Programs available to children and their parents. Welcome to black irookings. Along with richard reeves, the gentleman to my right, and i codirect the center here called the center on children and families which were extremely pleased to do. And 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 be concerned about the childrens allowance, the idea of giving a guaranteed cash benefit to families. And 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. The estimates vary greatly. But it is a lot of money to raise children. And theyre the ffew future. Without kids we wouldnt have a future. The second is an issue of debate. Maybe well have some today about that. And that is since welfare reform in 96 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 and so forth. So theres 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 the participants, both the speakers and the reak tants. So the goal is to make sure that all American Families have a cash new york, not just low income families. But all families. Well take about this later im pretty sure. Very good modelling shows that even if you finance by ending the Child Tax Credit and the 4,000 child exemption that there are no lewers. Everyone would still have more than they have now especially if the benefit is set 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. Jane is this will take three minutes to tell you her title. Centennial proges sore of social work for the prevention of childrens and youth problems at columbia. Pretty good, huh . Good thing i had it written down. And i think its 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. Truly amazing with is spectacular career. When she finishes well turn it over to richard and panel one. Theyll talk about the context. Richard will share the panel and introduce the speakers at the appropriate time. Then were going to present two plajs for what a child wants, how much it might cost and hopefully well Say Something about offsetting the cost of these plans. And aei, a resident scholar there are chair the panel. And then were going to conclude the event with two keynote talks, one by robert door of aei whom ill introduce at the appropriate time and the other k by rosa who will be introduced by Jared Bernstein and then well have an opportunity for the audience to ask questions for all of the panelists, the speakers and then after the last keynote speak well journ and have some adult beverages and snacks for people who can stay around for a little while. With that, jane. Thank you, ron. So its my pleasure to join ron in welcoming all of you here today. We both want to thank the people who supported this conference today. That would be the three poverty pernts, wisconsin, michigan and columbia and the neck foundation. And i hope i havent forgotten anybody in terms of funders. It looks like i havent. I also want to thank ron and his staff here at brookings for being such good hosts. Theyre tremendous to work with 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. 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 h. E. W. And organized by our colleagues at social work, evelyn burns and al kann. So were following up on that earlier conference. Already back then in 1967 many of our countries has a universal child allowance. And over the ensuing 50 years, universal child allowances have. Become a court element of a modern safety net and one that helped substantially to help reduce the Child Poverty. Austria, denmark, finland, germany, luxeningburg, never lands, norway, sweden and the uk have a universal or near universal child allowance. Providing a cash benefit to all families with children regardless of Family Income or employment, typically paid monthly, these universal child allowances help protect children from shocks and 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 56 0 5600 per year np in canada up to 6400 per child under age 6 and up to 5400 for a School Age Child age 6 to 17 depending on your Family Income. We know from the uk that expansions of their child allowance and Child Tax Credits in the late 1990s and earlier 2000s helped cut Child Poverty in half if measured on a poverty as we do in the United States. The recent canadian reforms are set to do the same. The cut Child Poverty in half. Its important to note that these allowance amounts are are in addition to the universal health care and the low cost high Quality Childcare and preschool that these countries provide. Theyre intended to help cover the cost of other necessities for children. Educational goods like books and toys, as well as material goods, 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 the 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. Today were showcasing two particularly prominent proposals but there are also others. This seems like an ideal time to come together and talk about the case for a universal child allowance, hear about two current proposals and engage in a discussion of the feasibility, costs and benefits. So thank you all for joining us and lets go into the first session. Thank you, jane. As ron says im the codirector of the center on children and families. Id like to add my welcome to all of you in the room and also those of you who are joining us on the live web stream. People who werent able to make it or watching around the country. Youre almost as nearly welcome as the people who are physically in the room. Those on social media, if youre going to tweet, use the hashtag child allowance to draw more attention to the event. Its obvious from now that im from the uk which jane mentioned and 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 by making it not universal for high rate taxpayers as an attempt to save money and shortly after that i left and came to the u. S. Im not suggesting causality but i am just reporting the facts. We have two presentations and two panelists. Youre going to first hear from kathy edin who is sitting two to my right as you look. She is the bloomberg distinguished professor at johns hopkins. Seems to write a book every year. One living on almost nothing in america. Shes going to open her proceedings with a presentation on the problems with the u. S. Safety net. After that were going to hear from bonnie mcloyd who is a clee jat professor of psychology at the university of chicago. These job titles are getting longer for everybody. Shes going to present on why Money Matters. I should have mentioned that shes an associate editor of american sigh koolgs. On your far left is executive director olivia golden, a former fellow of the institute, eight years in the federal government as the children and Family Services at the u. S. Department of health and human services. Last an on the far right as you look at the stage, this is purely a physical description, not a political one, ramesh ponnuru. Bloomberg panel. A visiting fellow at the American Enterprise institute. With no further adieu, im going to hand things over to kathy with her presentation. Kathy edin. 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 of the beltway and i ask 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 extension of the earned tax credit, Health Insurance for poor children, s. N. A. P. , the Food Stamp Program expanded of course by bush, ii, 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. I want to point out that i wrote a book about this with others. So i do write optimistic books. Its called its not like im poor. But in that book we chronicle a remarkable success of the 90 reforms, the 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 the book in a way that virtually consecrated these hard pressed working parents as citizens. So i first sort of caught wind of how profound this change had been when field work took me to the east boston. I was following around the recipient to figure out how they spent the money. I ended up in east boston. Stumbled upon an old building encrusted with 100 years of soot, wire mesh over the windows. Both brass letters and carved into the facade of the building were the woods overseers of the public welfare. To me this was such a powerful symbol of the stigma and shamed that 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 down bennington street and arrived at the local h and r block where of course about 70 of eitc claimants fill out their tax returns. Standing with with my colleaguicolleague i s, people would come out after giving h and 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 Adviser tells me i shouldnt be, you know, 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 eitc, we also made it easier for children of working parts to stay on medicaid and we made it easier for them to get on s. N. A. P. One of the legacies of the working poor is that of welfare reform is that 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 like talking about that more. But let me start by saying something about the literature. Laura and i have just reviewed all of the literature on welfare reform over the last 20 years for the annual review and it amazing how good it looked at the beginning. Right . Lots of researches including myself are looking at welfare reform in the 90s. Two things were happening that made it optimistic. Welfare rolls were falling, dependency was decreasing and Labor Force Attachment was increasing. Now, somehow after 2000 researches lost interest in welfare reform expect for a few notable exceptions. We failed to notice that after the late 1990s we no longer saw this criss cross of trends, that instead two things were going in the same direction. Welfare rolls continued to fall and so did labor force participati 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 dinism. First, we ended the entitlement. Second, we gave it to states as 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 and im going to use a strong term here purposefully really almost an opiate for the states. An ir resistible flexible fundig stream to use the citizens term. I call it a slush fund because i like to call a spade a spade. But, you know, when governors wanted to give goodies away, they couldnt afford like michigans scholarship program, there was the block grant. When states found themselves needing to fill budget holes this happened i believe just last year in South Carolina with expenditures on child welfare. There was tannive. And states governors could also look good by giving more help, sort of piling on to this help for those noble working poor. And in this end what weve seen is a virtual collapse of the n tannif program. In 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 1990s when welfare reform was looking so good. Theres now a rising literature on the fis suring of the workforce. In and out of the labor market now rather than stably either in or either out. So lets look at a few pictures. This is the decline in the tannive caseload among eligibles. As you can see its quite stark. But what i want to point out, in our field work you may know that luke and i wrote a book last year called two dollars a day, the rise of the number of americans living on virtually nothing in america and this was both an exercise of numbers and ef nothing fi. But we were following people over 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 tannives door. Tannive was dead in the imaginations of the poor. Heres how states are spending their tanf dollars. What we see is a die version 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 forgovern governors to give goodies. So theres less to the poorest, right. This is really is store of of welfare reform. Less to the poorest. More toe what my colleague robert calls the shallow poor and to the near poor. So in some weve seen a reconfiguring of a safety net. And laura and i in our and review piece argue that this is a redrawing of the line of deserve edness 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 and time estimates. These are from the cps. The reason we use the cps is because you can correct at least somewhat for underreporting. You may rale in the original we reported a doubling in poverty. Here you see an increase of three times. Now if we limit or estimates just to single mothers, those most likely to be affected by welfare reform, we see a much larger increase from 900,000 to 90,000 to 700,000 in 2012. If you dont believe surveyings we can turn to s. N. A. P. Data. These are the number of s. N. A. P. House holds reporting they have literally zero income when they apply for s. N. A. P. Or go back for recertification. I will Say Something about this chart. When we plot this against our original estimates of the income and program participation, there is an eerie correspondence between this line and our estimates, especially at the end of the series. When what you see from the Food Stamp Program is much more dire than what our estimates indicate. So what could be going on there. And i showed that slide in an audience where herb and waldfogel were and they immediately said thats got to be child homelessness. Since 2004 states have been required, schools have been required to report on the number of students that are either homeless or unstably housed. And we see that when states were kind of more or less reliably reporting there has been a huge well come back to this in a minute. So does it matter . Does it matter that the cash safety net has all by collapsed in many of our states . My friend and former, i think former student but maybe didnt quite overlap says, look at all of this medicaid. Right . Robert rector said well the poor have cell phones. Now Ray Mccormack from 2 a day actually has medicaid but it doesnt pay for many of her medications. And she has a cell phone. I hear from her almost every day. How do we think about that given the fact that she had no heat this winter. How do we think about that when we consider the fact that her lights and her water were routinely cut off. Her daughters turned 6 five days before christmas. Ray had no money for a cake nor did she get any christmas or birthday presents from her family. How do we think of these two things together. And i argue that its actually important to do that. I think these are food questions to be asking. I put it to you that we cannot adjudicate these claims unless we turn to direct measures of wellbeing like student homelessness. Others that might be important are low birth weight, out of home placements and Food Security and so on. But when luke and i looked into the data, we used state by years effects. I had to practice that even more than i had to practice my title. We found that for every hundred case decline in the tanf caseload within a state we saw 16 more k