So this is panel two. Thank you so much for coming. Take it away. Thank you ron and thanks to all of you for being here. My name is a. Im in policy studies at the American Enterprise institute. I work in tax policy labor markets. One of the areas ive recently been focusing on is paid family leave. As im listening to the conversation i think you know generally talking about paid leave and child care and how we reform the existing system in the u. S. Is very important to the conversation that we have here. Ive also written about the system of child care, the Child Tax Credit, the you know, the system of tax credits that we have and how much of it is queued toward people at the top. How people with the benefits doesnt go to the people with the lower income. This is part of a larger discussion how do we reform child care how to we make it more accessible to people at the bottom. The first panel was more about why we need these policies. Why are we even talking about universal child allowance . And we heard from kathy about how weve seen a trend in a sense welfare reform, the nonworking force being left out of the system. And weve heard from other panelists in the first if the first panel about how we can which we care about the health of a child, why that matters, for mobility and other reasons. And in this panel we are going to start off with the discussion of how do we do in . We have two presenters. We have two different proposals for universal child allowance. So chris who is the core director of the center on poverty and social policy will begin the discussion. He will present for 15 minutes thp pen then turn over to Samuel Hammond who is at the scan lynn center also presents his proposal about 15 minutes then we have a discussion with melissa who is Vice President poverty to proermts program tp Scott Winship project directorer at the joint Economic Committee and then maria who is plofser of university of wisconsin. Lets begin with chris. Thank you. Does that do anything . Is there we go. Okay. Okay. Thats a good idea. There we go. All right. Sorry. So i would acknowledge my coauthors but i only have 15 minutes. So im not going to do that. But im you would think sort of adding an additional author to a paper would decrease the totals amount of effort that goes into the content. But it turns out that that that equation is not quite accurate. But i want to acknowledge a couple of people one is Luke Schaeffer the lead author on this paper i shamelessly stole almost all of his slides im presenting today. Then also Jane Waldfogel who when you have ten coauthors getting them all on the phone, getting them to all agree on something is herk ewe lean task and jane was the best that anybody could be. Were talking about our plan to provide a universal child allowance to reduce poverty in income and instability among children in the u. S. I want to acknowledge this briefly. Some of the funders. The centerry Foundation Supported a preliminary version of some of the analyses irp rrussell sage abet cetera. But all the flaws are ours. So Child Poverty in the u. S. Sort of remains stubbornly high. Right. So some much our work at columbia and elsewhere has shone some of the progress we made in fighting Child Poverty in the United States over. Regardless how you measure it we still have especiallily high levels in the United States. And some of the tp tax efrpgs l exemption tendsing to to go to families higher up in the Income Distribution rather than lower down. And thats become a big problem. The safety net has panned. But it obviously and that can supplement incomes quite significantly but it leaves out some of the most vulnerable families we argued could reduce longterm longterm outcomes. Just to skip ahead the u. S. As i said before, i mean over the past 50 continues to be a laggard by International Comparisons in terms of the level of Child Poverty that we that we tolerate. After this tanf and unicef we looked at the Great Recession and that is eye that would constitute a major. Break threw. And also might have a larger effect in reducing Child Poverty in our country. Its a nonrefundable child credit will be established it will be impossible to come back. Probably. That was over 25 years ago. If theres any sort of short summary from my proposals to prove bob green stein wrong that refund ability is possible and achievable and we smunt resign ourselves because all the points that he makes in this memo are as true today as they were in 1992. Im going to just sort of skim over the information because its been covered already. But the bottom of this bar graph is the u. S. , the Child Poverty rate compared to other countries. Tsz enormously different. As has been said what mostly explains this especiallily the anglo countries, canada, uk and australia is child credit and refundable tax credits. You know sints just looking across time it hasnt really changes in been more or less fluctuating with the business cycle, so again just confirming that everything that was said in the memo to bill clinton in 92 is as true today as when it was written. So about the proposal lets make the Child Tax Credit refundable and we should probably double it for younger children. Now the just previous presenters said this would be expense oef but i dont think its that expensive when you look at the net cost to be 9 billion that is order on the magnitude of ivanka trumps child deduction for rich nannies about the same amount of money she proposed. And its paid for by eliminating eliminating the dependent exemption you could pick anything like was said you could cut the military, whatever id choose to go with School Nutrition programs in part because i think it signals if we did this that were serious about signaling parental responsibility and choice. And a big part of my motivation coming comes from this photo which i put together with on the orders of my intern. What you see is public assistance divided by adults versus children. And and on the left i think the most notable thing is how much assistance that goes to adults comes in in form of either cash or medical reimbursement. Over half whereas when you look at spending on children it is like a rain bow. Its been divided up into literally near almost 100 separate programs for every little tiny niche think that you could imagine for kids. And part of what we argue in our paper is that children dont really have an advocate. They dont have sort of the aarp for kids. They have third parties, adults who argue on their behalf. And also third parties in the sense of businesses that defend their own interests while supporting kids interests incidentally. So you know, within this within this second column School Nutrition programs youll see in brackets is five. That includes School Lunch Programs includes breakfast programs also includes programs called special milk. And you know what makes the program so special . Well its the millions of dollars that the dollars that the Dairy Farmers of america spend lobbying to protect milk programs not on behalf of kids but on behalf of payments that go to the suppliers for these programs. The other reasons, im just going to run through quickly, number one, its effective. Im just going to pull up two studies that i find the most compelling for why cash is so effective. The first is from a major paper on the benefits of longterm tax credits in the u. S. What he remarkably finds is that a dollar of spending on the tax credit leads to more of a dollar of earnings increase in present value terms. Its a free lunch. You can spend a dollar and get more and a dollar in turn. The reason it shouldnt be true is because parents dont get the full benefit of their investment. If parents could go to a bank and say give me a loan or buy some equity, you could spend a dollar and i could give you fair market return. Obviously we cant do that so maybe thats an alternative to this proposal. But in the meantime, without Child Tax Credit being fully unrefundable, we are not investing in our children. The second study tried to isolate the health impact. It uses a measure called quality adjusted life years which is a standard way of measuring Health Impacts across different kinds of intervention to try to make a standardized metric. It finds that a dollar spent on the eitc is 8 times more effective as a Health Intervention than spending on medicaid. We consider that spending on medicaid to be Cost Effective so the fact that were not massively spending more on Child Tax Credits suggests that were systematically underinvested on cashbased forms of the systems. My paper does a deep dive on the canadian system which im most familiar with. The studies there looked at first of all, they found that it was actually effective at reducing maternal depression, improving child health outcomes, and they wanted to understand why. They did this Expenditure Survey and found that parents were increasing their spending on things that they didnt expect, not just direct inputs like Educational Resources and Health Resources but also what are sometimes called home stability items, just General Household items that increase the stability of the household and reduce stress, even leading to reductions in tobacco and alcohol consumption. That goes to some of the Psychological Research that shows that stress from a shortage of income is a big determinant for detrimental noncognitive developments in children down the road. The last point is its fair. We had on the stage people that represent the left, the center and the right of center. But i come at this sort of like from a libertarian perspective that says the social engineering that the right does and the social engineering that the left does, neither are correct, that we should leave it to parents. Thats my strongest motivation for supporting expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Its basically neutral to your way of life. We had this debate in canada where i hail and the one party was proposing that we have a universal daycare program. It was very controversial, especially among conservative families that favored athome care, stay at home mothers and so on. So the conservative party at the time introduced the child benefits because they tried to split the defense and say lets give cash and that opens up the choice to the parents whether they want to use it to subsidize or compensate athome care versus external daycare, and it actually worked out extremely well. The alternative approach was taken in the provence of quebec. They massively subsidized child care and over the last 20 years where we looked at this, number one, it did not actually increase the amount of child care that was taking place, it just displaced informal child care by pulling kids into the formal sector. And number two, there was pretty disturbing evidence that it led to noncognitive decline, more aggressiveness in children. So i think a big piece of why cash matters is when you lock yourself into service delivery, you can end up going down a wrong path thats very difficult to get out of. This is where i kind of tick off people on the right. So what about work . We heard that we should focus on labor Market Participation and labor market strength. Well, i agree, and thats why i did a deep dive on this topic too, and its just not the case that a 2,000 unconditional tax credit is going to significantly reduce work. What you see here is a before and after of the introduction of whats called the universal child care credit or child care benefit in canada, which is what it used to be called. The cohort where it actually reduces work is the low educational cohort. So before and after the Child Tax Credit it goes from 60 to 57 for the low Education Group in young children, and thats sort of what you would expect. The choice to use an external provider for care or to stay at home as a stay at home mom or dad, it depends on your educational level and opportunity cost. If you can earn more outside the house, youll do that. But if youre spending your entire paycheck on an athome nanny or daycare, it doesnt quite make sense to do that. The neutrality of money accommodates the market price signals that you wouldnt be able to derive sort of just in the abstract from these different cohorts. This really quickly is just looking at the different Labor Force Participation between legally married and single mothers. I think the most notable thing is that single mothers have a harder time after a newborn reentering the labor force partly because theyre on their own and once again cash is able to split this difference in a way that an in kind benefit cant because one size fits all. This is from an important paper called the differential impact of universal child benefits on labor supply. It found that married parents use subsidized stay at home mother on the margin, whereas single mothers use to go and access external services. So even though married mothers reduced their labor force by two percentage points, single mothers increased their Labor Force Participation by 1. 4 percentage points. Either way, the sky is not falling in these scenarios, and if you really value choice and are opposed to social engineering, whatever form it takes, a point drop in Labor Force Participation based on the choice of mothers is not something to be terrified about. This is just demonstrating that it is single mothers who singlemother families who have the highest poverty rates. I just want to finish on a note for the direction of the conservative movement and by extension of the Libertarian Movement which im a part of. Even though tanif has shrunk in size in absolute terms, it looms as large in the consciousness of d. C. Policy debates as it ever has, and everything is sort of talked about in those terms. Even todays discussion was framed around welfare reform, which at the time was a debate about work requirements, work incentives. Going forward, i think theres a lot of discussion about this right now about where the conservative movement should go is to maybe look at, weve lost the battle on gay marriage but what about single mothers or traditional families. This is a policy that can bridge both the needs and desires of the progressives to care for the most needy and the desires of the conservatives to be neutral with respect to traditional families. Theres my information, and feel free to reach out. [ applause ] now to melissa for a quick comment. I want to thank both chris and fam for interesting presentations. Also a child allowance proposal in 2015 which is much closer to the Columbia University one and ill go through quickly why i think thats the right approach. I have both positive and negative feedback on fams and then just some general thoughts about the political moment that were in and why this idea is an idea whose time has come. In terms of the Columbia University proposal, i think its incredibly forward thinking and hits all the right notes because you have something that is available monthly. Child expenses dont wait until tax time. Diapers dont wait until tax time. Formula doesnt wait until tax time. So the idea of having a monthly allowance i think is really important. The research on economic mobility and the longterm outcomes is sort of striking the right amount at the right age group. Caps proposals had a young child credit that was fully refundable. We kept the base as 1,000 fully refundable and eliminated the earnings threshold so everybody would get it but we kept it so that there was a pot of money for big purchases or to facilitate savings at tax time and added on a young child tax that was available in monthly installments for those day to day costs, diapers and car seats and cribs and all the things you need when your kids are young. I think that the young Child Tax Credit concept is also important because theres a big mismatch between parents peak earning years and the age of a quarter century mismatch. So the exact time that you in many cases need to take time off of work, whether its paid or unpaid leave, that you have a little less flexibility in your schedule because youre caring for young children. Youre already relatively early in your career or job so youre making less money. Its the exact time when the highest cost smack you. When youre in your early 50s youre in peak earning years and your children are likely to be older. There are other expenses but not necessarily at the same time. So very much in favor of the Columbia University proposal. It has a lot of similarities to some of the research that cap has put out there. Yay for full refundability, yay for Monthly Payments and yay for recognizing that a child allowance isnt going to have catastrophic Labor Force Participation effects. I dont know anybody who would not work because they were getting 2,000 or 3,000 a year to help raise kids when kids cost so much more than that. Those are helpful points and i think its helpful to spur these kinds of bipartisan discussions. The main area of concern i have with fams proposal is the pay fors. So the idea of taking away s