Welcome to brookings. Richard reeves, the gentlemen to my right not politically, but to my right. And i codirect a center here called the center on children and families which we are extremely pleased to do. Were pleased to be holding this event, as well, about an old policy idea, which is often called the childrens allowance, a species of guaranteed annual income with some new twists. Why would we be concerned about a childrens allowance, the idea of giving a guaranteed cash benefit to families. I think there are a lot of reasons but i think two are predominant. One has always been a good reason to do it and that is it costs a lot of money to raise a child. At least a quarter of a million dollars, estimates vary greatly. Wealthy families spend more and so forth. But it is a lot of money to raise children. And they are the future of society so it makes sense that we would subsidize families to try to compensate them for the money that they have to spend for children, because would the kids we wouldnt have a future. Second reason more recent in origin and an issue of some debate maybe well have some today about that and that is that since welfare reform in 9, there has been an accumulation of especially single women but people at the bottom of the income scale who do not have any cash benefit at all. And these families are extremely poor, deep poverty has risen, and so forth. So there is a real concern that we need a way to get money to that group of families. Of course these are all laid out in the papers and presumably mentioned by various of participants, both the speakers and reactants. The goal of the american people, make sure all American Families have a cash income, not just lowincome families, but all families. By the way, well talk about this later, im pretty sure, but very good modeling shows that even if you finance it by ending the Child Tax Credit and the 4,000 child exemption, that theres still virtually no losers, that everyone would still have more than they have now, especially if the benefit were set at around 250 a month. So heres our plan for the event. As soon as i get through talking, jane will come up and speak for an hour or so, maybe. And it will all be very important so take notes rapidly. Jane is the this will take three minutes to tell you her title. Compton Foundation Centennial professor of social work for the prevention of childrens and youth problems at colombia. Pretty good, huh . It is a good thing i had it written down. Jane cant even say it yet without reading it. And i think it is safe to say, for those of you who follow this world, that jane is one of the biggest stars in the world of social policy. She heads a truly amazing and spectacular group. When shes done, well leave and turn it over to richard in panel one and theyll talk about the context of some of the issues i discussed and some other things as well. Richard will chair the panel and introduce the speakers at the appropriate time. Then we are going to present two actual plans for what a child wants would actually look like and how much it might cost, and hopefully well even Say Something, reactants will, will offsetting costs of these plans. And a resident scholar from aei will chair that panel and introduce the panelists at the appropriate time. Then we will conclude the event with two keynote talks, one by robert door of aei whom ill introduce at the appropriate time, and the other one rosa dilaro who will be introduced by Jared Bernstein. And then well have opportunity for the audience to ask questions for all the panelists and for both the speakers and reactants. And then after that last keynote speech we will adjourn and have some adult beverages and snacks for people who can santa fe around for a while. So with that, jane. Thank you, ron. So, its my pleasure to join ron in welcoming all of you here to. I know we both want to thank the people who supported this conference today. So that would be the three poverty centers wisconsin, michigan and columbia. And also the a e ekc center. Ron has been a terrific host in organizing this conference. So this comes at an opportune time. We first began talking about this event a few years ago when we realized that 2017 would be the 50th anniversary of the first conference on a universal child allowance. Now some of you may not have been here for that first conference 50 years ago, but there was such a conference. It was held at hew, and it was organized by our former colleagues at Columbia School of social work, evelyn burns who was very active in the founding of social security, and al khan. So were following up on that earlier conference. Already back then in 1967, many of our peer countries had a universal child allowance. And over the ensuing 50 years, universal child allowances have become a core element of a modern safety net and one that helps substantially to reduce the risk of Child Poverty. Countries as varied as austria, canada, denmark, finland, france, germ in i, ireland, luxen bouluxe lux luxenbourg, norway and the uk all have child family allowances. Typically paid monthly these universal child allowances provide a cash floor that helps protect children from shocksnd a fluctuations in their parents employment or income. The level of the allowance, the amount varies by country. In germany and belgium, the benefit for two children is about 5,600 per year. In ireland, it is about 4,000. In the netherlands, it is about 2,400. In canada, following recent reforms, families may now receive up to 6,400 per child under age 6, and up to 5,400 for a schoolage child age 6 to 17, depending on your Family Income. We know from the uk that expansions of their child allowance and their Child Tax Credits in the late 1990s and early 2000s helped cut poverty in half as measured on an absolute poverty line as we do in the United States. The recent canadian reforms are projected to do the same, to also cut Child Poverty in half. It is important to note that these allowance amounts are in addition to the universal health care and the lowcost highquality child care and preschool that these countries provide. So they are intended to help cover the costs of other necessities for children. Educational goods, like books and toys, as well as material goods like housing, food, clothing, and even diapers. So when we first started talking about todays conference a few years ago, we thought we would be introducing or maybe reintroducing the idea of a universal child allowance to u. S. Policymakers, especially those who werent around 50 years ago for that first conference. But over the past few years, actually the idea of a universal child allowance has been garnering quite a bit of interest and attention in washington and elsewhere in the u. S. , and from several parts of the political spectrum. So today were going to be showcasing two particularly prominent proposals, but there are also others. So this seems like an ideal time to come together and talk about the case for a universal child allowance and hear about two current proposals and engage in a discussion of the feasibility in costs and benefits. So thank you all for joining us and lets go into the first session. Thank you, jane. Thank you, ron. As ron said, i am codirector of the center or children and families. Id like to add my welcome to you will of you in the room but also those of you who are joining us on the live web stream. Some people are unable to make it or watching from around the country. I just want you to know if youre watching online that you are almost as welcome as the people whos come. Very nearly as welcome as the people who are physically in the room. Also those who are on social media, if youre going to tweet, please use the childallowance to draw more attention to the event. Its probably obvious by now that im from the uk, which jane just mentioned. In fact with three children who were being raised in the uk had a universal child benefit for all three of those children. I was then part of the Coalition Government that removed that universal child benefit. They were making it not universal for highrate taxpayers as part of an attempt to save money. Shortly after that i left and came to the u. S. Im not suggesting causality, but i am just reporting the facts. Im going to introduce our whole panel. I have two presentations and two panelists. Youre going to first hear from kathy eden, sitting two to my right, as you look. She is the bloomberg distinguished professor in the department of sociology at johns hopkins. Seems to write a book roughly once a year. The last two are coming of age in the other america and 2 a day on living on almost nothing in america. Shes got open proceedings on her presentation on problems with the u. S. Safety net. Then well hear from bonnie mcloud, collegiate professor of psyche zbi at the university of michigan. One note by the way, these job titles are getting longer for everybody. Bonnies going to present on why Money Matters. And i should have mentioned that shes also an associate editor of american psychologist. On your far left is olivia golden, former fellow of the urban institute and served for eight years in the federal government as commissioner for children, youth and families and as assistant secretary for children and families at the u. S. Department of health and human services. Last on the far right of the stage, Senior Editor for national review, columnist at bloomberg thats two mentions of bloomberg for one panel. So hes definitely getting his moneys worth. A visiting fellow at the American Enterprise institute and senior fellow at the National Enterprise institute. Without further ado, ill hand things over to kathy eden. So the 20th anniversary of welfare reform has drawn renewed attention to this landmark piece of legislation passed just a little over 20 years ago. And the question thats come up over and over again is, did it succeed or fail . So, i live in baltimore and i do so so that im not actually inside 69 beof thewa beltway an still think straight. But ive heard this is a city of simple answers so im going to resist the temptation to give one. If by welfare reform we include the broad changes to the safety net we saw in the 1990s and into the 2000s, the expansion of the earned income tax credit, the Child Tax Credit, Health Insurance for poor children called schip, snap, our Food Stamp Program expanded of course by bush 2, then i think the answer to the question of whether welfare reform succeeded or failed must be both. So, lets talk about the success side of the ledger. Ill want to point out that i wrote a book about this, called its not like im poor. In that book we chronicle a remarkable success of the 90s reforms, expansion of the eitc that made good on the promise that if you work, you shouldnt be poor. This is a remarkable achievement, and we managed to do it this is really the theme of our book in a way that virtually consecrated these hardpressed working parents as citizens. So i first sort of caught wind of how profound this change had been when real work took me to east boston. I was following around eitc recipients to see how they spent the money. Ended up in east boston. I just stumbled upon this old dikenzian building, kind of encrusted with 100 years of soot, wire mesh over the windows. Both brass letters and carved in to the facade of the building were the words overseers of the public welfare. To me this was such a powerful symbol of the stigma and shame that it accompanied that program. It was almost as if you had to trade away your citizenship to get relief. So imagine my shock when i then went on bennington street and arrived at the local h r block where of course about 70 of eitc claimants fill out the tax reforms and actually collect their tax. And standing there with my colleagues wearing sandwich boards to get them to participate in our study, people would come out after giving h r block 200 to file their taxes saying things like, ive got people. Or, i feel like a real american. Even, i feel proud to be a taxpayer. Now my Financial Advisor tells me i shouldnt be paying as many taxes as i am. So ive never really felt proud to be a taxpayer. But these testaments of citizenships were just unexpected and really remarkable in our work. And we didnt just expand the eidc. We also made it easier for children of working parents to stay on medicaid and we made it easier for them to get on s. N. A. P. I think we could argue that one of the legacies of welfare reform is the working poor are, at least in terms of money, arguably better off than at any time in american history, as long as they work full time, full year. Okay. Thats enough optimism. What about the failure part . Of course i liked talking about that more, but let me start by saying something about the literature. Laura talked about it, just reviewed all of the literature on welfare reform over the last 20 years for the annual review. It is amazing how good it looked in the beginning. Lots of researchers, including myself, were looking at welfare reform in the 90s. Two things were happening that made us really optimistic. Welfare rolls were falling, dependency was decreasing, and Labor Force Attachment was increasing. Now somehow after 2000, researchers lost interest in welfare reform except for a few notable exceptions. And so we failed to notice that after the late 1990s, we no longer saw this crisscross of trends, but instead two things were going in the same direction welfare rolls continued to fall, and so did labor force participation. So heres what we didnt understand about welfare reform. First, it was not a stroke of a pen. Instead, it was a dynamic force. Now, there are two features that led to that dynamism. First, we ended the entitlement. Second, we gave it to states in the form of a block grant with little oversight. Now we all like to think of states as laboratories of democracy. Myself included. Innovation can be very good. But instead, it became im going to use a strong term here purposely really almost an opiate for the states, an irresistible Flexible Funding stream, to use peter, the citizens term, i call it a slush fund. Because i like to call a spade a spade. But when governors wanted to give goodies away they couldnt afford, like michigans scholarship program, there was the tannif block grant. When states found themselves needing to fill budget holes, just last year in South Carolina with expenditures on welfare, there was tanf. And states governors could also look good by getting more help, sort of piling on to this help for those noble working poor. And in the end what weve seen is a virtual collapse of the program in several states, in virtually every state of the nation it is only a shadow of its former self and weve essentially seen this rising inequality among the poor. The second thing we didnt understand is that the 90s economy the late 90s economy wouldnt last forever. It remains true that todays bad jobs are just much, much worse than the bad jobs of the late 9 1990s when welfare reform was looking so good. There is now a rising literature on the fissuring of the workplace which has led to worse rning income volatility among the poor who are mostly in and out of the labor market now rather than stabling, either in or either out. So lets look at a few pictures. This is the decline in the caseload among eligibles. As you can see, it is quite dark. I want to point out, in our field work, lou schafer wrote a book called 2 a day, the rise of the number of americans living on virtually nothing in america. This was both an exercise in numbers and in ethnography. But as we followed actual people over many months and years in this situation, we were struck by the fact that when hard times came, in most cases it didnt even occur to people to knock at tanfs door. It was dead in the imagination of the nations poor. What weve seen in 2014 is this diversion by states, very little expended for work related activities. And the largest single category of course for other areas, oftentimes to fill budget holes or for governors to give away goodies. So theres less to the poorest, right . This is really the story of welfare reform. Less to the poorest. More to what my colleague Robert Moffitt calls the shallow poor. And to the near poor. So in some weve seen reconfiguring of a safety net. And laura and i in our annual review piece argue this is really a redrawing of the line of deservedness with work as the new litmus test for citizenship. Now this has led to harsh consequences among the poor. We see the rise in extreme poverty. These are figures from the cps. You know our original estimates were point in time estimates. These are from the cps. Reason we use the cps is because you can correct at least somewhat for underreporting. You may recall in our original estimates we reported roughly a doubling in 2 a day poverty. Here you see among all families with children an increase of about three times. Now if we limit our estimates just to single mothers, we see a large increase from 900,000 to 7 90,000 to 700,000 in 2012. If you dont believe surveys, we can turn to s. 2346n. A. P. Data. These households have literally zero income when they apply for s. N. A. P. Or go back for recertification. Now, i will Say Something about this chart. When we plot this against our original estimates from the survey of income and program participation, there is an eerie correspondence between in line and our estimates except at the end of the series. When what you see from the Food Stamp Program is much more dire than what our estimates indicate. What could be going on there . I shoewed that slide in an audience where they said, thats immediately got to be child homelessness. So indeed, since about 2004, states have been required, schools have been required to report on the number of students that are either homeless or unstably housed. We see that when states were kind of more or less reliable in reporting, theres been a huge income. Well come back to this in a minute. So, does it matter . Does it matter that the cash safety net has all but collapsed in many of our states . My friend and former i think former student but maybe didnt quite overlap, says look at all this medicaid. Right . Robert said, well, the poor have cell phones. Now one of the participants from 2004 has medicaid. And she has a cell phone. I hear f