On a Food Stamp Program is the right thing to do at all. Bill you know, unless they fix some of the things like that i do not know exactly what is going to happen, but i have heard the price of a gallon of milk could double or triple, and this is the wrong time for stuff like this to be going on. Reality think that the about the welfare system and welfare spending is that anytime a program is ostensibly cut, we have a huge amount of controversy about it, but when those programs are enlarged, nobody actually knows about it, and as a result of that, we have expanded, after adjusting for inflation, assistance for the poor, 20 fold since the beginning of the war on poverty. When we started the war on poverty, if you took all the antipoverty programs and added them together, . 50 was spent for every dollar that would be needed to eliminate poverty, and today we are spending close to 5. 50 for every dollar that is needed to eliminate poverty. The system is very large. When we talk about the cuts in food stands, this is half of 1 of a system that is growing by close to 33 over the last four or five years, and, again, even those cuts, i think it might be reasonable to postpone those in exchange for fundamental reforms in the Food Stamp Program requiring that ablebodied adults work or at least look for work in the future as a condition for getting aid. I have been promoting that change for 25 years and i always run into a leftwing roadblock in congress. Maybe we can finally get it through today. Guest i very much agreed with the last caller that this is a very bad time to be cutting back on what is already a fairly meager safety net in this country. Ofert gives you a lot statistics that makes it sound impressive and makes it sound like we are a lot more generous than we are, and we cannot have a debate here on television about whose numbers are right, and i do not want to be disrespectful of his numbers. He is a good analyst, but he is a different point of view. I believe and work requirements. I believe we can do a better job of delivering help to the poor. I think it is very important to understand that a lot of the growth he is understanding talking about is because of the growth in healthcare costs that has affected all of us. That is one of the biggest anti poverty programs we have, health care for the poor, especially poor children. We have two programs that loom large in the numbers here. One is dedicated, which goes to low income elderly, in nursing homes, and mothers and their. Hildren that are poor another program for children that is for low income children. I do not think anyone in the country wants to deny health care to the poor. You have to be careful when you talk about this data about exactly what you are talking about and what is going on here. I think that we have a much stingier safety net in the United States than any other advanced country that you could look at, and i think we are an affluent society, and although we could do a better job and you do like selfsufficiency, and i am in favor of moving people toward selfsufficiency, there are a lot of people who because of the job market, because they did not get a good education, or because they have various disabilities, need some help. I would disagree strongly that we have a smaller, stingier safety net than european countries, with all due respect, and i think the point about medical care is right, but if take all of the medicare medical care out, the fact of the matter is we are spending twice as much as would be needed personsevery single income above the poverty level. It is therefore a misleading impression about actual living conditions. Robert,s you know well, one of the reasons there is money going to people that do not appear to be poor is because if we cut off all assistance to moment somebody reaches the poverty line, there would be no incentive for someone to get out of poverty, take a job, and see their earnings go up. There are various constraints on how we could do this that i think you would support as much as i would. It is important to design programs in a way that they do not just cut you off the moment you achieve the poverty line. There is no way around that problem. 100 , at the fact of the matter is you are still raising enough money to raise everyone to essentially twice the poverty line, and we are still pretending we have 46 Million People that are homeless and do not have food to eat. If that was true, it would be the worst indictment of this system, we spent close to 1 trillion a year but we have tens of millions of people that do not have enough food to eat. There is no way the system can be that any efficient. I find myself in the ironic position of defending the liberal welfare state, but i am saying even the government could not be that ineffective. We have a large system that rivals anywhere in the world. Guest we will have to disagree about that. Is the problem is not the money is spent in a way that does not encourage people to help themselves. Host we are talking with Robert Rector and isabel sawhill. A couple of your tweets 83 of food stamp recipients work fulltime from don ritchie. Medicaid,with snap, section eight, school lunch, heating assistance, how much would one need to learn for the same benefit . A response for either of those. Guest the average family is getting probably about 20,000 25,000 we have thousand dollars a year. People working fulltime is not accurate, but if you are the workingtime, requirement does not apply to you. In the longterm individuals would be benefited by a nudge it would move them more into the labor force and that would be best for the taxpayers as well. Guest we have not talked very much about wages. You could work fulltime and your making them wage, you are making 15,000 a year. People to think about trying to support a family on 15 on 15,000 a year. These programs, including food up,ps, help to bump that and in an important way, and the debt is just that if we did not have these programs at all, we thed have 37 30 of population that are poor instead of about 15 . The first safety net that i described, it is doing a lot of good. I think we should not be tampering with it too much unless we are willing to see a little more suffering than we have now. Guest i think the important point here is i am not advocating doing away with food stamps or the earned income tax credit. I am saying we need to be honest about how much we are spending, honest about whether or not or 50 Million People in stark deprivation, which there are not. Guest i agree with that, by the way. People in this country are not destitute. That is an exaggeration. Guest then, importantly, we need to talk about the future of these programs. I believe to start out, we ought to say that any program that provides assistance to able bodied adults, those individual should be required in the long in thet tomorrow longterm, they should be required to work, or at least look for a job to get that aid. Another huge problem here that both ms sawhill and i agree on is the collapse of marriage. When poverty the war on poverty began, 6 of americans were born outside of marriage. Now the number is 42 . One of the problems with the welfare state is most of these programs penalize couples when they get married. That is probably not a good idea. Toought to look for a way put the family back together again rather than assuming it just goes on forever. Host kelly in rome, georgia, on our line for republicans. Caller yes. ,o disrespect to ms. Sawhill but i believe a lot of the problems might not have to do exactly with poverty, but maybe who decisions with people receive all of the assistance that they receive. Work. Band happens to he is a major contractor for one of the Largest Companies in that buildsorgia and maintains section eight thatng, and i can tell you it is very hard for him to accept when he shows up at 8 00 truck a 20yearold in a 20yearold truck, and you ride around section eight housing with people who have , and they areans living in a free housing, free heating, air,er, and you walk into their homes xs, they have brandnew xbo flatscreen tvs, and there is mcdonalds, people and stakes, and they claim they are in poverty. E stakes, and they claim they are in poverty, and they are sitting on the couch. They do not get up. There are screaming kids, and they are receiving everything free. I a lot of them get refunds. Host did you have a question for the guest . Guest caller the point is a lot of it has to do with the decisions they make with their money. When the housing crisis was hard, and we were trying to keep. Ur home, we lowered our bills we only in out once every six months. Eat out once every six months. We do not eat mcdonalds. Guest i will agree that there making,t of bad decision no question about that, so i can understand her frustration over her husbands frustration, but it is difficult because we do not believe in the United States that we should be interfering in peoples private lives by saying we will give you a certain amount of support, but for heaven stakes, heaven sakes, do not buy a tbone steak with it. There will be mistakes made. People will make terrible decisions. There will be people who are actually doing counterproductive things in terms of moving toward selfsufficiency. I do recognize that. Guest i also think there are some more fundamental decisions here. Of the basic rules that a about welfare and poverty that and i agree on, is if an individual does three things in life graduate from high school, get any kind of job and stick with it when they can, and they are married before they had children, that individual will not be poor or will rarely be poor in the course of their lifetime. The way you get consistent poverty in the u. S. Is individuals who break those rules and make bad decisions. I am not saying you made a bad decision, so we will not give you assistance, but we need to modify the welfare system so that the decisions are less frequent. Another issue that the caller is ofnging up is there is a lot cheating. People get aid, and they steal other sources of income from the government, or they have other people in the household with income that is hidden from the government. A work requirement goes a long cheating. Ving that if you have a hidden job while you are getting benefits, if the government requires you to show , you the site to train cannot do your hidden job and show up at the same time. That is why when you put those requirements on, a lot of welfare recipients simply jump off of the roles. Host another question from twitter. Boring file clerk is asking what is the current definition of the middle class . Guest there is no such definition. It does not exist. I think a lot of people would say informally that it is people with incomes of around 50,000, 60,000 a year, because that is about the average in this country for a family. That it is all of those are in those middle ranks between 40,000 and 70,000, but definitions are all over the map. Guest i would agree with that. It is an imprecise term. In massachusetts on our line for independents. Caller i have been watching c span for seven years, and i think this is a critical topic, and i want to say thank you to both of them, especially robert, for 20 years of opening this pandoras box. Host thank you. We go to alabama. Caller it sounds as though poverty is being equated with laziness. Know theike to statistics for individuals that have College Degrees that are receiving some of these benefits because they cannot find jobs. Guest i do not think laziness is the proper word. I do think that maintaining a strong work ethic and trying to be in the labor force as much as possible is an important factor in escaping poverty, but i also realize that in the current time there are millions of americans that simply cannot find jobs, and that is a problem with the current economy. Is it is not so much laziness, but it is a question up inen somebody shows the Welfare Office and says i cannot find a job, i have children to support, i need assistance, i do not want to cut them off, but i do not want to say go home, and i will send you a check in the mail and assume everything will turn out all right. One way to determine that person really needs aid is to say sure, we will give you eight from half a dozen different programs, but in exchange, we will expect you to come back down here next week, do some supervised job search, training on a better resume, and when you take a positive approach, it weeds out the people that do not really need the assistance, the cheaters, and it will help people that truly needy assistance in a better way. That is what we did back under president clinton in the 1990s. The problem with that is with over 80 different programs providing assistance to the poor, the welfare reform in the 1990s reforms only one of those albums. Food stamps was not touched, Public Housing was untouched. We need to go back to the basic principles, giving aid to those who need it, and give a nudge to help people move toward self sufficiency as well. Guest i would like to say that i agree with robert that having to help people find a job, and asking them to come into the office to get that help, would be a good thing to do. We could go one step further, as we did in the great depression, and have programs that put people to work Building National parks or doing other public work that needs to be done in this country, and then we would not have people would not have any excuse for not working because the government would say we have a job for you over here. You can become part of the peace corps, or the conservation corps, or you could help to clean up our parks. That might not be such a bad idea if we continue to have very high rates of unemployment. That is what the starting point of welfare reform was in the 1990s. We did require people to do the job training or Community Service work, but even in that program, after the recipients today are doing nothing. Even before the recession, half of them did nothing. Only 10 of them are being pushed by the agency to obtain more employment. We are a long way from requiring that. Basically, we are spending close to 1 trillion a year, and virtually none of that assistance requires ablebodied peoplence ablebodied to do anything for the aid that they get. Guest again, forgetting children, people that are disabled, etc. Host we go to john. The line for republicans. Caller thank you for cspan. Thank god for robert and the heritage foundation, and even for the woman who does not know what she is talking about. I live in the city of chicago in what is known as a poor area, and i know a lot of people that are collecting money on disability that could work. They could work better than i can. Is nonsense. I also know a couple that really deserve help, but that is a couple out of, maybe, 10. If you have two out of 10 than needed, help them out. The rest of them, let it go. That woman does not know what she is talking about. Guest well, i think there are people on disability that could do more employment, but we do not even have to focus their. E can there we can put all of the disabled people aside, and that is about half of the nearly 1 trillion, but we have this other 1 trillion being spent on people that could work. I think what we could do, again, recognizing that it is not in the next 12 months, because the economy is very bad, but in the long term we need to put work or on individualss for whom it will be in the best interest, and it would be in the best interest of the taxpayer. It would enable you, if you put in, to give better quality aid to the people that truly need it. Houston, texas, honora line for independents. Independents. For caller good morning. Even though we have been here for a while, what i have not heard is the conversation that makes up the ablebodied. People coming out of convictions, and Mental Health that private people from obtaining this type of work, and when this population cant secure employment, it is typically sporadic or infrequent can secure this employment, it is typically sporadic or infrequent, and he keeps people in a construct that is difficult to break out of, even if you increase the wage or the service divided. We are still miss provided. Were still missing a significant component of the population that falls into this definition, and several others that get even less. I appreciate ms. Sawhills comments, and mr. Rector, i am learning to be openminded. Guest well, i guest could i begin, if you do not mind . Your comment is exactly right. We have not talked about this. We have many to many people that employer simply do not want. Maybe they have Mental Health problems, very poor education. If you are a High School Dropout these days, your chances of getting a job are just very, very poor, especially if you are young. So, we have not done a very good job in this country of preparing our young people to be employable, selfsufficient. A lot of these programs we have been talking about, although they could be improved, and as i said, i agree we need to require work for a lot of the benefits we provide, many of these other programs are about helping a child by giving them a preschool experience. They are about increasing Educational Resources in schools and poor neighborhoods. They are about improving health care. They are about improving nutrition for mothers with infants and very young children. They are about helping low income kids that have the ability to go to college, but not the resources to get to college, to get some post secondary training, which you need in todays economy. You are exactly right. We are not talked enough about what is happening to our economy. We have not talking about what is happening to our economy, requiring a level of skill to Many Americans simply do not have. I do not think a lot of the programs we have right now are as wellcrafted as they could be to improve peoples longterm employability. Lets be clear that that is what we need to do because if we do not, over the long term you will have more people dependent on those that have jobs. Host Robert Rector, quick response. Guest individuals talking about these ablebodied without food stamp on the program, there are about 4 million of them, and people say it must be because of the recession, but even before the recession. You say they cannot get jobs, there is nothing they can do how do we know that . One way to find out is to simply say a few years from now, as the economy improves, each of those individuals, in exchange for the required too be come down to the office maybe half of the day each week to do some job preparation work, help on their resume, supervised job search, and if the individual shows up then you know you hav