 We're going to go to our panel of respondents who I'll give each of you five minutes right off the top and handle this with Marshall discipline as well to give everybody a chance to speak and then we will have a discussion between us and then give the audience a chance to respond as well. I'm going to go in the order of our seating up here and begin with Jocelyn and give you a chance to respond to this question of did poverty win? Thank you and good morning. It's terrific to be here with such a terrific distinguished panel and first and foremost I want to thank Sheldon and Marfa for such a great book and for really discussing in detail a lot of the impact of the war on poverty and I think what I'd like to do is focus a little bit on the lessons that we can learn from the war on poverty and so my first answer to your question is you know did we did the war win? I think that I'm going to talk a little bit on an offshoot of that question because I don't think the war is over. I think what the book does in a very compelling way is make it clear that important progress has been made and that we shouldn't discount that progress and the fact that we haven't won doesn't mean that the war was a failure. I think it just means that it's a difficult war to win and so the question on the table is what steps do we really need to take to continue the progress that has been made and while I don't love the war analogy what I understand about war or conflict is that you know in any sort of engagement a conditions change. You've got to be able to change as the conditions change. You need to be able to tweak the strategies that you deployed. You need to be able to deploy new strategies and you need to be in it for the long haul. You can sort of get out when it gets difficult or hard and to me that's one of the important legacies that we ought to think about. But when you look at particularly President Johnson's speech and you look at the way that the book sort of in a very comprehensive way talks about the range of programs involved with the war on poverty it seems to me there are at least five takeaways that I think are instructive in terms of where we need to go today. The first is that the war on poverty was rooted in our nation's values around individual dignity around equality and that one of the clear goals of President Johnson's program was to make real the promise of equality and fairness to demonstrate concretely what we as a nation needed to do in order to make all of our values felt equally by all of our citizens. The second thing is that he took a comprehensive approach and while I suppose there's a lot of debate about sort of what the scope should have looked like I think what's important is that he understood that there wasn't a one size fits all solution that tackling poverty meant doing a number of things. It meant investments around education. It meant healthcare. It meant social security. It meant looking from the young people in their earliest years and making sure that kids get a healthy start in life all the way to the end and looking at our seniors and I think that comprehensive framework is one that's still relevant today. The third thing he did and Martha spoke about this is that he recognized as a core policy matter that equality was inextricably linked to poverty and that entrenched barriers to equality often have as a side effect persistent poverty and persistent economic insecurity. And so he framed the strategy around tackling equality as a fundamental economic policy initiative and I think that's important today. We often talk about those issues in silos but the reality is that our efforts to ensure equality for all Americans is fundamentally related to our ability to have a strong economy and it should be considered an economic strategy and not simply a nice thing to do. The fourth thing I think is important is that he understood he had a fight on his hand. He called it a war for a reason. He understood that you can't just pass a bunch of laws and then hope that everything turns out right that he did have to leverage the power of the federal government that it was important to make it clear that he understood he was fighting against something that there were interest in preserving the status quo and that it wasn't going to be as easy as simply hoping that once you put laws in place that they would actually work, just work unconditionally. And lastly and I think this is important is that he understood that everybody had a role to play. People present the war on poverty as simply a bunch of government solutions but if you look at his speech he explicitly said otherwise. He understood the government had a role to play but it wasn't just government that everybody needed to come to the table. I think those principles are important as we look forward because I think they can shape and provide a framework for progress that we need to make today. And I know we'll get into more detail but it seems to me that the conditions have changed. The conditions that were present 50 years ago are clearly different today and at least some of the areas that I think that we need to focus on in continuing the progress that was made need to focus on quality jobs. As I think Sheldon mentioned the jobs that are being grown today many of those are low wage jobs and are simply not able to provide people the economic standard that we need. So a focus on jobs that actually are better jobs is an important investment. A focus on living wages, decent wages, clearly raising the minimum wage but efforts around the country to actually think about what a living wage really looks like and making sure that people are paid fairly for their work. So the work around equal pay is a critical proponent particularly for women because one of the biggest changes that has happened is the influx of women into the workforce. Continued investments in early childhood education and ensuring that kids have the best start in life. So discussions around universal pre-K and improving the quality of childcare is essential. And the last thing that I will say is continued investments in vigilance around eradicating discrimination. People often forget about the importance of investments in civil rights enforcement but it's very much connected to the ability of everybody to have an equal chance to succeed in the workplace. The very last thing I will say is that despite all the critique about the war on poverty, I think there's a lot of support nationally for taking and pursuing a lot of these strategies. The center through the half and 10 program just released some polling that showed that nearly 70% of Americans support a new war on poverty. And I think that should embolden us to make those the changes that we need to really continue to move forward. So thank you. Thank you. Well, Kevin Hassett, has this emboldened you to move forward? On that question of whether poverty won, how do you feel about that? So did poverty win and you mentioned that I've been a critic of income inequality analysis in the space and I can say that the Council of Economic Advisers put out a report last night that looked at the same topic that we're discussing today and had a very measured and academically credible discussion of the debates that we've been having maybe Sheldon and I more than a decade now about how to measure it and how to judge our progress. And I think that we know that if we look at consumption rather than income then the story can often be quite radically different in terms of how much progress we're making. And so while income inequality has skyrocketed, I have a paper called A New Measure of Consumption Inequality with the Parna Matura that came out about a year ago where we plot consumption, genie coefficients and show that they've not really budged much at all. And I think that in part while income inequality can increase, if income inequality can increase and consumption inequality is not increasing nearly as much or maybe much if at all, then that means that there's both a war on poverty and really a kind of war on inequality that's going on, that there are transfers either through high marginal rates on the rich or middle class programs that subsidize middle class consumption which is like social security might be an example, disability might be another example. But if you stipulate that the consumption inequality analysis that we've been doing for years that suggests that people are doing better than you might think if you look just at income inequality, then you have to concede that that consumption is being bolstered by a lot of these programs, the transfer programs. And so if you think, you know, and partly I think that Sheldon overstates the decoupling from growth, I'll talk about that in a second, but if you think that consumption is holding up a lot better than you might have expected, given that income hasn't, then it must be that collectively these programs are having a big effect. And so therefore the war on poverty, it must be helping people maintain consumption. Just to clarify, you're saying that most people have cell phones and VCRs? Well, you see it in measured consumption, but you also see it in terms of the, and this is a thought experiment that Aparna and I play, which we're able to play because of the residential energy conservation survey, which is this great survey which basically goes into people's homes and writes down everything that they've got in their house, you know, 700 something variables. And if you look at that, one of the things that I find striking is that if you believe, for example, the wage chart that says real wages haven't increased in 40 years, then what that means is that if you really had measured what welfare correctly with your price index that's measuring the real wage, then it ought to be that we could take a random person today and say, hey, I'll let you trade your current circumstances to how she live in the stuff you've got for one 40 years ago, for a house with stuff 40 years ago, and they should be indifferent, right? If the real wage really hadn't grown. And that was the relevant metric of their welfare. But if you actually look at how the houses have changed and what's inside them and the percentage of people that have heating and air conditioning and washer dryers and things like that, there's nobody would, even people below the poverty line would be very irate if you tried to make them take that trade. And I think that that's a challenge for measuring things. And I know I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to say that going forward though, I agree that there's a lot of hard work that we have to do in terms of policy design. And I wanted to list a few areas. And I think in this, I might be in much more agreement with Sheldon. I think that first, while I don't think that the growth of welfare of the poor nexus has broken the way Sheldon says, I think that there's a risk that going forward it might be more broken than it has been because we have a serious problem of long-term unemployment and the long-term unemployed are really hard to reconnect to society as the society grows. And so I think that going forward, we've not done a good job of thinking about how we can reconnect the long-term unemployed to society. We know that that's a very, very hard problem and we're not really doing much to do it. And that was one of Sheldon's bullet points, and that would be one of my top priorities. I think the second thing is that we need to recognize that we've kind of undone welfare reform. I think that if the ultimate objective is the hand up, which I think there was a lot of bipartisan agreement about, and I think President Clinton, I think in the end supported reforms that had a big positive effect on lives, many lives. And I think that we've kind of undone them by spreading the idea of welfare outside like into the tax code through the ITC and that if you look at, there was a Hamilton event a few weeks ago that talked about the ridiculously high marginal tax rates that especially second earners face because they lose benefits if they go out and get a job and you can often get tax rates above 100%. And so we've really discouraged work for low and middle income people with high marginal rates with this new construction that we have where we have a lot of welfare programs that are sort of outside of the welfare program that we revise to encourage work more. And we're really discouraging work a lot. And we need to think about the Hamilton proposal, what was to have a refundable credit for second earners and things like that, but we need to explore policies like that because we're discouraging work so much and it's not necessarily the case that we built something that's a hand up. The third thing I think is that if you look at a really, really big challenge that we have in terms of poverty that you'd have to say that geographic variation is enormous and that there are pockets like Detroit, but it's not just Detroit where things are really intensely awful and that in the past there was strong bipartisan support for things like enterprise zones but I think there's wide agreement that the designs they tried in the past didn't work. And I think that the challenge going forward is to think about this geographic variation and what kind of policies we can develop to address it. And finally I would say that and this goes to something in Martha and Sheldon's work or in the book that I would want to acknowledge which is that while the racial discrimination was a really big focus right at the outset for President Johnson and that the relative poverty has declined it's still the case that the poverty rate for African-Americans is more than double by just about any measure. And so while there's progress there's still like a radical, when something's off by an integer multiple then there's still a lot of work to do. And so I think that feeling so while there's been progress made on that we need to think about why we haven't made enough. And so that's what I would say. Thank you. Very valid points. Well I was struck in this book as I think most readers would be by the disconnect between the policy record that it details and the political verdict that's accompanied it. If you read the book you may see that there's missteps or disappointments but also real progress on a variety of fronts. Housing, health care, nutrition, access to education. It's a nuanced look at a mixed record but the political verdict on the war on poverty isn't nuanced at all. It's widely shared I think and wholly negative as summed up by Ronald Reagan's devastating quip that we fought a war on poverty and poverty won. The very phrase war on poverty is used I think not only to discredit government action on the poor but government action in general or certainly federal government action. So if it's true as Bailey and Danziker argued that poverty rates are much lower today than they would have been had the war on poverty never been declared the question becomes why did the effort get such a bad rap? I want to use most of my five minutes to consider a few possibilities but let me spend 30 seconds or so for those of you who haven't looked at the book yet to give you a sense of some of what they cite as legacies of the war on poverty. An expansion of maternal health programs and an accompanying dramatic reduction in infant mortality the creation of a head start program that's been shown to lengthen school attainment and bolster college attendance, a dramatic decline in the official poverty rate of the elderly, the creation of what became the Pell Grant program the creation of food nutrition programs quote with a solid track record in reducing poverty and food insecurity improving nutrition and yielding benefits for child health and development. The narrowing of disparities between rich and poor in access to health care and the list goes on. So while progress may have been slower and more expensive than expected and in some places the trends are going the wrong direction how did an effort that included such respected programs as head starts, student loans and Medicare become the boogeyman of American politics. I have a few possible theories. Theory one would be that the authors are engaged in a liberal sleight of hand. There's no clear definition of what is the war on poverty and maybe this volume just lumps in some things that don't really belong there like Medicare and student loans when people criticize the war on poverty they're not criticizing honor students or old people they're criticizing community action welfare programs so maybe this is simply a confusion of terminology. The second theory might be to blame the measuring stick. In 1967 the official poverty rate was 14% now it's 15% certainly seems to bolster the conclusion that we fought a war on poverty and poverty won but as everyone in this room is aware the official poverty measure is a deeply flawed one that leaves out the effects of non-cash programs like housing food assistance wage supplements and medical insurance. A recent estimate by Jane Waldfogel and her colleagues found under a more expansive accounting the poverty rate would have dropped from 26% in 1967 to 16% today 26% to 16% a 40% reduction that's not a thrilling breakthrough probably not as much as LBJ would have hoped for but it's certainly significant progress and different from a picture of complete failure. Different methodologies would give you different numbers the measurement of poverty is very complex as Kevin just alluded to but one thing that struck me about that number is just intuitively it feels kind of right to me. If I think about again to use Kevin's thought about what would have been like 40 years ago I don't think any of us would want to change places with a citizen back then so a 40% sort of almost halfway one the foreign progress might war on poverty might seem more appropriate. Theory three blame the headwinds that's been discussed a lot here. It wasn't so much what the government did but what the government came up against unexpectedly in terms of the economy stopped lifting all boats the trends went the wrong way the rise of single parenthood created more poverty. The war on poverty can cause those trends although it sometimes gets blamed for the latter but maybe it simply deserves credit for keeping people from losing more ground. A fourth possibility is that it just suffered from bad timing and the war on poverty was declared then the next thing you knew the riots were breaking out and the black power movement grew militant to Vietnam war grew south crime soared by the end of Watergate a decade later faith in government had eroded maybe the war on poverty just gets blamed for occurring at the wrong time. To Kevin's point on the TANF program I think the opposite dynamic is TANF gets a lot of credit for having been born in the late 1990s when everything seemed to go well and most people haven't given it a good second looks in the ten years since when it suffered many of the problems or even worse problems and its critics predicted at the time so maybe first impressions have a lot to do with how programs were judged. My last theory I guess about why the war on poverty has became so unpopular is the racial theory that the war on poverty is unpopular because it's largely understood as an effort to help more black people. When politicians talk about war on poverty being poor again I don't think they're summoning or the war on poverty having failed they're not conjuring pictures of old ladies on Medicare using up too much money. I think they're talking about black people getting welfare checks which is particularly ironic when you think that LBJ hated the word so much he wouldn't call HEW by its real name he called the Department of Health and Education Ronald Reagan is famous of course for destroying the war on poverty failure he's also famous for talking about the strapping young buck buying steaks with his food stamps I think an image that leaves little doubt about what race the strapping young man was. These theories of course are not mutually exclusive as to why the war on poverty is so unpopular but if Bailey and Danziger are right defenders of the safety net have a set of partial successes what are the lessons for going forward. As long as I've been covering poverty for the New York Times almost 25 years the left has had some version of the same debate which is whether to talk about poverty in explicit terms and risk a kind of conservative backlash or to try to help poor people on the sly and avoid the word poverty. In the late 80s and 90s the emphasis was on helping kids I think we now have a conversation that's largely subsumed in a debate about inequality and opportunity which is certainly a safer word and one more promising bridge to consensus. As a journalist I come down on the side of the explicit there's tens of millions of poor Americans and their hardships run deep and they deserve a higher and more explicit place in a national conversation that's one reason why I like the book. For a politician I'm not sure I'd take that advice because if the war on poverty shows anything it's that the choice of words matter a lot and poverty remains a really divisive word in American politics while opportunity doesn't. If we do end up having a conversation about opportunity that becomes more productive in terms of leading to policies to help low income Americans maybe there's a historical footnote there that opportunity was of course the favorite word of the architects of the war on poverty so much so that they housed their effort in an office called the office of equal opportunity so maybe in that sense we'll come full circle. Thank you and finally Michael another journalist how do you feel about the question of did poverty win? Well maybe I can start by adding one possible explanation to Jason's of why assessing the legacy of the war on poverty is difficult and some of that has to do with the expectations that were raised. After his election in 1964 LBJ proclaimed that America was living in quote the most hopeful time since Christ was born in Bethlehem which is really raised expectations pretty high and I actually placed LBJ in the manger and this added to the expectations of the war on poverty when he said for the first time in history it's possible to conquer poverty and the actual results as you'd expect would be mixed. I agree with the book on many things Medicare and Medicaid have become part of the fabric of American life and some of the greatest social justice achievements in American history. Arthur Brooks the head of AEI now talks about how conservatives need to make peace with the safety net and I think that that's necessary. The expansion of social security helped many elderly. Food and nutrition programs when I talk to conservative audiences I admit the SNAP program encourages dependence dependence on food which is a different thing than other forms of dependence but of course there are things like AFDC where you had a Democratic presidential candidate make reforming it one of the center pieces of his campaign. That shows the shift has taken place and then you have the federal role in education which people haven't really mentioned here which I don't blame necessarily the federal role for this but education as a whole when it comes to social mobility and opportunity is one of the great scandals of American life the way that poor children are betrayed and continue to be betrayed every day in American schools. That is certainly not a success by any measure and then there are some other elements that are such good ideas we keep trying to get them right like Head Start where it can work in some cases and it doesn't work in other cases. So what have we learned here? I think we know how to meet the needs on a vast scale of millions of people we don't know how to defeat poverty the war on poverty did not end poverty or prevent the economic isolation of American cities which took place in this period and so we spend as a whole in the nation a trillion dollars on transfers every year we've got 40 some million people in poverty that's not a causation but it's a cause for disappointment and missed opportunity and a call to reform. So if you were making a judgment about the war on poverty in say 1968 or 1972 it would have looked really good if successes would have looked good but that progress ran into durable social problems that are not addressed by transfers as people talk about globalization technology undermined decent paying blue collar jobs and you also had social trends that undermined family structure and community health and these are problems that are not rooted in a lack of consumption but a lack of social capital and opportunity and those are complex problems. So it's left a significant problem for America a dangerously stalled social mobility for a significant number of Americans which is a threat to the American ideal and that requires the ideals and effort of society but the methods I think have to be very very different and that's finding ways to improve the labor market encourage work, encourage workforce participation but also finding ways to catalyze the essential role of private and civic institutions including families, religious institutions that give people the skills and values to succeed in a modern economy and so I think that's another area where education and creativity is required and these tasks when you look at them actually require both liberals and conservatives to make contributions if our political system allows that. A moment to ask the authors of this book and uh... Oh good idea, this is what happens when you have a print journal forgetting the value of microphones Let me ask Sheldon and Martha, now that you've heard the responses is there anything that sticks out that you'd like to respond to? Actually I really appreciate the comments of our respondents and there's lots of things they said that really resonate I especially like the idea that Jocelyn brought up saying that the war analogy I think has been problematic for a really long time but it's also very useful for thinking about that the voices of the poor are something that's not always heard and there are lots of powerful interests fighting against change. One of the most the biggest pieces I think relates to the comments of one of the other panelists is that there is tremendous resistance to civil rights and integration. This was not a popular program, this is something that got Johnson into a lot of trouble. These types of initiatives I think are tremendously useful and thinking about this is a war analogy. I've never liked that much but I actually liked your comment a lot thinking about how useful that is. It's still something that I think is worth thinking about today. Sheldon? Just a couple of comments. On the broad definition of the war on poverty that Martha and I emphasize in the book I don't think Jason was convinced but when he said is it liberal sleight of hand and what we try to do in the book is to say Johnson set out all the broad goals in the January 8th speech 50 years ago today and it's on Martha's second slide so assisting the aged and disabled in improving the nation's health was front and center to the war on poverty. There were 11 goals in the chapter which accompanied the speech and so and again I agreed very much with some of the things that Michael was saying improving labor markets was one of them. So I think from the very beginning this broad definition was part of it. I want to mention one thing on Kevin in consumption and again because of time what I didn't get to say because I was of the time limit was we went from a period in this golden age when a rising tide lifted all boats when male earnings were the engine of economic growth to a period in which it's been the rising wages and work of women. So the reason families are better off today I'm not saying families are not better off today that's also on that slide is because women's share of family income has made up for what one would have expected from male economic growth. So I certainly agree about consumption inequality being less than income inequality and your implication is exactly right. One of the reasons consumption inequality is higher is because spending on food from food stamps and spending on healthcare from Medicare and Medicaid are included. But in general I think the comments from all of the panelists and would agree that it would be a very optimistic time. One would have to go back I think to the period of President Ford when conservatives and liberals sat down and tried to say how can we work together to solve the problems of poverty and an opportunity and liberals would agree that there are some programs that could be gotten rid of and conservatives could agree that there are some programs in the safety net. I think you quoted the term make peace with the safety net that have been very successful and how do we move forward and the key thing is how do we move forward to raise the wages and employment opportunities of those at the bottom of the labor market. I love this notion of private institutions it would be wonderful if there were private institutions that hire millions of workers that would decide oh the Costco model is the model that we want to follow and instead of having their workers rely on the public sector they would raise the wages of private sector so I think that a lot of change has gone on not just in government programs but in the behavior of private employers. Let me jump in just a second. I should have said Martha and Sheldon provide a very detailed and persuasive explanation for what they include in the war on poverty. I didn't mean to imply that I was criticizing what they included I'm saying that part of the reason you get such a different verdicts about the war on poverty is different institutions have different programs in mind and there is no clear definition so the people who are attacking the war on poverty aren't attacking I don't think for the most part Medicare or student loans or nutrition programs they're attacking another set of programs. Thank you for that clarification. I'd like to zoom in on this issue of consumption for a moment without getting too wonky because if I knew anything about math I wouldn't have been a journalism major. I'll be very upfront about that but I'm going to ask Kevin to elaborate on the question of whether there has been a consumption gap or not in other words has consumption by the poor continued high-paced despite the income gap. There's been some questions by some other studies and this is where we'll probably get wonky in other words some studies that disagree with your finding in regard to the difference there and how do you feel about that? There's some discussion about whether the income is better measured than consumption and whether different subsets the consumer expenditure survey are more accurate and if you sort of throw some stuff out you can find measures of consumption that don't where the consumption equality has increased more than you see if you use the broader measure that we use but I think that again if you look at the Council of Economic Advisors report yesterday and also like my discussion with Martha I think we all kind of concede that consumption inequality at the very least has increased a lot less than income inequality maybe not much at all I think that the maybe not much at all part would be if you think that the measure that Aparna and I chose which is a very broad measure was a good one. One thing I wanted to say to add to the discussion that just happened that is somewhat related to this is that I wanted to circle back a little bit to the idea that there's both been a kind of war on poverty and I agree that maybe using war is inviting people not to work together as soon because you don't care about poverty if you're opposed to war on poverty I don't know but I think that the war on inequality is a really relevant factor when you think about how can we spend a trillion dollars and then have 40 million people left over still in poverty say if that's the way you want to ask the question well then the obvious answer is just arithmetic is well you must be giving some of that money to people who don't need it or to people who aren't the poor and if you think about for example President Bush's prescription drug program incredibly costly present value of the cost of that was bigger than the present value of the cost of Social Security by the estimates at the time a lot of the beneficiaries of that are not people that are poor but it was very very costly and I think that the war on poverty one of the reasons why it's something that maybe not be cost effective is that politicians of both parties have used expansions to kind of pander to the median voter and win votes by offering benefits to people who aren't in the bottom of this aisle spending a trillion dollars a year but a lot of that's not going actually for a war on poverty as an old saying goes one person's pandering is another person's relief I can say the same thing in regard to Social Security caps, the income caps for Social Security payments, FDR imposed that so that it wouldn't be viewed as a socialistic program in other words everybody would pay up to a certain limit and right now the most popular Social Security reform according to Paul's is to lift the caps yet the caps aren't being lifted, in other words politics can send to all this to some degree isn't that necessary sometimes in order to build support for something like Medicare Part D so you couldn't have a drug program for everybody, I mean for just the poor so you need to have it for everybody and that's maybe the cost of having a program I just wanted to add a point that's relevant there another math point and I'm not an expert to the math either but there are some tensions within the legacy of the great society and one of them is in 1960 if you look at the figures about the same percentage of domestic spending went to seniors as went to the young that by some measures right now is about three times the amount on seniors that we spend on the young because we created these programs many of them not means tested Medicare and others and we're going to double the number of seniors by 30 and the math for politicians doesn't add up at some point you're straining everything else we want to do on equal opportunity particularly focused on the young with the direction of certain elements of the great society and so I think we're going to have to take those tensions seriously moving forward and create strange political circumstance in which democrats are often having systems that really often that benefit white and many wealthy people while we're underfunding many of these other efforts that need to be emphasized to build equal opportunity in our society particularly for the young so I think there's a tension there Speaking of politics, Jonathan having been a veteran of the Obama administration and the current Obamacare war shall we say that have been going on a big question about whether the whole notion of government's ability to effectively respond to these massive social problems that's in question now at the same time that we're observing 15th anniversary of the war on poverty do you think now is a good time for the whole notion of government remedies for a problem that's vast Well I think it's a critical time to really think about what role government can and should play and I think one of the lessons of the war on poverty is that government has an essential role to play because there's some things that only government can do I mean when you start talking about inequality and ensuring that everybody has an equal opportunity a fair chance to succeed in the workplace for example and you think back to what were really the seminal strategies put in place to accomplish that goal that was almost entirely government we would not have had the advancements for African Americans and people of color and women in the workplace absent important critical government strategies and then first president Johnson and then subsequent administrations really making the investment to make those laws real so I think when you look at that history it's clear that government has a critical role to play it doesn't mean that government is the only solution I think the president would say that now I think president Johnson said it then and there clearly are a lot of other strategies that ought to be deployed at the same time it also doesn't mean that government is perfect any change particularly big change whether you're talking about a war on poverty or health care or education is going to have some wins and some losses that's the essence of what any sort of tackling a big problem involves but you make adjustments and you get it right you don't abandon it you don't abandon programs that have fundamentally changed the lives of families you don't abandon something like health care that's critical to the ability of folks to be secure you figure out what's not working and you fix it to make it better so I think you know looking at this current administration there's a really important role for the administration to play and really tackling not only health care but also making sure that everybody has an equal chance to achieve some level of economic stability for themselves and their families there's a lot about the unexpected I would say gender trends that have occurred over the last half century one has been called the feminization of poverty we can see more and more single moms in particular and that whole debate surrounding that in regard to the role of family as a poverty fighter and at the same time how do you build family and increase poverty so that's one aspect the other is that I think you touched on this Kevin the fact that we're seeing greater advances now for educated women in particular both in schools now since the early 90s now entering freshmen women in college are exceeding the performance of male students and being the father of a young male student just hits me quite personally but in any case there's that issue and the fact that the structural changes in the economy have given an advantage to those who do behave well in class as I've told my son and show a real interest in education and so on the one hand seeing women doing better than men on one level and on the other hand women doing worse than men what does this tell us about the whole poverty issue as LBJ or saw it and what we have seen as a reality after half century and I'll get a response from anybody on this well I'll start but I'm sure others want to comment in many ways it illustrates the point that Martha started out with which is the connection between poverty and equality because the reality is and this is still true that when you look at earnings and wages and the types of jobs that women hold today they are disproportionately at lower wage jobs and we still continue to have challenges around securing equal pay and so not surprisingly when you look at women who had households you see sort of disproportionate numbers around poverty and I can't remember if it was Martha or Sheldon who made this point I think it also illustrates the fact that conditions changed where we were 50 years ago is not where we are today that one of the changes that happened was the influx of women into the workplace and so it required us thinking a little bit about how do we make sure that as that happens that women also have a fair shot so it's not simply a challenge around racial equality it's also gender equality and putting laws in place that actually help us accomplish that as well so I think that dynamic is a perfect illustration of the continued need to have sort of a dual strategy that focuses on how do we make sure that the jobs that women are in actually pay decent wages but also how do we continue the investment and resources to make sure that they have a fair chance to succeed like everybody else Anyone else? In work in progress it's a nice example of I think that when we fight a war on poverty we need to call the generals in the room and be rational about what we're doing and I think that your discussion of the sort of decline in the family and the problems that that creates highlights a work in progress that I'm working on now that can talk about how unintended design flaws can have seriously negative effects the Affordable Care Act has massive marriage benefits and so if you take two people with incomes of around 20,000 they each get Medicaid in many states you have to go around from website to website to see what the prices are so this is why it's still a work in progress because the websites may or may not be correct and so on but if they get married and have a family income of 40,000 then they don't and they have to buy insurance or if they're in the subsidy range then the subsidies also have marriage penalties and so the Affordable Care Act will have this side effect of at least encouraging people on paper to not get married because if they do then there will be a very very high cost in terms of loss benefits that kind of thing again that this Hamilton project event that was at a few weeks ago is something that's kind of all over the place in our policies and I think that we need to be much more rational about how we want to align incentives to encourage family formation rather than discourage it. Are you advocating a single payer system which wouldn't have those disincentives? Sounds like a slide in that way. Let's circle back to the 1960s and one of the things that the Johnson administration really struggled with then and this is evident in the Monaghan report and it sort of extends through is how to think about training women and getting them to work so some of the first human capital programs that they invested in they didn't have any for women at all they didn't even know how to think about training for girls that wasn't part of the thing so it took a lot of work to get them to even think about job training for young women. Now this action has continued and it's still the case now the movement from welfare to work fair means that the people who are ended up strapped are the people a lot of single mothers as a matter of fact. Now child care is expensive, wages for these women are low and so moving them from the home into work I mean there's obviously an important tension there. If we're interested in increasing resources for kids it's not clear at all that the financial resources for those kids are going to increase if their moms are actually paying a lot more for child care. On the other hand we want to minimize the work disincentives this is actually an exercise that I give my students in my class on women in the economy. How can we design a program without work disincentives that provides opportunities or increases resources for poor kids and the answer to the exercise is that it's almost impossible. It's really really difficult to come up with something that's going to work so the best suggestion that my students have come up with and that some of you may think of is these preschool programs that also double as child care for a lot of these families but those are enormously expensive. So I think that this is a problem that's a tension that comes right out of the 1960s and it hasn't decreased as women's labor force participation has skyrocketed. Good point. There's something else I wanted to say. I want to circle back to this idea that for programs to be poverty reducing they have to be means tested and that was something that I really wanted to talk about so coming back to something that Mike said so one of the things I wanted to point out about Medicare is it's easy just to think about the fact that this is transferring a lot of resources to people who could have paid for care in the first place but I think that that misses a lot of its important contributions. So I talked about Medicare funded desegregation Medicare gives the federal government a lot of power to change things in hospitals for instance or in medical care that we like it to affect we also think Medicare the availability of Medicare reduced the possibility of falling into poverty think about the era before Medicare to retire you lose your employer provided health insurance right so you couldn't actually retire with any medical care and of course this is the moment in your life when you really needed so you couldn't retire and what happens then if you get too sick to work you also lose your health insurance in this era so who ends up providing care for a lot of the elderly in the 1960s and before their families not only do families pay a lot for this medical care but they also have their aging parents living with them and they're providing of course this is again women's work a lot of the care taking in the home for these parents so a lot of these benefits are not quantified when we're thinking about the value of programs like Medicare but you can also think that they're much larger effects of programs like that and the other thing that I highlighted is if you think about what happens when you free up those resources for a lot of American families they're not using the money to pay for their aging parents medical bills instead they can use it for things like their kids sending them to college and so on and so forth which reduces dependency on the other types of programs where we like to cut expenditures so there's a lot broader implications of a lot of the programs put into place in the 1960s than we might think by the way I wouldn't deny any of those implications of making a fairly narrow fiscal point over the next 30 years as larger and larger percentages of our budgets have gone to non-demean tested entitlements it reduces our flexibility to invest in other areas and that's a public policy that's a measure of public policy priorities it's also by way of measure of political power children in America don't have effective lobbies in the same way that the elderly do and some of those needs are urgent and they require public policy and the flexibility to do that becomes much more limited over time on the current path that we have for the percentage of our budget that goes to entitlement payments without dramatically increasing the percentage of our economy taken in taxes Very good point. We have come to the point in our program for you, the audience, get a chance to respond. We have two microphones out here in the aisles and we have folks with, well, we'll bring a mic to you for that matter if you will just, do we have some people who have some questions earlier or should we just go directly to we do have a couple folks at the mic right now so why don't you go ahead and then those of you who can't make it to the mic you can hold up your hand and I'll have a call on you Exploring this war analogy, we know how difficult it is to fight two front wars and how that decreases the chance of success I was around in the 1960s and though my memory at this age may be a little less I seem to recall Lyndon Johnson talking about us being able to have guns and butter. Sounds like a two front war to me if we'd fought the war only domestically and the war on poverty do you think the outcome would have been different? Good question I think there's a famous quote with expletives that I won't repeat by Lyndon Johnson basically to that effect it's saying that the war in Vietnam it's starved I think he the only woman he'd ever loved which by that he meant his domestic war on poverty. And most people would agree that Vietnam was what crashed his legacy in the end after all the massive social changes he had made domestically so we haven't. Anyone else want to respond? Yes ma'am? Hi I'm going to pull this over in part because it's Mr. Gerson I want to see and he's behind a poll And who doesn't? So I'm wondering if panelists could talk about what you see as the vision for the next step in terms of setting goals and in particular why I wanted to talk to Mr. Gerson or wanted your response on this because I think on an international scale there's a lot of interest in a goal of ending extreme poverty on the planet by 2030 and do you see efforts aligning between the U.S. and around the world or just generally if folks could talk about whether it's cutting poverty in half in ten years or some other measure what's the next goal and how can we work towards that? As Martin Luther King said where do we go from here? That's not competitive priorities that's some of the difficulty when you look at where Americans would like to cut federal spending they put at the top international aid by the way they put third extending unemployment insurance which is not very popular I wouldn't have expected that but it's you know globally we've made extraordinary gains against extreme poverty over the last 20 years and extraordinary gains on global health and you know some of this is I would say a restoration of appropriate confidence in effective outcome based government and I think both sides ideologically need to contribute to that need to find ways to say there are circumstances in which government can identify problems and solve them in modest ways while minimizing unintended consequences I personally I won't go into it I think on international aid we've seen that in many ways providing AIDS drugs to millions of people doing work on malaria or a long-term development and other things and of course we need long-term development in the United States as well and so I hope those aren't competitive priorities they are often seen that way but I think they're related whether you believe that government can take limited effective outcome based action. This study did mention that the geographic impact which was discussed earlier and that we as poor as poor folks are these days they're better off than poor folks were 100 years ago or they're better off than poor folks are in the third world etc are we asking too much of our anti-poverty efforts here in this country Jason. I just wanted to make a quick follow-up to Michael's point I've spent most of my time as a journalist working on domestic policy but I've spent a little time traveling in the world of international poverty and I've been struck by the difference in the optimism level of the two communities you know if you I think the domestic poverty conversation has this kind of overhang of trying to explain why disappointment whereas in an international context it's a surprise I think is that things moved as Michael said in the last 20 years in many ways rapidly in the positive direction so I'm not sure what to make of it but it is definitely a different tone in the conversation and I liked Michael's phrase what was it appropriate outcome based the restoration of confidence and appropriate outcome based government in other words you get a sense that something can be done in a way that you don't often get that sense in the domestic conversation. I thought conservatives were better at catch phrases so Michael we'll work on that one. You know I just wanted to respond to the question because I think we get caught up in a lot of the division around the war on poverty rather than focusing on where there's commonality and agreement and one of the things that strikes me the most about the war on poverty is that you know it was a big vision to end the war on poverty is an enormous goal and it seems to me there's no reason why we can't set a big goal today whether it's cutting poverty in half and ten years or some other equally ambitious goal the worst thing that can happen hopefully is that maybe you don't get there but you know you make some progress and I think it's incumbent upon us to set a big goal and to think about how we can work together and to learn from the mistakes of the past but I think it's important to set a big goal and then to talk about all the different components to making that goal a reality education healthcare employment all those pieces working together but you know this is an important time and I think we have an opportunity to actually do some important things. Can I just add here because this discussion of setting a goal reminds me of Tony Blair and I would refer people to a Russell Sage Foundation book by Jane Waldfogel called Britain's War on Poverty because he basically declared war on poverty in a President Johnson style speech set the government to do it and cut poverty, child poverty in half by Britain in ten years so it's possible. Now they have a very different system when you control parliament you can do what you want but the conservative government hasn't turned around and rolled back most of those aspects so if one wanted to look at what would be a modern view for America I think Tony Blair's War on Poverty is a good example. Yes sir. Yes I was just going to say Sheldon's chart on median income and the gap between male and female really jumped out at me and Jocelyn you did talk to it a little bit but given that you know that there is a gap between well we don't have equal pay for women and that's clear if we fix that given how many households are led by women what kind of dent would that put in poverty? I'll say something about that so part of the gap between men and women is that they have different skills right so there's about a 20 you know women make about 80% of what men do on average and I think that's what you were showing so part of that is a skill gap and some of that skill gap reflects women making different choices about how much they want to invest in their careers versus family but the other part is something that I've worked to remedy and I think has been changing though the convergence in the gender gap has really stalled in the last decade. Let me just add to that you know my personal experience having been kind of like a baby in the war during the war on poverty I was able to because of a lot of the things that happened I entered IBM in like 1976 and I will tell you that they had to adjust my salary three times across my career all the way up to 1990 because of inequities and the issue there is it's a one-time shot so the cumulative impact there is not even noted I see the same thing happening with women right now. I think that's an excellent point and that's part of what I was going to say I mean there clearly are you know there's a lot of conversation you could have about the pay gap and why the pay gap exists and what it looks like I think that you know the data that I've seen is that even when you control for things like differences in education and other seniority experience there's still you know a gap and I think that's the point that you're raising and if you look at research like research has been done by the Institute for Women's Policy Research the issue is not simply the gap that occurs you know at the start of your career but how that impacts you over time and that eventually you know I think they say 300 or 400 thousand dollars in terms of income over time and then that impacts not only what you've earned but also your retirement so I think efforts to correct the pay gap would go a long way towards creating greater economic stability for families generally because the other dynamic is that women increasingly are the sole or primary breadwinners and their families are doing research on you know 4 in 10 families now women are the sole or primary breadwinners so it's not simply a women's issue it's a family issue and overall economic issues so you know I think again it's sort of shows very vividly the connection between poverty and equality because not withstanding the laws that we have in place around equal pay if you ask women they will tell you that one of the top things challenges they face is equal pay and from my perspective we shouldn't be focusing on whether or not there's a pay gap whether or not you know we have challenges around equal pay we should be focusing on how can we ensure better enforcement how can we ensure that we make sure that when that folks just have a fair chance and what sort of steps can we make sure we can put in place to make sure that when women apply for jobs that they're being offered the same sorts of salaries as their male counterparts how do we give women better information how can we create greater transparency in salaries so that there's not you know the lead better phenomenon of finding out 20 years later you were being paid less for decades and then somebody secretly gives you a note I mean these are sort of things that are you know sort of no brainers we spend a lot of time debating but there ought to be a way to give people better information to make sound choices so that at least they have a fair chance to be paid fairly for their work we have a few more people at the mic room I will give us more insight yes ma'am one of the panelists referred to poverty today not knowing wanting to go back to poverty 50 years ago and that type of poverty and yet when you look at the fact that poor people have our consumers like the whole country is they buy things and yet they ingest empty calories and then end up with obesity and those types of problem how do you then talk or explain that kind of thing about well that poverty isn't the same I think people in some ways more healthy and we do have a health system that keeps even people with diabetes and all those kinds of things with medicines to keep them alive yet well we didn't have them 50 years ago so how it's hard for me then to understand the statement that was made on that well I mean obviously I feel very strongly that it's an important initiative and one that did a couple of things and importantly sort of talked about not only health from a poverty perspective but also the health of kids more broadly and has made an important contribution to continuing progress that was beginning but hadn't quite materialized around reducing childhood obesity I think one of the interesting things about her initiative is that it makes clear the connection between health and nutrition and poverty and doesn't talk about them as mutual exclusive things but also makes clear that health shouldn't just be the province of people who have resources you know one of the first things that we did in 2009 as we went to a soup kitchen here called Miriam's Kitchen that focuses on healthy eating to make the point that having access to healthy food was something that shouldn't be exclusively for folks who have resources to buy nice expensive organic food but is something that is inextricably linked to our nation's values around human integrity so I think that those things are incredibly important today and are important investments to make another question or comment? As you'll tell from my accent the Tony Blair example is a helpful one to hear having just been kind of part of that debate in the UK one of the things we learned with some of New Labour's policies around the New Deal for youth unemployment and things like that was because poverty is ultimately a personal thing there are people components of poverty that can't really be fixed by government and government isn't necessarily the best to address so one of the things was soft skills looking at those things like conflict resolution punctuality and things that employers say they desperately need that are actually barriers to employment that are far harder to I mean you could pass a law saying everyone needs to be on time but I think that would be a bit more challenging so my question is really when we think about poverty and the people component of poverty what are if any of the ways that government can actually help create a climate for other people forming institutions to be able to address poverty more effectively doing things that may be their better place to do than government might be the recognizing government has an important role in kind of creating that climate very good question this is something that I've been working a lot on going back to this work that folks might have seen that I've been doing on work sharing that there are a lot of innovative programs in other countries to encourage private entrepreneurs to enter with a sort of creative spirit into this space in Germany if the government job training programs have failed you for a year and you still don't have a job then you're eligible for a program where private firms can jump in and try to help you find a job and if they succeed by a metric where you're getting a paycheck for an established amount of time then they get a big cash bonus I think that thinking about again if you look at the terrible evaluations that we've seen in the academic literature of the job training programs that we have in the US I think that that kind of copying that kind of program is a key area of opportunity going forward we are almost out of time so let's make this a wrap up question here Michael right here sure I think if you look at the material that Robert Putnam is talking about and talking about the gaps that cause many of these gaps of opportunity there are gaps of parental time and investment gaps in social trust gaps in community involvement gaps in religious participation all which predict problems for mobility in the future and those are have to be solved by mediating institutions I think the real question is whether you can have as a supplement to government doing its job in a variety of areas which is absolutely essential whether it can find creative ways to involve other value based institutions in society to help address these to catalyze to essentially encourage roles that it can't do very well itself and that I think is an area where I hope you know Marco Rubio is speaking on a new war on poverty this afternoon conservatives have begun a more virtuous competition on these ideas maybe that's an area where conservatives can contribute to this debate in a substantive way the idea Jason you want to add to that in terms of the political debate right now do you think we're moving toward some kind of a new consensus where new conservatives like Michael are coming together with to update the old LBJ agenda I'm certainly no expert on where conservatives are going in their debate about poverty but my impression would be no I hear from Michael sounds very different from what I hear from House Republicans it is very different from House Republicans maybe what we need Michael is a consensus among Republicans I mean the opportunity though is the 2016 election because the dynamics of a national appeal on the common good are very different from the congressional dynamics of you know districts that are predominantly either conservative or liberal and sorted in a kind of non productive way that's always been the situation so that's my hope you know you had Bill Clinton campaigning on the new covenant talking about responsibility and opportunity you had we in 2000 talked about compassion conservatism and trying to involve mediating institutions in drug treatment or you know other things there is a space here for an appeal to the common good by the left or right that takes into account these lessons of the great society as a veteran of three campaigns a presidential well that's true I lost count but you see looking forward here any hope for that sort of a consensus nationally I think that the quickest way because I know we're about out of time to answer that question is go back and look at President Obama's speech right after he won the Iowa caucus and compare it to a typical stump speech of President Bush when he was talking about compassionate conservatism and you'll see that there were many themes that were quite common between the two speeches and I think that having an ear for what Americans want to hear was a gift that both successful politicians had they won two presidential elections my guess is that whoever wins the next one will go back to the themes that they played which are similar to the things that Michael's talking about and it's not necessarily there's a lot of pressure for that in congressional races but at the national level I think that we've got four elections in a row where people who played to those themes won Thank you. Jocelyn you see hope and change in the future for our presidential debate in 2016 on the poverty issue in particular. Well I'm always positive about hope and change I like those terms I think I'm cautiously optimistic with being very cognizant of the point that Jason raised about the current politics but I think there's a lot of opportunity folks of goodwill on all sides of the aisle to really think critically about the issues that we're talking about and to me the opportunity is to create the space for the conversation and I go back to the point that Martha alluded to earlier a lot of the progress that we're talking about in the war on poverty they were not safe choices they were difficult choices they created controversy particularly around challenges around racial equality and so I think it will be true that as we talk about different programmatic responses that there will be a strong opposition and so what we need to do collectively and together is to create a safe space for people to have those conversations when people go against the prevailing mood of their party or folks on their side of the aisle that there's still a safe space to talk about how do we actually invest in kids and low income families and ensure the safety net that we don't abandon all of those things that have helped make progress so I'm always optimistic. Thank you. I want to invite Michael Larracy the director of the Anna E. Casey foundation policy reform and advocacy please give us your closing remarks. Thank you very much for having us. You know when we started planning this about four or five months ago I had pretty high expectations I thought this could be important and significant and this panel has really exceeded all my expectations. We saw this as an opportunity to re-evaluate, revisit America's most notable effort to reduce poverty and promote opportunity and to learn lessons see how we could guide our future policy efforts and I think the book which is really quite good really by it it's well worth it and this discussion achieved that the extent of the consensus here among some very diverse people politically was striking and the areas disagreement were illuminating and I think important you know when there was disagreement I think it was consequential and significant so you know you really exceeded all the expectations and I had high ones knowing almost all of you well. I want to put a word in about one of the project this effort co-sponsors spotlight and poverty and opportunity. It's a platform designed to highlight the challenges that vulnerable members of our society face and to try to cultivate the type of bipartisan cross ideological discussion that we're having today and focus on solutions. Spotlight is managed by the class, the Center for Law and Social Policy and staff run by the Freeman Consulting Group, the Hatcher Group and NAK TV. We've been at this spotlight's been at it for about six years now and you know it we tag ourselves as the source for news idea and action and I think we've seen in this period a lot of progress. I agree with the sort of consensus here this afternoon that a lot has been changed I follow the newspapers every day and anybody who gets my emails every morning knows it and I really have seen a significant change in the recent months in the discussion around opportunity and I don't think that's an accident. I think there's a lot of work that people at this day are doing and a lot of other folks in this room I see a lot of people contributing to that. So I'm optimistic I am very optimistic about what's going to be happening in the next couple years if we're going to deal with Congress. I think we're really being in great shape. I want to acknowledge and thank our two co-sponsors the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and it's Director of Communications Laura Lee and of course Dean Susan Collins. I want to acknowledge and thank the Russell Sage Foundation especially it's fantastic new president Sheldon and it's Director of Communications David Heproff and I'd like to thank all of the panelists here today. Clarence thank you so much for coming out and the authors of the sections in this book who really make some wonderful contributions and of course I want to thank all of you for coming out and being part of this discussion. It's a discussion that's going to be ongoing and one way to be part of it is to visit spotlightonpoverty.org and engage in the discussions there. We offer exclusive commentaries from folks left on the right. We are a portal to everything that's happening on poverty and opportunity so it's a good way to keep informed and be part of what I think will be a very exciting year. So thanks again and let's stay in touch.