increased criminal justice expenditures and a recently released report the Center for American Progress shows that just the hunger equation of this is costing us $167.5 billion a year and you can get those breakouts by state the second thing is that we can do this it's not a mutually exclusive proposition to cut poverty and cut the deficit at the same time Center for American Progress earlier this year released a report which showed a path to balance the budget by 2030 while cutting poverty in half at the same time we've seen these adequate revenues and made strategic spending cuts but invested in the things that were most important some of the human capital and job growth parts that will really impact our economic competitiveness so this is possible and it's important are kind of the two points I want to leave you with and then the final piece is that the poverty is intimately interconnected with our international competitiveness it's really difficult to be the best you can be on the world stage when you're leaving one third of your citizens behind languishing in low wage jobs or low income families and so I think we need to increasingly be making the connection between reducing poverty and the impact that has on our ability to be competitive economically I agree with what Melissa just said I just want to add two things one is that we are in a situation where I think it's very very critical to try to hold on to what we have that know what works but the other is that it's virtually impossible to see how we get out of the current deficit problem without significant contributions from revenues and depending on how that's done it's very possible that we can address some of the issues we've raised here today in fact some of the policies that were sort of embedded in one of the charts Aaron showed on mobility policies that are disproportionately tilted to the top are actually delivered through the tax code and I think this might be an area where we're more likely to see some agreement than say raising tax rates though as I've argued we need to do that as well so I think that you need revenues and the way that you deal with revenues can certainly address a lot of the issues we've discussed today you want to hold on to the programs and policies that you have and know that work as well Melissa in your presentation you showed a chart comparing the US poverty rate against the UK's poverty rate can each of you respond to how we're performing according to their perspective that you describe to us in international context and maybe why there's that difference Pew's Economic Mobility Project last week released a study that we did in coordination with the Russell Sage Foundation and the Sutton Trust in the UK that was a really comprehensive view of cross national mobility comparisons we looked at 10 different countries in Western Europe and then of course the US and Canada and we looked at how parents education in particular matters for children's outcomes on a range of measures their economic outcomes, their educational outcomes and their socio-behavioral outcomes and what we found is that the United States performs at the bottom of the pile in pretty much every measure looked at other countries are doing a much better job than we are at sort of breaking this connection between a parent's place on the income distribution or within their socio-economic status and their children's it shows that when you think about parents education playing a role in children's outcomes it makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways but that sort of genetic transmission of advantage should be the same across all countries and so where you see differences is actually a reflection of policy intervention and it shows to us that there's a lot of room to grow and a lot of room for the United States to implement better policies for promoting mobility I'm going to tackle inequality and poverty with Melissa's position quickly because unfortunately the stories are virtually identical and not dissimilar to what Aaron just said the best data for comparing poverty and inequality in the U.S. to other countries comes from the OECD the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.S. ranks at the bottom or near the bottom by virtually all measures according to this data but what's really remarkable is something very similar to what Aaron pointed out if you look at poverty or inequality before the tax and transfer system in each country has an impact and after the tax and transfer system in each country has an impact people would probably be pretty stunned to find that before the tax and transfer system the U.S. has similar rates of poverty and inequality to countries like Sweden it's only after the tax and transfer system is counted that we see a country like Sweden fall to the bottom of the pack in poverty and inequality and the tax and transfer system does significantly less and keeps us with higher rates of poverty and inequality than much of the rich world yeah I think we're all trying to kind of describe the same reality so the same policy responses that my co-presenters have referenced would apply to ours as well we haven't created a best international yet so I can't make a direct comparison between our national or local data to other countries but the fact that we require people to spend that much more on health care than people in other countries has a dramatic impact on how far away workers fall from their best standard and how badly the U.S. does in terms of family friendly workplace policies we're one of the worst countries when it comes to offering paid sick days or family medical leave to our workers and again when it's required that two workers work full-time just to be able to provide an economically self-sufficient income to their households workplace flexibility policies are extremely important I guess you heard it here first be on the lookout for best international sometime next year and this is going to be my last question so if those of you in the audience want to formulate your own question we'll begin in just a second and for those of you watching online don't forget to email assetsnaf Matt, you left the door open so I'm going to walk through it asset building and particular precautionary savings are really important for the economic security and mobility as well as low-income families but the charts that you showed us it looks like there isn't an inch of space in a family's budget to be able to devote to that what are some ways that we can support building up that resource for low-income families absolutely actually my co-presenters mentioned this we have a $400 billion asset building budget within the federal budget and most of those supports don't go to low-income households that are really struggling just to put a little bit away for retirement emergencies so some of that money that goes to support them and the minimal incomes that they have to put into these savings accounts is extremely helpful helping people open savings accounts and targeting asset building housing policies towards renters is extremely important as well so there are federal programs available that help renters enter into matched savings programs funding those at a similar level to how we fund the mortgage introduction would be extremely helpful so having asset building policies and savings programs match the realities of low-income families is extremely important so we have the money to do it and we just need to transfer to the people who needed the most one thing I would add to that I agree with everything the match has said is to sort of stop asset limits that are disincentive for low-income families to start saving so it's so much strange that if someone needs to access temporary help oftentimes they need to spend down their income or their savings in order to access that temporary help and they leave in a much worse situation they must get rid of whatever they've put away from their child's college education or for retirement in order to be able to access that temporary help and so some states have some reforms to make in terms of their safety net to enable low-income families to be able to access the safety net when they need it without running up against outdated asset tests I'd like to jump in too which is to say that a little while ago our project partnered with New America Foundation and conducted some research on the connection between savings and mobility and what that report shows is that at the bottom of the income ladder when families save they dramatically increase not only their own chances for moving up the income ladder but also their children's chances so this idea that low-income families can't save I think first this is inaccurate and the data shows very clearly that when they do save it has marked and powerful repercussions for their upward mobility that report also noted that the government does spend a good amount of money right now in promoting savings and promoting asset building mostly through the tax code but those savings incentives are geared towards people who have tax liability and so what you look at and what you end up with is an uneven incentive where those at the bottom of the income distribution who could save and should be saving for their own mobility are unable to and the government is not supporting their ability to do that I'm going to jump in again one more time too so for the few dollars that do go towards asset building programs for low-income households a lot of those programs are targeted to help these families with post-secondary education or purchasing a home and it would be really helpful to have those policies or programs to helping people just be able to save for emergencies and retirement as well because that's the primary savings vehicle they're the primary target for savings that economically insecure households need first they need money that they can fall on when they lose a job or when they have a high medical bill so that they don't go to high cost credit or high cost again high cost payday loans or those of the vehicles so having again asset building programs target as well is extremely important is that quickly the only thing that looks more terrifying than the concentration of income is probably the concentration of wealth at the very top in the U.S. and I think that in no small part stems from some of the policies that we've described here today and I just want to suggest that folks take a look at CFED's upside down report which I think does a great job of looking at how a lot of our subsidies and the tax code are so tilted towards the wealthiest Americans Thank you all and the report that Aaron had alluded to is a penny saved mobility earned and you can find the executive summary with the rest of the materials outside is the one with the cute little pig on the front of it and now let's turn it over to you please just raise your hand and someone will bring a microphone over to you not because I particularly agree with it but I wanted to be the devil's advocate and ask you the question that the Heritage Foundation and others question which is that indeed the bottom 20% has is living a better life than their parents did and they got all these wonderful cheap toys they got Xboxes they have air conditioners they have televisions how do you all address that argument that the actual status of a life in poverty is easier today than it was I think there's a couple of responses to that the first is that the amenities that the Heritage Foundation sites such as televisions or Xboxes or whatever it is all those have gotten disproportionately cheaper over the years whereas the real cost of basic needs such as childcare and transportation and out-of-pocket health costs have all risen much more quickly and so you're seeing a in the things that really matter families budgets really being squeezed very easy to afford now those those amenities second thing is a lot of the things there that are labeled as amenities are today considered necessities in today's labor market I mean one of the things in that study was a refrigerator who has an icebox anymore I mean if what employer do you know that doesn't need to be able to reach you on a phone of some sort so I mean in terms of a car I mean as Matt mentioned most people don't have access to public transportation so the as what Adam Smith calls you know the styles of our country have changed and our poverty standards have not kept pace with that and so that includes workers needing more education to access skills it includes now mothers are working in need to afford childcare a lot has changed in the past several years since that poverty measure was set including making many of those things that were listed part of an everyday Americans needs in terms of being able to participate fully in the customs of our country I just had two quick points one is that well it may seem that I said significant movement between income groups it is the case that if you look at the poverty population a given year nearly two-fifths of the people who are poor were not poor just two years earlier so it's a question if the Heritage Foundation wants everyone to immediately start selling everything once you know they lose their job or what but additionally we know that low income status does real harm especially to children there's been some pretty remarkable recent research that finds that when you look at a range of anti-poverty experiments and interventions over the last few decades you find that some of them boost employment and some don't some boost income and some don't but the only ones that improve young children's learning in school and their achievement in school are the ones that boost income so you have actual interventions where you boost employment levels for parents but you don't boost income say your benefits are cut back as the parents wages go up and you don't see any benefits to young children's learning in school and then you have other interventions where you even reduce employment but you still boost income with larger benefits and young children do better in school and this isn't just a crude correlation but when you control for a whole range of factors you find the children who grow up in poverty especially between the years of zero and five in families say below $25,000 or so a year if we just increase their income by about $3,000 a year they would see an on average a 17% increase in their earnings as adults so this is pretty significant the other thing I want to add and I think building on an earlier point that Indy made is that if you look at some of the long term poverty data you see that much of poverty is in fact episodic so some of the CIP data the sort of longitudinal data show that over the course of a four year period only 2.2% of the population was in poverty all 48 months whereas about 30% was in poverty for two months or more at some point and so you could imagine someone having a television or having some kind of amenity and then you fall into poverty and you get back out of it as Indy said you could sell that television or you could sell that microwave but we did an analysis showing you could sell a television online and it could buy equivalent of three days worth the food for a family of four so this is not the amenity standard is sort of a bogus way to measure how well being and how people are doing. I think too it's important to keep in mind that when you look over the long term we have seen gains in absolute mobility even at the bottom of the income distribution and those gains translate into higher living standards in some ways but if families are unable to over a generation. Having a TV doesn't provide them equality of opportunity. And an important question of our project is, is that good enough? What is good enough for us in terms of the American dream? And we don't believe that right now the mobility data are sufficient to show that we do have the country that everyone is striving for. I'll just continue the constructive criticism of Heritage's take on measuring poverty. And that's, I guess, I give credit to Heritage for trying to think of an alternative way of measuring poverty. I mean, they emphasize consumption, right? They want to look at how much people are actually consuming and what they have as an alternative to a somewhat arbitrary measure of income need, right? So I guess I would just emphasize again the importance of a budget standard like that Wow offers of looking at true costs and what the proportions of those costs are to a family's budget. Especially in the context of looking at the report that Heritage put out, it puts into context how important it is to look at true, accurate costs of making ends meet, how people actually need to spend their money, a normative understanding of what costs are and what families are actually facing. So thanks to Heritage, it points to how much more helpful Wow standard is. So anyway. Great, more questions? Thank you. Thank you for your work on this. I wanted to follow up on one of the points that we've just raised in terms of the low marks of the United States for policy work as compared to some of our European neighbors. And I'm wondering if there was a point where we actually scored either the best or significantly higher. And if so, how did the downtrend begin and what were some of the factors that brought us to this level? I don't know the answer on an international scale, but if you look at some of the graphs that were part of my presentation, you can see 1973 was kind of that pivotal year where you saw a lot of flat lining of wages and inequality beginning to sort of diverge on Indy's chart. And I think part of that can be attributed to the decline of unions and collective bargaining. Part of it is increased globalization and technology without a corresponding investment in training for high school workers. I don't know if others have things that they want to do. I've never seen historical international comparisons, but I think a lot of the main drivers of rising inequality are fairly apparent in other wealthy countries as well, without the similar rises in inequality, though they have, almost all of them have seen some rising inequality as well. Part of what's likely going on is that in fact in many other countries some of the features I mentioned about our 1947 to 1970s period remain, including the influence of unions and the bargaining power of workers even in some wealthy countries where unionization rates seem low, even the small rates actually help set wages across industries and sectors. Other countries are even more open to trade and maybe just as not more susceptible to some of the impacts of technology on inequality, you think of a small country like Denmark, I think that relies possibly more heavily than we do on trade. They have very strong investments in their labor market interventions, especially job training and just other active labor market policies that help people who might lose their jobs, retrain and prepare for new jobs in ways that we don't see in the future. Speaking in reference to the cross-national mobility analysis that we released last week, I can say that the United States did not show any wasn't on the top of the pile for any of the measures investigated and while there isn't necessarily a sort of silver bullet for helping us boost our mobility, one of the most interesting case studies in the book that we have a summary of is about France's universal pre-kindergarten program and there's proof there that two years or more of pre-kindergarten dramatically increases a person's monthly wages when they are an adult. Pew has long advocated for universal child care and I think there's a lot that we can do for helping mobility even early in life by age three. Great and for our last question, let's check in with Hannah to see if we have anything from our online audience. This is a question from someone watching our online live webcast. The Census Bureau's new poverty data measures the impact of higher healthcare costs on seniors. How do the panelists think this new data will figure into whatever comes next in the deficit reduction debate? Well I hope that the deficit reduction debate will be data driven and will be impacted by rising amounts of poverty and the impact of policy solutions such as both those for seniors and the Social Security Medicare and Medicaid which is also for low income families. But also for things like tax credits, the earned income tax credit, SNAP, affordable housing as you saw in the slide that I put up all of those had a very powerful anti-poverty effect and in combination with the distinct safety net, we would have over one in four Americans living in poverty without that safety net. So it is my fervent hope that as policy makers consider deficit reduction that they use the tools that this new supplemental measure gives them and showing what government policies are working to keep families above that line below which no one should fall but also across all the measures and I think it's up to all of us to push them to examine that data and to make sure that they're integrated into their decision making because as Indy mentioned earlier in the past quarter century it's been unprecedented to not protect low income programs and deficit reduction and in fact many gains for anti-poverty, fighting poverty have been made in the context of deficit reduction so we're really on a new terrain here and I think we need to be pushing our policy makers to incorporate the information we're getting from this data to protect the cost growth mobility. If I could jump in if you think about our Long Term Deficit Problem it's almost entirely driven by healthcare cost growth system wide though not just in the public sector but the private sector as well in fact the public sector is more efficient and has seen slower cost growth in Medicare and Medicaid than comparable private plans have. So I think that any Long Term Deficit Reduction Plan will have this question of controlling Long Term health costs and ideally I'd like to wait and learn more about health reform which I think tries not every but almost every major theory or proposal for controlling healthcare costs and until then we would rely more heavily on revenue increases but it's very likely that any deficit reduction plan will include cuts to programs like Medicare which as the questioner mentioned would affect seniors in particular as the questioner's concerned and it suggests I think the supplemental poverty measure and data on out of pocket medical expenses suggests that we need to be very careful in how we save in programs like Medicare. There might be some room for greater cost sharing at the very top but most seniors really don't have high incomes and I just saw research today that suggested that even modest co-pays after essentially heart attacks for prescription drugs reduced the likelihood that people will take some of these medications and so we need to be careful about cuts to programs like Medicare and just make sure that we've designed them in such a way that they're not penny wise and pound foolish and don't harm people's well-being. I'll just second what Melissa said and say that we hope that mobility angle and mobility frame is considered in this and all policy considerations. I think the data is very clear about what works, what promotes mobility and what helps people move up the income distribution and using a data-driven approach could go a long way to ensuring effective public policy. Great, well I'm sorry to say that we've reached the end of our program. Please join me in thanking Matt and Indy and Erin. Thank you all for coming and happy thank you.