[inaudible] question about this process is how a man comes back from this kind of devastation. Yeah, its been very interesting to see how its worked an the idea how this occurred. For instance, bison animals enter into the edges going in and this determined the way. And they found out that process is much more random than you would think. It depends on the time eve year and what animal happens to be around and which will cull nice that area and that becomes an island where other plants and animals can get that area as well. So you see a lot arounded the area and one feature is that the area now is is a diverse area in all of Washington State. If you just let these natural processes occur plants and animals entered into those areas a an attempt to come back. When you go to mount st. Helens it has this odd combination with a incredibly devastated area and yet vegetation is returning quickly to the mountain. It does have huge old growth forest around it and wont for another hundred years unless volcano erupts again. But the trees are back, and full of elk so wonderful place to visit. I recommend that everybody go to take a look at it. Yes should we be worried . You might look at the cascade observatory website before you go. Maybe not a bad idea to check on things but youll know if those volcanos get active again. Thing about them is they do issue warnings mount st. Helen was active for two months before this big eruption. If you dont show up if im there you know its safe to go. Keep an eye on two vonls now. In the forest to hear that it existed in 1980 but assumed other than National Park [inaudible] pockets of old forest around Washington State. Theyre not easy to find, but they do exist, for instance, if you ever go to mount st. Helens and hike down the green river, youll come across the forest which did not fall in the eruption that moores were camped in so that was the forest that protected them and they were instrumental in helping the monoutility as a protected area. Theres little bits and pieces up there. Its maying theres not more old growth pourings but trees are so valuable that they were [inaudible] so one last question. [inaudible] astonishing to fly over to see you know land is it unprecedented or how distinctive is that area with diversity, question how unusual this volcano is. Fact of the matter is that its unusual to the United States certainly. But once they learn from mount st. Helens is this kind of eruption a sideways eruption, a blasting of volcano and eruption e devastates landscape in that area is fairly common. They see this all over the world and you can go to other areas that look pretty similar to mount st. Helens and it has done this in the past and going to do it in the future and matter of time before they erupt. Thanks everybody. [applause] thank you so much for coming. Please say hello, get a book do me a beautiful favor fold up for chair. Thanks [inaudible] youre watching booktv on cspan2 television for serious readers heres a look at whats on prime time tonight. Kick off the evening at 6 30 p. M. With dr. Lewis sullivan human and Health Secretaries under george h. W. Bush a cost of efficacy of local count terrorism efforts. Then at 9 provides new hrs. Of ablutionism and on afterwards at ten emily finds rise of elected women with Maxine Waters and finish up our programs at 11 we david priest reporting on president s daily brief or aside its commonly known the pdb. That all happens tonight on krshes span 2s booktv. Good afternoon. And welcome today at the auditor you mean in the Cato Institute. Appreciate you coming out today. This is a really important topic. I have a book form here for the human cost of welfare by phil harvey and lisa. For thoatdz those folks who are following us online you can follow along at twitter at hashtag katoa events or hashtag human cost of welfare. Now, the u. S. Federal government last year spent roughly 688 billion to more than 100 poverty poverty antipoverty programs. State, local governments rather spent an additional 300 billion dollars on those and other programs. That means that government is spending close to a trillion dollars every year fighting poverty. If you want to go all the way back to 1965, when Linda Johnson declared war on poverty, weve spent some 22 or 23 trillion dollars fighting poverty. But what if we really established over that period of time . If you use the sentence bureau official poverty numbers, poverty rates have barely budged. And even you use the sort of alternative poverty measures which are more accurate and take into account noncash benefits and things like that taxation and other things, you find that progress against poverty really stalled out somewhere in the 1970s and has been pretty flat ever since. Were spending more and more money every year in getting fewer and fewer results. Buts as bad as that is for taxpayers and for the fiscal Balance Sheet of the u. S. Government, the real problem is that its bad for the People Living in poverty. Because nots only are spending money and not helping them but in many cases we could be making their situation worse or thats the the case argued by phil and lisa in their book so were thrilled to have them with us today to talk a little bit about the studies theyve done and people theyve talked to and fantastic opportunity theyve given to give voice to People Living in poverty and people on welfare to tell their own story so were very happy to have them with us today and going to tell them about this and have some confers an get you folked involved as well. Phil harvey is the chief sponsor of the dkt Liberty Project which is an advocate group that raises awareness about about in the United States and hes the author of a number of otherring bos including what every child be wanted, how social marketing is revolutionized in use around the world and government, what the government is ding that you dont know about. You write for huffing ton post, forbes and other publications and appeared in the communist, chronical of fill philanthropy and quite a cross connection, and lisa is the director of policy studies for dkt Liberty Project. She works on topics like welfare policy and civil liberty with a bachelors degree and masters from university of maryland shes a consultants and ghost wrifer work on Public Policy issues. This is a really terrific book that will be assigning later on if you havent bought one already, i urming you to do it. In the meantime lets hear from authors of it and start with phil harvey. [applause] thank you all for coming out o. Thank you for being here on what started out to be a very rainy day it isnt any longer, had which is good. Thanks to the Cato Institute for arranging this and making it possible, and special thanks to Michael Tanner, michael has written, studied, lectured widely on subjects relating to welfare and poverty in the United States. And his work has greatly informed our book, and were especially grateful to him for that. Well talk a little bit today about the basic issues outlined in our book issuesing to welfare and its problems. Well talk quickly about the welfare state in extent to which the United States is becoming one. The correlation between the rise in welfare and the drop in work participation in the yiet. The extent to which people on welfare feel trapped and in many cases are trapped in a cycle of welfare and poverty and dependence. And well discuss briefly benefits one was principle reasons for that feeling that sensation of entrapment that some of those who lisa interviewed expressed. First lets it can a quick look gheed, a quick look at the relationship between welfare spending and the United States it seems to me that given the fact that america spends almost as much as the rest of the world put tailgate on defense, that the fact that welfare expenditures are now overtaking, have often overtaken already and are destine to overtake defense spending even more as the years go by in the future. Means that we have come a very long way indeed to becoming a welfare state because it is now larger obligation than defense. The next slide shows the correlation between increases in well with fair expenditures this is a particularly steep increase, the blue line is food stamp, the fratch program skyrocketed more than some of the others, but it makes the point, the red line is Work Force Participation that is percent aiming of adult americans either working or looking for work. This does not prove causation but we think that the correlation between these two items is not entirely coincidental. For a significant number it is not but we now see more and more people on three, four, five, six years and that is the population we are concerned about and population that is miserable. We have been warned over the years. Concerned with welfare issues of the dangers involved and we are seeing some of the dangerous taking place today. One of the most articulate spokespersons on this was president Franklin Roosevelt who referred to relief, as it was called then, as a subtle narcotic. A very insightful description of a destroyer of the human spirit, he said, undermining dignity and self respect. We must preserve selfrespect, roosevelt said, selfreliance, courage and determination. He understood the dangers and was very concerned about them. How does welfare, why does welfare, why does dependence, Financial Dependence on the government have these enervating and deeply negative affects . Simply because all of us want to accomplish things in life. All of us want to be able to say i did that, i raised a family, i supported my family, i got my kids into college, i learned to play the saxophone, it is addressed in many different ways. But we all need earned accomplishment to make our lives worthwhile, and that is exactly the element that is missing in the lives of those who depend heavily on welfare. One of the women lisa interviewed expressed this fact extremely well and i want to read her quote because i think it illustrates both the negative side of being dependent and the Positive Side of working your way up, this was a woman in decatur, illinois. I remember the first paycheck when i went back to work like it was yesterday. 177, not much, but it was mine, and i took it home and showed it to the kids and it made me feel good inside. My kids, they need so many things, diapers, toys, shoes, clothes, and they need me to provide for them, and it gives me a lot of pride to do that instead of them seeing mama cashing welfare checks. I think that encapsulates the human part of this dilemma. The answer as the lady from decatur suggests for most americans most of the time the answer to the need for earned accomplishment is a job blues not for everybody but for most people it is paid work and the system, the welfare system is conspicuously bad at getting people out of welfare and into work. One of the people we encountered is a man named angel who had been on welfare for many years and he was angry about this fact would you go to the welfare office, they should post jobs. They should be on the bulletin board, Jobs Available in this community. But they dont. You go in and it says need help with food stamps . Need medicaid assistance . Nothing about jobs. That is the other aspect of this form of entrapment. The whole system including recruiting government workers sponsoring bingo nights for seniors to sign up for food stamps. There has been some pushback on that recently, glad to see it, recruiting is taking this business a little far but the psychology of the system is more welfare, more different welfare programs and nothing about jobs and work. The only program that has job training and with dependent children in 1996, that program, only 3 of the total welfare package so these other programs have overtaken it and dont have work components. There is one program in the system, one big program, earned income tax credit which does require work and earning in order to enjoy that benefit and we think that shows the way to greatly improve the system and using that as a model we may be able to come up with ways of making the situation a whole lot better. Thanks. [applause] you cant forget the declaration of independence. On one side, pretty simple. I thank everybody for coming out today, great way to start the week talking about interesting ideas and i want to thank Michael Tanner for having us and Cato Institute. Get us all together to talk about things. I am delighted to be here. I am going to talk briefly about more of the philosophical underpinnings behind our book because it is based on a philosophical idea and speak about the methodology, how we did the book, and just open it to questions from michael and you guys. The reason i picked this fight, the philosophy is we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, what we are interested in is the pursuit of happiness. The idea is what we want to look at is if we have the right to pursue happiness what does that mean . What does it mean to be happy . What does it take for all of us to be happy . Once we decide on that, what does the welfare system have to do with that . Will it help us be happier or will it not help us be happier . Is it helping the people on it to pursue happiness or not . That is what we want to answer with this book. As far as happiness goes, we are to the first people to come up with the idea that what we do for a living is essential to selfactualizing, to get better and success, scholars from aristotle to socrates and on have talked about happiness and all look at this like what do we need . We all know, if i were to ask the first question i would ask is what do you do . Are you an artist, are you a teacher . Are you a writer . Are you a policy analyst, that is how we identify who we are and what we are doing with our lives and if we agree we have the right to pursue happiness and if we agree that happiness is tied up with what we do for a living and how we earn our way, what does the welfare system look like under those parameters . Does it help people be happy or does it not . That was the underlying philosophy behind this book. There are a lot of policy analyses, plenty of charts for policy monks and all that stuff but it is a deeply philosophical idea we want to address. What we found out when we look at welfare programs is they put people in position where work is a threat rather than an award, it is risky to go to work, you lose benefits if you go to work and the rules are really strict and hard to deal with. When you hear about her example a lot of people on welfare are working, what about the working poor, they are working but the problem is they are being told they can work a few hours a week or a month, they can earn so much but if they go over that you are off the rules which a lot of people i tripped up over the rules, a gift from an and or someone died in the family leaving the money and suddenly threw them out of all these programs and left them in a position where they had to get back on and so the whole psychology about work changes when you are on these programs. All of a sudden the value of the programs becomes greater then a job you could get so for example, the welfare cliff, the director of health and Human Services in the state of pennsylvania looked at this, decided to do an example of a woman in this position and what it would look like and so he took a mother with two children, a single mom living in the suburbs, she would be getting cash assistance, food stamps, additional food for her and her infant, housing, she would be on medicaid and doing the math, adding up the value of those benefits, found that you would have to earn close to 59,000 a year to replace those benefits. If somebody wants to go to work and are offered a job and it wont cover the value of those benefits, all of a sudden they make a very rational decision based on the incentive to not work. That is scary because in the short term we think we are helping them out, they are getting support so that is good because we dont want the poor to not get support but we are telling them not to go to work. We also do this in the disability system. Any of you familiar with anybody on disability, you are told not to go to work if you get on disability because you have a good chance of losing your benefits, so we take people that are disabled but would like to make work into a risk. That is the underlying philosophy behind this book, we believe we all have the right to pursue happiness and happiness requires work and earned success and welfare systems get in the way of that so in a nutshell if you get that you get the whole premise of the book. Briefly i will tell you as far as my role in the book we wanted to do a book that was a little different than most of the work out of dc, which is very heavy on policy analysis but may be missing what it is like, how these policies actually play out in real life with real people who are affected so i traveled all over the country, northeast, southwest, pacific northwest, california, hawaii, i went all over the place, i went into soup kitchens and homeless shelters and tent cities and bus stops, wherever i could find people willing to talk to me and asked them if they would be willing to talk to somebody writing about welfare about what their life was like and surprisingly people are happy to talk to me and show me what they were doing and what they were living on and how many dollars they get every month, and we add them to our policy analysis so the book is not just food and cost as much and this is how it works out and it goes on with stories from the road so we think that is a unique contribution to this field of policy research and we were delighted to do it and i think i am done so i am going to open questions from michael. I think i have done what i am supposed to do. [applause] let me start one of the fascinating things about the book is the fact that the actual participants in the system gave them avoidance. To be stronger on numbers i dont know what this is. They are lava ears . Start again. Essentially you gave voice to the system which is so unusual. We tend i am curious in terms of this what you learned about why people are poor. Essentially if you look at the big debate academically one side talks about poverty is structural, based on racism and sexism and things beyond individuals control. Then there is another side that says bad behavior on the part of the poor, they have done bad things in their lives, made mistakes, made bad decisions and that is why they are poor. You interacted with the poor. What did you see in those regards . People are poor because they dont have any money. It is a complicated subject and everything from bad decisionmaking, people made bad decisions and end up in a position where nobody would hire them or they had addiction issues where they couldnt hold a job, there are all kinds of reasons people are poor. There is no one. I did my travels i saw people, there was a lot of job loss during that time and i was traveling the country and people were saying it is easy to talk about this but there are no Jobs Available. What am i supposed to do . That made it more complicated. The answer is for many reasons. I will say the vast majority of people i interviewed would much rather be working. I heard over and over again i would much rather be doing work and it didnt matter what kind of work. Any kind of work, then having to be on these programs. Some people say people dont want to work. I expected to see a little of that and i am sure it is out there but i didnt meet people like that. I met people who were trying hard. Their preference would have been to be working. The war on drugs has contributed, the fact that so many young men, particularly young black men are spending time in jail, clearly find it harder to get legal work as a result of that, and that is another cycle of poverty and incarceration but it has certainly added to the poverty cycle in the United States. That is pretty undeniable. You make a strong case, talking about marginal tax rate or the fact that people when they earn a certain amount of money start losing their benefits, taxed on that income very quickly and the fact that that discourages work, we made that case in a study called the welfare tradeoff which is widely criticized in the pennsylvania study, and ohio study confirmed where we were coming down on that and your book builds on that work. What would you recommend as an alternative to that . We brought up that study some folks on the left said the answer is therefore we have to raise wages, we need a higher minimum wage and guaranteed benefits of some kind. Other people said we need to cut Welfare Benefits down to a lower level. People talked about the earned income tax credit. What do you recommend as an answer . Certainly making welfare point toward work is an important part of that. The present system is antiwork. Almost a war on work. And that is insane. At the very least we ought to be helping people get out of the system and into paid employment. I did mention the itc. It has the effect of popping up wages, and that is very good. And income tax return, it was designed to refund to low income people any federal income tax that had been withheld from their wages but it tops up on those amounts by more than has ever been withheld. It makes work pay and has contributed substantially to getting people out of welfare into work and to take a job that may pay 7, or 8 an hour but when you get the benefit, it is the same cumbersome process, it was the right way to go about it. And this plethora of benefits, housing, food and it is very patronizing. To the extent we can give people money and let them make their own decisions about their own lives and set their own priorities, that is also a move in the right direction and subsidizing wages is one way of doing that. Kansas, missouri and others, drug testing recipients, the prohibition on buying seafood with food stamps or limiting people taking other cash machines despite the fact the high seas go banking and so on, you see this punitive approach being effective or counterproductive to what way people have to live . It is dumb. I guess i would agree, they can make good decisions, they will make decisions and dont need a lot of patronizing in order to do that and it doesnt seem to be working very well in places it has been tried. It gets past and immediately rescinded. You describe your self in the book as being open to the idea of guaranteed National Income to replace the current pile of welfare programs. One of the problems is trying to make the numbers on that work. We did a study and found we couldnt find a way to make the numbers work but is that something you are open to . Yes. There are two kinds and we need to distinguish the system which was then called negative income tax, the Milton Friedman idea, propped up peoples wages, turned out to be a work killer. For the simple reason if you were making 9000 and established level was 12,000 and the government gives you 3000 under those circumstances you have no incentive to make that 3000 yourself because you make the same amount of money anyway. The straight cash benefits, the purest form is the Charles Murray plan in his book in our hands which is to give every adult american 10,000 a year and nothing else. This is affordable if you dont give it to the truly wealthy and that distinction, does have to be made because if you are giving 10,000 a year to millionaires, and everybody in between it does cost too much. We havent really tested this at all well and i agree with you. Michael has written a good deal about this and some experiments on giving people money and let them make their own decisions. Murray sets up some interesting hypotheticals, he said 10,000 a year, three or four if you want to get together and grant a shack by the beach and spend the rest of your life surfing, you can do that. No one is going to tell you how to spend the money, there are no incentives to work, no disincentives to work, no incentives to have children, no disincentives. In that respect it is entirely neutral. My reservation about that, having found the power of the relationship between work and happiness in doing this book is too many people wouldnt work and even though that would be their own choice there is no guiding hand telling them not to work, but people who are not working generally are not as happy as people who are so i have that concern but people should test it. In the 1970s, studies showed these were negative income tax that had in a discouraging effect because of marginal tax rate problems. Murray suggested 25,000 taxfree and then would start taxing above that but you still have problems with the tax rate. If you try to get the 10,000, 4 trillion which is not affordable so making the numbers work seems to overcome that. What about the other approaches being talked about . Consolidating these programs with block grants under the state, paul ryan with a small number of programs, marco rubio suggested though he hasnt spelled it out, almost everything, giving them to the states and having some sort of standard to continue to qualify, would that be an approach you would be in favor of . What did you hear at that meeting in South Carolina . I was on the Advisory Council in january where six of the republican president ial candidates came and talked about poverty for half a day which was cool. There was energy in the room. The six candidates who came were no longer in the race, on the democratic side they were invited but chose not to attend. Dont know where we stand with that. There is one left standing. In terms of block grants to the state in our reading of how these things play out, the 1996 welfare reform was supposed to be welfare to work, they were supposed to have a work component, supposed to be given encouragement, and getting into work. A lot of those programs were turned over to the states, and dealing with real people and low and behold waivers start happening so if you look at welfare programs as they play out in states today you find even though something comes in with rules from washington, when it gets to iowa or Washington State the state is deing with population of people on welfare and they adjust accordingly. I have concerns about that but i like the idea of giving states more control on the flipside, i am schizophrenic on this because overall the states deal with actual populations. Their populations adjust programs to meet people so if they had more freedom to do that maybe they would do it better but unfortunately what i have seen so far as they tend to loosen requirements rather than tighten them for the most part. One of the things we find his interesting questions, before i turn it over to them let me give you a chance to defend yourself against what i think is one of the criticisms of your book and that is a certain amount of victim blaming that is going on. It is essentially, you take a poor person living in the innercity, they have had terrible schooling, innercity schools are by and large lousy, they are dealing with the criminal justice system, the war on drugs that you said, there are no jobs in their neighborhood, you go to the area where freddie gray was killed in baltimore for example there is not even a fast food store in the entire neighborhood, no supermarket, no employment opportunities, these are not People Living in the suburbs and you are saying get a job, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Is that a fair charge to put on that poor person to do that . Arent you in essence saying they are behaving badly by not doing that . I lost my train of thought. As far as the job situation in inner cities, we did a book in baltimore a couple weeks ago and had a bunch of people in the audience talking about how they wish there were more jobs for people to have and that was an issue but they also agreed they would rather be working so even those who are not able to find jobs our point is those folks would rather be working. It is not that they are living there because they choose to live in the innercity neighborhoods that dont have Jobs Available, and still the idea that they do want to work is still there. When i went around the country i met people i would ask why they wouldnt move for work. At that time north dakota had 0 unemployment or something ridiculous and i would meet people in alabama and i would say what about moving for work which is something we used to do a lot, i did it growing up and benefits hold you back from that because it is hard to get off of those benefits and move to another state and all of a sudden you have to reapply and it gets very complicated. As far as blaming the victim, that is exactly what we are not doing. We care deeply about these people and they have as much right to happiness as we do. Why do they have any more or less right to the same things we have . I have the right to happiness, they do too. To banish them or lead them to ignore them and say you live in a poor neighborhood, too bad for you, we are arguing strongly we care about them a lot and want them to be happy and believe their happiness will come. The worst thing, it seems to me, that you can do to somebody is to put them in a situation where they are going to be in a perpetual cycle of dependency and poverty. That is criminal and we shouldnt do it. The best thing you can do in this context it seems to me is make work more attractive. There is little to be said for doing more to create dependency that doesnt lead to satisfying lives, it leads exactly the other way. I dont see any blaming the victim there. It seems to me that the idea of simply providing more benefits to people is going to be good for them and what we found is it is not. A really important point. Lets go to the audience out here. We have microphones, identify yourself as you approach with the microphone, make it a question and not a speech. In the second row, right there in the middle. I am an economist. A hypothetical question. What happens if you cut all of it, go back to 1960. Is this a political issue . I am thinking in terms of civil society, the family, there are other safety nets that are not uncle sam. What would this look like if you got rid of everything . I am not running for office. I think it is a fair question frankly and in many respects there are pluses but let us a right off there would be some destitution. One of the things that has been accomplished by the welfare system although it could have been done other ways is to virtually eliminate real destitution in this country. We dont have people starving in the streets. I dont think they would be if we ended everything because americans give away 3 50 billion a year to private charities and a great deal more of that if we had no welfare, would go to poverty and less to the symphony and museums and universities so that i think society would adjust, but there would be a period that would be rough for some people. I do think that private philanthropy could be taking up much much more of the welfare issue and one of the recommendations we discussed in the book is giving people a tax credit for donating to a list of several thousand charities. There is always the problem of picking those charities. Instead of giving money to the government for food stamps you could give it to the charity of your choice for assisting the poor and they would have to use it for something related to that purpose and that would be a good move. A couple things i would add to that, there is a very robust underground economy. People are not necessarily living on food stamps, they are bartering and doing all kinds of things. You have to keep that in mind. Part of your savings would be a vast array of Government Employees that administer these programs so they dont lose their jobs which means more unemployment but we free up some money that was not directly going to support these. Consumption data if you look at what the poor actually spend as opposed to what their income is, it is 7 times higher in terms of consumption so it is significant. The other interesting thing is if you look at poverty rates prior to 1965 they were coming down steadily. They continued to come down through the early 1970s have leveled off and you can argue 65 to 70 whether that was due to welfare spreading or things like the Civil Rights Act which brought america into the labor force or the Womens Movement which there is not a lot of evidence to suggest additional welfare spending is lowering poverty significantly. We no longer have the my full Michael Harrington style destitution where a third of american poor didnt have running water. It is questionable whether we are lifting people out of poverty with the programs, gentlemen in the blue. Identify yourself. Jeremiah, a friend of the author. What consideration did you give or might you give that would stimulate job creation, the old new dealer and public works projects. To me from what i am familiar with, and to find employment under the circumstances of very low income black areas and people now losing their jobs because of the outflow of jobs to other countries. Did you give consideration to that, instead of giving people an incentive to find jobs, give them incentives or put some kind of pressure on the private sector to create jobs for the people that we have and the federal government in a time of very low interest rates. The short answer is yes, we have a series of recommendations basically to make it easier for business particularly Small Business to create jobs, there is an awful lot of policy now, government policy that inhibits job creation, regulations on small manufacturing businesses for example are estimated to be Something Like 15,000 or 20,000 per employee of simple regulatory requirements so we have a number of recommendations about that. Almost absolute sweeping recommendations about idiotic licensing requirements. A lot of that is state originated but when you have 2 license things like flower arranging and hair braiding and taking care of horses teeth and other things that require that you go to some college, some Training Course that costs 1000, these are stopping people from getting new businesses started and new businesses are one of the lifeblood of the economy, we have a number of recommendations about that. As for the availability of work, one of the positive things lisa mentioned a minute ago, people not telling anybody about it. Half the people she talked to, this is indicative of the total population, working off of the books, there is a big underground economy out there and in a way that is good news because it means people want to work and are finding ways of working and bartering and exchanging as we set. Let me stop there. Those are the principal things we suggest. Licensing is an area of broad bipartisan agreement, something the white house has spoken on, 30 of all occupations in america require license permit or state approval in order to participate in funeral attendance to require a state license, dont die unapproved or something. We will move to the back next. Thank you very provocative. I am looking forward to getting further into the book and finding the narrative having to do with how we got here with respect to misbegotten political processes and concepts embodied in the law that brought us to this place, i suppose there will be a narrative arc on that so we could better understand, we have a president , republican with different types of senate and house arrangements and all mixtures of things since Franklin Roosevelt and yet this has happened, republican, democrat, if you can understand how we got here it might be those people could be rallied around the idea that it hasnt worked out the way they wanted and become part of the constituency to change things, not griping about it. The way we got here is straightforward as society becomes wealthier, people are more and more embarrassed they are poor among us or simply more concerned when they simply realize we can afford programs to assist the poor, so people need food, we get food stamps, people need medicaid and so on. I dont think there is anything terribly mysterious about that. Is odd when you ponder it a bit that in all the relatively populous western democracies including the famous scandinavia which is always used as an example of how government in this regard can work, as they became wealthier, instead of thinking now the whole society is wealthier, so fewer people are going to need welfare, have decided instead that as society becomes wealthier we will use more of our wealth to help the poor even though they needed less than they did before. But that happened here and it has happened in all the western democracies. I dont think it is terribly mysterious and the differences, there are differences right and left between conservative and liberal views of all this but i dont think that is quite what you were asking. Even with republicans, legislative approval is what it is. Time for two or three more questions, we will take two and you will finish it up. Gerald chandler. Poverty, actually a government assistance level and you have decreased poverty. You used the word destitution, what we actually do is keep raising the level to government assistance is allowed. It is a fair point. A number of scholars have hypothetically asked will we continue providing welfare when beneficiaries can afford a second home and a sailboat. It is an interesting question because the lifestyle of most poor americans today exceed middle american standards of 60 or 70 years ago. Having had running water, indoor plumbing, television set, telephone, microwave and a computer would have looked very good to my parents when they are young, a long time ago. Relative poverty is deeply ingrained belief western society generally, and as long as there are people conspicuously more poor than most people, the concern will continue to exist even though in absolute terms you could argue that it doesnt. The gentleman had his hand up for a while. Basic income action. I was pleased to hear you mentioned Charles Murray and negative income experiments from the 60s. I want to see if you are following the discourse about basic income in europe and canada and many other places where this guarantee of the floor is gaining enormous support, a referendum in switzerland and a couple weeks, pilot programs, in england and canada and pilot programs in india and namibia. I wonder if you could comment on the rest of the world and these ideas and what we are doing. Around the world, where we are considering basic income and still is talking about it, that is at war with our idea that people need to be working to be happy. If you just give them money and they can choose, four guys get together and get a beach house, nothing wrong with that but we have a philosophical question about what does that mean . The minute you put rules on it and say you have to work we are back to what we are doing right now. And to see these studies, there is a lot more research and it is fascinating countries in different places reach that point, and that ability having grown up in the world, and the fact that it is as varied is awesome. The data to look at the results we have seen, finland is another place, switzerland will lose the referendum, and anytime it is proposed, in the netherlands, data in a couple years and canada finding out how
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