[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 abou