 Thank you Phil. I'm glad to be glad to be back here and you know in the embrace of two of my favorite institutions, New America and Washington Monthly. I have a I want to talk a little bit about the piece that I have in this issue and the broader context. I like the framing of the cover of the magazine and the pitch of the event that these are kind of the ideas that the presidential campaigns aren't quite talking about because one of the one of the issues that I've one of the questions I've been dealing with is kind of how did our politics and particularly progressive politics, how did we sort of lose track of really creative ideas about how to build security for middle-class families and I think it's hard to I think there are there are definitely good policies out there about you know pumping up the economy and things we can do but I don't feel like there's as robust a generation of ideas and fresh approaches that really deal with the challenges as there has been in the past so that one of the thing you know my kind of larger project over the last six months or so is to really think about how you know where do ideas come from how do you make this happen how do you inject ideas into the political process and so one reason I really wanted to to write a piece about the assets movement was really almost as a as a way of looking at how as I put it in the piece you know not so much how a bill becomes a law but how an idea kind of gets injected into the mainstream and takes life and gets refined and gets to the point where you can where you can do more with that one of the things I didn't do in the piece was put put any I in it I mean there's there's there's none of me in it although I wanted to write the piece in large part because this is an issue I've sort of been on the margins of for for a long time so I'm gonna I'm gonna put the eye back in in in here in this talk a little bit helped by the fact that this is a kind of this is your life panel for me as I think just about every everybody here on the two panels except for David Leigh and hard has been a colleague of mine at one time or another so what's interesting what where I first kind of got interested in the ideas of helping use assets as a strategy for building economic security for poor people and the work of Michael Sheridan which is really inspired the assets program here at New America was when I was working on the hill in 1991-92 working for Senator Bill Bradley and we were really interested at that huge there were a bunch of things he was interested in part of it was we needed a way we you know we were we were this was the beginning of the welfare wars we needed a way to talk about poverty and welfare that wasn't just about work requirements and time limits we needed something that captured a sense of of possibility and human potential that people weren't always defined as you know dependent or or or you know welfare recipients or not that that people could could get to a different level we're very affected by the by the statistics that kind of came out starkly in the early 1990s about the difference between African-American and white wealth which is which remain staggering and there's and there's a whole new round of studies on that there was a real I mean if I could it's it may be impossible to to pull you back to this moment because it's been so forgotten but there was a moment at that time when in a sense the the Los Angeles riots of 20 years ago were almost like the Occupy Wall Street of the of today and that there was a moment when people thought this really will change everything and and there will be a focus on poverty again that that we haven't had before and of course that wasn't true and it wasn't really true of Occupy either but these are these are how we how we sometimes think about things which is to say when Michael Sheridan came forward with book assets in the poor and the idea of individual development accounts which is to say you've got individual retirement accounts and all the other asset programs in the middle class why not do something that help that help poor people you know actually by saving a little you match it a lot and you get people to the point where they have a significant significant account was you know was an idea that answered a lot of a lot of what we were looking for in poverty circles and this was a poverty debate at the time and and it's you know so it's a bill I remember you know I remember I actually I in the how how ideas catch on I knew Ray Bushara socially my boss at the time Ken Appel who was later the head of the Social Security Administration knew Bob Friedman from the Corporation for Enterprise Development also I think through Tacoma Park circles and and you know so we were kind of connected to this idea and and and put it together as a bill and and and of course nothing went with you know nothing really came of it although it did kind of catch on you know in both in both as I say in the piece and as Ray has written in both kind of liberal Democratic circles conservative Democratic circles it was a big priority of the Democratic Leadership Council Progressive Policy Institute and then among those Republicans who were looking for something you know what would later be called compassionate conservatism at the time so it caught on in a lot of areas but of course as as as Ray's also pointed out we had not you know it was it was purely an idea I mean there was no real experience with making these accounts work and actually figuring out what it what was involved in helping people save and those incentives and so forth I mean there was that we were we were kind of running wild as as Ray put it the politics were way ahead of the practice you know nobody had really had really done this and in a way it's almost dangerous sometimes for an idea to kind of get picked up in the political process so fast you know ahead of the ahead of actually learning what what works so in a sense what happened after that although there were you know there were some grand political proposals I think Bill Clinton at one point proposed like a you know a 50 billion dollar program or something like that um now and what really happened was you know the foundations and nonprofits getting involved and really building out this experiment and and feeding back a ton you know really almost like casebook how American social policy ought to be developed you know which is the test it see what works build things up to scale use the foundation sector along with government to create some some feedback and information and they really built up through the American dream demonstration uh some some real answers to to to how these things work and now we're in a totally different place I mean partly because of the of the stagnation of the middle class um and and and the issues that Phil talked about we're we're we're we're moving so far in a different direction one of the things that we you know a couple years ago uh here at new america we put together this project on the next social contract and one of the things that one of the ways I think we think about this what we should think about this now is that you know assets are an essential part of economic security at every level assets being having some positive assets as well as manageable debt um but so that you're you know so that you're looking at overall overall net worth um the way I often put it is when you look at economic security there's no economic security better there's no there's no basis for economic security that's that's more reliable than having ten thousand dollars in the bank nothing helps you through a rough patch and if you think about it I mean the social contract to the patent the new deal social contract essentially is a set of social insurance programs of various kinds and whether it's unemployment insurance disability so forth um and social insurance is a brilliant it's like one of the most brilliant concepts in human history but there's limits to what social insurance can do because social insurance is essentially for predictable outcomes like you like short-term uh unemployment in along the business cycle and so forth um so that the next wave of the social contract really has to involve helping ensure that people are invested with those basic flexible assets that that can that can kind of get people through tough times that's something you can't do with social insurance alone so that that becomes so that that becomes the framework in which you think about these ideas more than just um more than just thinking about about poverty one of the things I found that one of the things I asked a lot of people in in the course of doing this article was really the question of whether the financial crisis had you know had had kind of thrown thrown this movement this effort for a loop because there was a real fundamental problem particularly with the home you know the there's an there's an assets movement that's looking at you know helping people really build economic security build savings for whether it's for entrepreneurship or home ownership or whatever and then there was the movement to really uh uh raised the levels of home ownership uh for for poor people and those are closely linked I think even though it is it is demonstrably false to say that the movement to increase the rates of home ownership among among poor people caused the financial crisis it is true that in many cases it wasn't good for those people themselves that the that the push to to home ownership left them actually more vulnerable and with less assets than they than they had going in I thought this was an interesting I was interested to see how the assets advocates had dealt with that and really I think what I found was that it's almost uh that that really well structured programs that were real that were not only helping people save uh but also helping people make sure they were you know they knew what their choices were and were making good decisions about their assets and making good decisions about home ownership at the right time in their lives I mean that in a sense these were actually protected these these turned out really well the program in in North Carolina run by self-help for example you know those people are actually have much more equity in their homes they the default rates and foreclosure rates are much lower they're much better off than than a lot of the people who were just you know victims of the of the financial industry so I think it's a really good case uh for these programs especially for structuring the programs well and then the last evolution that we've seen uh that we've seen here is really been to link the the savings accounts uh with college essentially with college promise programs so that so that governors mayors in San Francisco and other cities for example are you know making that commitment that if you're coming out of one of our high schools and you're you know you're basically getting decent grades we will make sure you're able to go to college and coupling that with an account in which in which people can save that brings them and their families into the economic mainstream creates an expectation of success that isn't there before using all these small pieces together it's a very very different model from this you know rough idea that we latched on to 20 years ago of the individual development account the individual development account depended on you know a big match sometimes like four to one match of savings to kind of get people up to the point where they had the uh where they had sufficient savings but what what all the work that's happened since then kind of shows is that if you do this right you don't need them you don't need the match to be quite as high and the match in a sense isn't as important as simply having that account having that expectation making it easy tapping into some of the things that we know from behavioral economics about what encourages people to save and the value of savings and expectations and that together those kinds of things uh created a different kind of asset so you know here it's it's it's been a fascinating I always feel I look at this movement it's kind of like um you know your own you you don't realize how quickly your own kids are growing up but when you have you know a nephew or niece or a friend's kid or just a reed daughter the other day you know if you see kids that you only see every two years or something like that yeah they really leap so it's been great to to see this this idea kind of from afar but to see the leaps it's taken to the point where it really it's about time that it really does play in a sense that the politics catches up with the practice as Ray would put it and that it it's time for it to once again have a much bigger place in the political debate thank you