Good afternoon. Thank you for taking time out of the speed of the day to join us inside our capitol Hill Briefing entitled the inclusive economy how to bring wealth to americas poor. My name is jeff and im a director of government and external affairs at the Cato Institute, Public PolicyResearch Organization here in dc dedicated to the pencils of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace. Todays discussion is named after a recently published book by the same title as todays event, its available to you on a Registration Table as you came in right outside these doors but for those of you who do not receive a copy on your way in, please feel free to grab one on your way out and if we decide that you would like a copy later feel free to contact us wed be happy to drop one by your office. With us today to discuss this book are two of cato scholars, michael tanner, author of todays book and emily akins, catos director of polling will discuss her Ongoing Research on americans attitudes toward welfare policy, poverty and work. Tanner is a senior fellow at the institute where he had research into a variety of domestic policies with an emphasis on social welfare for healthcare and retirement. He has written numerous books including going for broke, deficits, debt and the entitlement crisis, healthy competition, what is holding the healthcare and how to free it in the poverty of welfare helping others in civil society. His writings have appeared in nearly every major american newspaper including the New York Times, wall street journ journal, Los Angeles Times and the usa today. He has been named by Congressional Quarterly as one of the nations five most influential experts on social security. Emily is a Research Fellow and director of boeing at the Cato Institute where she focuses on Public Opinions, american politics, political psychology and social movements and has authored several indepth survey reports including the state of free speech and intolerance in america. Policing america and the five types of voters. Research appeared in the washington post, politico, wall street journal, usa today, Los Angeles Times and other publications. She earned her phd in Political Science from ucla. With that i will turn over things to michael. Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming out. Its much too nice a day to be in here listening to me. I appreciate the suffering that will go with this. As we talk about a subject i think is not talked about enough in washington and that is poverty and how we should get people out of poverty. We spend a great deal of money fighting poverty maybe not as much as some people like to maybe more than others would like but its quite a bit. If you look at all federally tested programs or programs that say in the definition this is an insight Poverty Program we have about 100 and such insight Poverty Programs at the federal level, 70 odd provide benefits directly to individuals in the other provide benefits to low income communities. They spend about 700 billion at the federal level every year on these programs and another. A billion or so at the state, local levels. Were spending nearly a trillion dollars every year fighting poverty and in fairness these programs have succeeded at some level and do reduce the poverty rate. Poverty rate is lower today because of these programs that would be in the absence of these programs or least you cant prove the counterfactual but we do know they do reduce poverty rates. The question is whether or not simply reducing the poverty rate or making poverty less miserable should be the goal, ultimate goal of our insight poverty politics and because you could take or go to a Community Like [inaudible] up in baltimore where freddie gray was killed or east Fresno California or kentucky where the poorest community and chimeric in america and are these Thriving Communities are the people in these communities flourishing and that ultimately should be the goal for Public Policy is human flourishing, thriving human beings able to become all they can be. If you look at maslows hierarchy of needs we do a reasonable level at the very bottom in the base of the pyramid of hr people have enough food, shelter, clothing and so on to even in the 1960s with large numbers of the port do not have Running Water or electricity or real hunger in america was prevalent. We do have a reasonable job in dealing with those needs. We dont do very good at getting people to rise up to the top of that where there are the masters of their own fate and selfsufficient and in charge of their own lives and control their own destinies and to become all their individual talents will let them be. When i started looking at poverty for this book, inclusive economy i said lets go back to the beginning and strip it down and get away from the sterile debate we have in washington right now which is we spend 98 billion of food stamps and democrats own and say we need to make that 99 under public and say lets cut it back to 97 and assume one change will make a huge difference in peoples lives. Lets strip it down to the beginning. First thing i want to do is look at why people are actually poor and i found there are two competing theories on poverty, if you will, in this country. Both politically and academically get but enough heads between these two theories. On one side is the theory that says if poverty is the result of individual choices and individual decisions by the poor themselves and theres a culture of poverty out there and that leads the poor to make a series of poor decisions in their lives and those decisions are what trap people in poverty. On the other side of this, you find people on the liberal side of the spectrum say that as far as it goes but you cant ignore the fact that we have a system in the societ a society that ged discrimination is still prevalent. Its quite conservative people like me that leads to economic implications that could lead some people behind and out of the equation and that these things could also cause poverty. The legacy of slavery alone is that africanamericans have been deprived of seven to 10 trillion of capital in the community. Those sort of things cant simply be left behind in the patient. So whos right . Theres truth to both sides of the equation. I dont think that you can strip the floor of the agency and that they are by the whims of fate that nothing they do matters, that they ar are entirely at the mercy of outside forces and they have no consequences. I think that is a very demeaning way to look at the poor. But i also think you have to recognize we all make our choices within certain constraints. And the simple fact is if you are a poor minority child lets say growing up in an area that has jobs where the School System is lousy, where the Police Tackle you every time you step foot outside your door, yo of yu are going to make up ending end up taking that is the combination of the individual choices people make and the context in which the society sets those decisions that ultimately leads to poverty. Looking at all this i said there is some truth in this society and thatside andthat side, butd deadline if you will that we need to look at, and that is the government itself and where the government policy gets in the way of people actually rising out of poverty. How often the government is messing things up on both sides of the equation for the wrong individual choices or enforced the societal discrimination that actually leads people to make the choices they do. So, i identified in the book basically five areas where i think we should be looking to reform policies in order to help people get out of poverty. The first is criminal justice reform. We know that our criminal Justice System is bias against people of the greatest of the way from the over criminalization of an america to the war on drugs. Let us not forget that eric garner in new york was killed for the crime of selling and im taxed cigarettes. We need to look at the over criminalization of society but also the way the Police Interact with people on the street and the way we deal with the rest. We know for example if you are a minority person or live in innercity that youre going to be treated and arrested more likely for drug use than if you are white. And yet they use drugs at approximately the same rate. Once you are arrested we know you will be sentenced more harshly if you are a person of color. We need to look at the way people are treated in prison and look at the problem that stems from having a criminal record when you get out of prison. The fact is if you commit a crime and make a mistake you get a felony conviction and when you are 40yearsold you are still going to have to carry around a criminal record. Its going to prevent you from getting a job that says you have a felony conviction that it can also prevent you from getting housing because landlords ask whether you have a criminal record and it can prevent you from getting Financial Aid to go to school. To get a license for various occupations. In ohio with a heavy Person Training Program to teach people in prison to become farmers that its illegal to get a barbarous license in a felony conviction in the state of ohio. It seems sort of a pointless exercise. But we need to look at all these things. One of the things the conservatives worry a great deal about is women who have children outside marriage pointed to a host of problems from high on the marriage birthrates. They say go to the innercity 67, 68 having children outside of marriage and i would say exactly who are they supposed to marry. Arrows will send pointed out, our criminal Justice System is strict 1. 5 million black men out of the marriage pool because they are tied up in the criminal Justice System which makes it difficult for them to find a job that could allow them to support a family to get the housing and education and all the things i talked about unless you reform will justice, youre not going to be able to deal with things like the marriage birthrates. So thats number one. We need to deal with the system and Vanderbilt University suggested that reform alone could reduce poverty rates by as much as 20 . The single reform. Second, we need to look at the Education System. We are sometimes more likely to be poor than if you go out and finish high school or go on to college. And yet we have a School System today that all too often fails. We have a School System today thabut all too often exists fore benefit of the Teachers Union and the administrator not have the appearancforthe parents andn themselves, that there is very little innovation, very little competition within our School System, very little improvement. And its not just a function of money. We notic know this but baltimor, washington, d. C. , chicago, la are spending more than the School Systems almost anywhere in the country and it getting poorer results. We need to look at the Education System in ways we can bring more innovation and more competition and more control over the way parents operating for their childrens sake than for the system itself. The system is not the goal ultimately educating children is the goal. Here, this one actually surprised me a little but just how important it is, that is we need to make reform to housing and bring down the cost of housing for low income people. You know, housing picks up a disproportionate amount of poor peoples incomes about 40 on average they poor persons income goes to pay the rent. That is a huge amount when you have other needs as well. At the same time, if you have unaffordable rent, it locks them into lowincome communities and they cant move to an area that had more jobs other schools and yet its often government policy that drives the point beyond the ability of people to afford. Specifically i want to look at things like landuse and zoning laws. Zoning alone could add as much as 50 to the cost of housing in communities like manhattan and San Francisco. The most were explicitly racial. The first in the nation was actually in la and the second was in baltimore, and effectually prohibited you from selling or renting to any family that wasnt in the majority on the block. They copied that within a couple of years and move to birmingham alabama and spread around the country and still has the same effect today of keeping basically people of color and low income people out of the communities where middleclass communitiewere middleclasscommy to prevent lowincome housing and communities. We need to be looking at land use laws and how they are used basically the bar for people from middleclass communities. We need to look at savings. We need to be looking at whether or not we encourage people to say you dont get out of poverty by spending but by saving money. Yet on both sides, we discourage savings in the country. For one thing we make it hard to simply open up a bank account. We are so paranoid about the war on drugs and terror that we set up identification requirements to open a savings account. Did you hear a lot of debate about the voting and s voting at he also neglects the fact that they like the identification to open a bank account. It means you have to cash a check or cant borrow money or whatever you are driven to the alternative is very high rates but you also have to walk around with money in your pocket and think of the problems that causes. On the other end of it the programs are designed to discourage savings and encourage basically if you get a welfare check and spend every penny of it, that is fine with us. Some of that into an account for your kids to go to school some day and we will take away your check. Get a car to get a job to get off welfare we will take away your check. We need to be looking at the programs obviously you need some of sort of testing. We dont want last years Lottery Winner to be on welfare. What we need to be looking at the test to see if they act to discourage people from making their lives better but ultimately should be the goal. Last, something i call inclusive Economic Growth. Its basically the basis for the puppy inclusive economy. We know that nothing gets people off of poverty more so than Economic Growth. A growing economy is more than any government so they can in the end. If you just simply look at history, you go back in history and find that for most of history they were miserable and ruled over by literally slightly less desperately. About 300 years ago, something happened and the wealth increased and declined substantially and its been going on since then. The wealthy lifestyles of many cases. It was modern freemarket capitalism and we need to encourage that today. We know what encourages that with the low regulation and things like that. But we should also recognize that Economic Growth is only going to lift people out of poverty if everybody can participate. If we block the poor people from being part of the economy, they are not going to see the benefit oof that growing a comedy, and that means we need to look at things that get in the way of poor people becoming part of the economy, press the Economic Growth, things like for example, occupational licensing. We have about 25 to 3 of all jobs in America Today requires you from getting the governments permission to practice your profession. And i am not talking about being a doctor or a lawyer or Something Like that. Cosmetologist beautician, braiding hair, being a florist or funeral attendance from all these things require a license from the state and in many cases, its very arduous and it will give you one example. In louisiana if you want to be a florist, you are a single mom trying to get off of welfare, youve done some arranging your friends have told you youre good to get back to take a course that is going to be a months long and find a babysitter every night in order to be able to take the course and you will have to pay for it and for the bucks for it and then a test at the end of the course that is only given twice a year. They will have to find a hotel to stay after night, someone to watch their kids and take the test because god forbid we would get a bad floral display. Can you imagine something worse . We need to be looking at whether or not licensing its reciprocal, whether or not it is necessary, whether you have a criminal record in your past. We need to be looking at all these things and at the same time look at occupational zoning and start a Small Business in your kitchen because if you get the degree and start doing flowers in your kitchen. We need to look at barriers to affordable child care that get in the way. Licensing requirement for education requirements that simply make child care so expensive. Here in washington, d. C. , they are working on a law where you have to get a bachelors degree to be a child care worker. You dont have to have a bachelors degree to be a parent. All that is going to make child care more expensive so poor people cant afford to get child care so they cant afford to get a job. When you look at the minimum wage laws and other things that allow people to get in on a chance to become employed or to start a business or to do things that are going to get them out of poverty. I dont pretend that this book will provi