Beyond Welfare Reform: Next Steps for Combating Poverty in the U.S.

Transcript

RON HASKINS: Good morning. My name is Ron Haskins. I'm co-director of the Brookings Project Welfare Reform and Beyond with Belle Sawhill and Kent Weaver. I welcome our audience here this morning at Brookings to the third public event sponsored by the Welfare Reform and Beyond Project. I also welcome people who are joining us by Webcast.

Next year, Congress will reauthorize the sweeping 1996 Welfare Reform legislation. The primary goal of our Welfare Reform and Beyond project is to improve the quality of the reauthorization debate, especially by synthesizing and disseminating the results of research as they bear on the complex issues of welfare dependency, the working poor, poor fathers, child care, marriage and other issues that will comprise the reauthorization debate. One of the most important activities of our project is to improve the public debate; that is, debate not just by experts and those with a direct interest in welfare reform and welfare policy, but among citizens interested in public policy, especially as it affects the well-being of poor families and children. Hence, our entire summer issue of Brookings Review, which is available here today and also available on our Web Site, and today's program are devoted to the "Beyond" part of our Welfare Reform and Beyond title, namely the next steps in combating poverty in America.

We're all aware of the biblical injunction that, "poverty shall always be with us," but in his wisdom, God specified neither the number of people that will be in poverty, nor how long they will be in poverty. So many of us suffer from the assumption that public policy can be used to reduce poverty. We will see in a moment what our panelists have to say about the connection, if any, between public policy, especially welfare reform, and poverty. The next program in our series of public events will be held here at Brookings on June 13th at 9:00 and the issue will be child care, especially child care financing.

Here's a word for our Webcast audience: If you want to join the discussion, which will take place in about 15 minutes or 20 minutes, please e-mail your questions to yourview@brookings.edu— yourview@brookings.edu. We'll try to get to as many of your questions as possible.

Now a word to our audience. If you have a question, raise your hand. When the moderator recognizes you, wait until our assistants bring you a microphone. Then introduce yourself and your organization and ask your question. We strongly discourage long speeches. (Laughter.)

And now for the main event, I turn the program over to one of our nation's most perceptive and ubiquitous policy intellectuals, Belle Sawhill of Brookings Institution.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Thank you, Ron and let me add my welcome to yours. It's great to see so many people here today.

As Ron has suggested, what we really want to focus on today is not the debate about the welfare reform law that was passed in 1996 and the effects that it's having, although that may, of course, come up, but rather to have a somewhat broader, more wide ranging discussion of the basic issue of poverty in the United States, whether we think that we're doing everything we can to combat it, and if we should be doing something else, what should that something else be.

My own sense, by the way, is that there's been so much focus on the welfare reform law, both in Congress and the administration, in the foundation world, and in the research community itself as a result, that not enough attention is being given to sort of thinking about, well, where do we go from here. Let's suppose we were to agree that having reformed welfare, we like what we got, would we say, "That's the end of the story; we don't need to do much else"?

We've got a very distinguished set of panelists here today. I'm really pleased that they could all come. They bring very diverse backgrounds and set of voices to these issues. Their bios are in your magazine or your review copy that you got, so I'm not going to make any formal introductions. I have asked them to be very brief in their initial opening comments. That will enable us to have some dialogue or back and forth between the panelists and then hopefully to engage all of you and the audience watching on the Web hopefully as well.

Now, before turning to them, let me just remind us all of a few background facts for this discussion. We do have quite a number of people in the United States who are living in what is usually called poverty by the official government definition. Specifically, in 1999, the last year for which we have data, there were 32 million people who were poor. That was just under 12 percent of the population. The official poverty line, below which you have to fall to get counted in this group, for those of you who don't know already, is about $13,000 a year for a three person family, about $17,000 a year for a four person family. For a single individual living alone it's $8,500. I noticed when the Census Bureau released new data on households just this past week, they made the point that there are more and more people living as unrelated individuals in their own household. The poverty rate is the lowest it has been in 20 years. What we have now rivals what we had as a poverty rate in the late 1970s. That I think is the good news.

If you wanted to say what's the bad news, it would be that after two decades of economic growth, we still have as many people or as high a proportion of the population that's poor as we used to, despite the fact that the poverty lines themselves are not adjusted for the fact that the economy is now larger and we've had everybody's income rising over this period. There are all kinds of debates we could get into about whether the official measure of poverty is a good measure or a bad measure. I hope we can avoid, for the most part, those discussions today. I just wanted to put this out as a bit of background.

Now, the questions that I'm hoping that the panelists and all of you will want to address is first of all to what extent is this a concern? How much of a concern is it that we have this group of people with low income, because how much we're concerned about it will, of course, determine whether we want to do something about it. Secondly, what do we see as the causes of this large group of people stuck at the bottom of the income distribution? And thirdly, what, if anything, should we be doing about it that we aren't already doing?

So with those questions, I'm going to start out with Henry Aaron and ask him to make whatever comments he wants.

HENRY AARON: Thank you very much, Belle. I will try to be brief.

As to the question of concern, I believe we should be extremely concerned about the existence of this population. Cross-country comparisons indicate that the United States is a clear outlier, with a much larger proportion of its population in poverty than that of any other developed industrial country. But I think the fact that we are concerned and want to do something about it does not mean that we should go all squishy in thinking about the analysis of that problem.

Alan Blinder got it just right in the title of a book he wrote about a decade ago. The title of that book was "Hard Heads; Soft Heart." It's very important in thinking about this problem that we recognize the analytical difficulties and the tradeoffs that are involved. Why are people stuck at the bottom? I'm going to take a blunt position on this and say I don't care. What I care about is the consequences of people being stuck at the bottom and evidence on the interventions that might be effective in helping them to get out. Whether it's a legacy of bad historical experience, whether it's bad personal habits, whatever the explanation, I don't really think it's worth spending a great deal of time hashing out those reasons. The thing to focus on is what measures society can take to assist individuals in climbing the economic ladder.

Before Belle gave me these three questions, I had prepared some comments that I was going to go through, and with the tenacity of somebody who never wants to let anything that has been written go to waste, I am going now to return to that because it turns out the last part of what I wrote is relevant to this third question. (Laughter.) My answer about what we should do about it is that in the absence of any evidence of a race to the bottom by states in their policies, a behavior, which is conspicuously hard so far to find evidence of, and of greater evidence of hardship among those who have left the welfare rolls than is currently available, it seems to me that policy should sustain and expand the various measures that have done so much to make work pay. And this includes a whole host of legislative actions during the 1990s and before. These measures include the Earned Income Tax Credit that Congress has expanded at the federal level and that many states have supplemented at the state level. It includes the Food Stamp program that continues to be the bulwark of income support for low earners. It includes modest increases and then maintenance in the real value of the minimum wage. But it does not include, in my view, large increases in the minimum wage that could jeopardize the employment opportunities for people whose productivity isn't very high. It includes extension of health benefits to low earning workers through the Federal-State Child Health Assistance Program, Medicaid and other devices. And it includes the equitable provision of child care assistance to low earners, as well as to middle income families through the tax system.

What the policy menu does not include, in my opinion, is the abandonment of the principle that people are entitled to cash assistance for a limited period, but are required to give their best efforts to become self-sustaining. For the great majority of power, that means a job. For some it entails learning how to read and other basic skills. But the abundance of work done by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, summarized in the issue that Belle edited in a paper by Gordon Berlin, makes one thing clear, and that is that most people earn more over all the periods over which measurements have been done if welfare agencies encourage them first to look for work as soon as they apply for benefits, and more than if they divert them first into various kinds of educational programs.

It's not a result that brings joy to my heart, but the facts are pretty clear and the hardheaded part of us has to pay attention to the facts. We still don't know for sure what will happen if in this current system the nation encounters a really serious recession, and let's hope we don't find out. The fears of those of us who thought the Family Security Act went too far, and I admit I was one of them, could yet be realized, but that outcome looks less likely to me now than it did a few years ago. And even if some supplementary help is required, I don't think it will or should take the form of an indefinite entitlement to cash assistance. President Clinton and Congress did oversee the end of welfare as we know it. The whole thing may have gone a good deal faster and farther than President Clinton originally intended or even desired, but I think that that chapter in welfare history is closed.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Thank you, Henry, and I don't think you did exceed your time limit. Eloise?

ELOISE ANDERSON: I, like Henry, have prepared remarks, but I'm going to try to answer your first two before I go to my prepared remarks. Worried about who's left behind: When I look at the discussion on poverty, what I know from my years of working with the poor is that there has always been two kinds of poor—working and non-working poor. And since most of the social policy people have tended to follow the non-working poor, now that they have become the working poor we're all now suddenly interested in the working poor.

My view is please leave them alone; we've made enough mess with the non-working poor. What are the causes? I think they vary, and they vary depending on who you are and where you are and what your gender is. So I can't really talk about what the causes are but I think that two of the answers are marriage and educational and skill development, and I'm going to speak to marriage because that's, to me, where we have not wanted to travel. Marriage is important to children, and I think that my grandmother was right when she said to me a long time ago, "The most important thing you can ever do if you want to have children is be married and stay married." And I think that her philosophy still stands. What more do we need to know as a society in order to promote it?

It seems that because many who promote welfare reform or other social policies have been divorced, have had children out of the benefit of marriage, are quiet on the issue for fear of being called a hypocrite, or, if married, afraid of offending someone or have someone think one is an elitist in supporting and promoting the value of marriage for some poor women and men who have engaged in having children without marriage, or have decided that they are not happy with their spouse and want to move on. Marriage is an institution for children. It has great benefit for those who enter. Like most things in nature, in order to get humans to do what is good there are benefits, and for marriage it's good health, longevity and economy betterment. Marriage is a partnership that if pursued with commitment works to support children from conception to adulthood, and that's a long period of time, and I'm quite sure after being almost 60 myself and watching us change, Americans have a hard time with long periods of time. (Laughter.) And children take quite a long time and now that my kids are in their thirties it took even longer than I thought. (Laughter.)

The trend for women to have children without the benefit of marriage reduces men to being sperm donors, and the message sent to boy children should give us concern. I think what we tend to forget is that we are likely to have either a girl child or a boy child, and for some of us, because we're not men, we don't tend to recognize what boys need to grow up to be men. The way social programs are structured around mother and child, leaving out and avoiding the father gives great and large signals regarding society's views of fathers. What always particularly interested me was the program for WIC, Women, Infants and Children. Particularly low-income fathers are triggered by our societal messages here. Boy children are often confronted with the culture messages, "You are not needed or wanted." Marriage provides the first social setting where children can witness affection as opposed to sex, sex without the context of love, cooperation, civility, sacrifice, conflict and its resolution, compromise and reconciliation; and most of all unconditional love. The married family environment prepares a child for citizenship and adulthood better than any other social arrangement. The divorce rate and unmarried childbearing are both symptoms of a society where the adults are self-centered and selfish. Ours is a society that says we are child-oriented; however, I believe it's one where the adults want to be children.

We have children for what reasons? Having children seems to be about what children are going to do for us, the parent, and when children are here, it's still about the parents. In many of the discussions regarding fathers with children on welfare, the remarks and expectations are very negative. There seems to be a belief that the mothers are somewhat better than the fathers. They are mirrors, the mothers are mirror images of the fathers. Mothers on welfare or low-skilled workers by and large were not raped by the fathers of their children. They were willingly involved. If this guy was good enough to have a child with, then he should be good enough to marry. How to approach marriage? Straight up.

Questions you should be asking the mom and the dad: You are about to have a child or you have a child; have you thought about marriage. If the answer is no, why not? If the answer is yes, why aren't you? At this point, social advocacy of marriage should occur. People who are married and trained in the support of marriage should be utilized as the workers for unmarried couples. Do not put a person who does not like marriage, hasn't liked being married and hated her mate in front of a person who wants to get married. Wrong person. The advantages of marriage should be promoted. The problems for many young couples is that they have never seen marriage. They did not grow up in a married family, have no idea what it takes to make a marriage work, and at the first sign of conflict, boredom or financial issues they run.

Most marriages and family conflicts are neutral at best on the notion of marriage. When a family goes for help, there isn't an advocacy for marriage. There is a need for marriage advocacy when children are involved and violence is not an issue. The poor need marriage probably more than the middle class and the rich. Just like every issue regarding the poor, it is not in the best interest of the poor to have middle class values. As we spend too much, we do kind of ridiculous things because we have an abundance and the poor don't have them. It will be harder, if not impossible, to get out of poverty if the poor behave like the middle class. And it is for sure harder to get out of poverty alone.

The middle class should cease and desist from expounding lower expectations of the poor than they have for themselves. In fact, the expectations for the poor should be higher. This society cannot continue to have government stand in for the husband. The havoc it has exacted on the poor men is destructive to society as a whole. The foundation on which the society must rest is married, committed families and children they produce. A society can have a little deviation from marriage but not much. The societal understanding must be that unmarried and divorced parents are the deviation.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Thank you, Eloise. Bill Galston.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, let me whip through Belle Sawhill's three questions as quickly as possible. I think they are three excellent opening questions.

As to the first, should we be concerned and if so why, my answer is yes, absolutely, unequivocally, and I can think of at least four reasons. First of all, the promise of America is the promise of equal opportunity. And to the extent that poverty results from the denial of full equal opportunity, that's an affront to the American ideal.

Secondly, whatever we want to say about adults and poverty, I don't think that one can possibly say that children are in any way responsible for their plight. They are clearly and purely victims, and I think we have to pay attention to that.

Third, poverty is closely associated with social and civic disconnection. And if you believe, as I do and as I think most people do in robust neighborhoods, a vigorous civil society and a vigorous civic sphere, then I think we have to continue to care about poverty and the alleviation of poverty.

And fourth, poverty has externalities; that is, it creates not just costs for the individual poor people but it creates social costs and we have to pay attention to them for self-interested reasons, if for no other.

Question number two, causes. Unlike Henry Aaron, although I suspect he'd accept this as a friendly amendment, I do care and I care analytically because I think understanding and parsing the causes of poverty gives us some direction as to the most effective ways of addressing it. So I just jotted down this brief list. Here are at least some of the reasons why poverty persists.

First of all, there are a lot of jobs that simply don't pay enough to get individuals and their families out of poverty.

Secondly, there are a lot of individuals who simply don't work enough in order to get themselves and their families out of poverty.

Third, there are a lot of individuals and families that are trying as hard as they can, but the family and job-related burdens of child care and health care make the struggle all but impossible.

Fourth, there are a lot of people who are poor because of family structure decisions they've made, and Eloise touched on a very important issue there. Belle Sawhill did a study suggesting that all of the rise in child poverty since 1970—correct me if I'm wrong, Belle—can be attributed analytically to changes in family structure that have occurred during that 30-year period. Well, if that is a robust result, and just about everything Belle does is robust in a research and policy sense, then we have to pay attention to that.

And fifth and finally, there is a lot of poverty because of the combination of inadequate human capital investments and inadequate educational attainment. Those are at least five causes. There may be lots of others. And I think that those five causes give us some clues as to the direction that public policy ought to take in the TANF reauthorization and then post-reauthorization world.

Like Henry Aaron, I think the Earned Income Tax Credit has been an enormously important and successful piece of social policy. We ought to build on it. I can think of at least two ways in which we ought to build on it. There are lots more to this complex topic.

First of all, we ought to do what we can to make it family friendly. There is a huge marriage penalty built into the Earned Income Tax Credit, and it's not cheap to fix it but we ought to get started.

Secondly, and here I associate myself with a very important suggestion that once again Belle Sawhill made, I think that to the extent that it would be possible to make the Earned Income Tax Credit sensitive to hours worked as well as income, in order to catalyze greater work by people who are working only part time, that would be a smart thing to do. And in a recent paper, Belle reports on a Canadian experiment, as I recall, that explores that linkage. The results appear to be promising. We should think about it. I think that instead of the peaks and valleys of the minimum wage, we ought to raise it modestly, let's say a dollar, and then index it to the median wage and get that issue out of the political arena and stabilize it. I believe that we ought to move toward an economy in which part-time workers, and there are going to be lots of them, particularly in two-earner families, earn pro rata benefits. An economic system in which employers have incentives to hire part-time workers just below the threshold for earning benefits I don't think is good for our economy and I know darn well that it's not good for our families and contributes to the difficulties that we're experiencing getting families out of poverty.

I believe—next point—that we ought to use the TANF reauthorization in order to think much harder about ways in which public policy, in a way that is respectful of our ideals and our traditions of individual liberty, can promote positive changes in family structure over the next generation. I think that we have to try to think creatively across party lines about ways in which the welfare system can indeed be used to promote marriage and to reduce teen pregnancy and to do a lot of related things.

Finally, and I want to dwell on this point for just a minute because this is my particular passion, I want to talk about educational attainment, because I think it's very clear that in the long run if we don't close the achievement gap we're not going to close the poverty gap, given the kind of economy that we now have. Since the presidential campaign, that's been familiar, but let me make a slightly less familiar point. Recent research has converged toward the following conclusion: About half of the achievement gap that we see in 12th grade is attributable to differences that kids bring with them into first grade. The other half is created by what happens in the schools from grade one to grade twelve. From which it follows that we need an all out assault on the problem of school readiness in this country, what kids are like when they get to kindergarten or when they get to first grade. What would I do about that?

Three brief points in conclusion. Point one. As was reported, I believe, on the front page of the New York Times, a recent University of Wisconsin study shows that when Head Start like centers also offer rigorous programs of reading readiness, children who attend these centers are significantly more likely to graduate from high school and are less likely to be arrested for juvenile crimes 15 years later. I think that's a pretty good study. I think we ought to take it seriously.

Point number two. The state of Georgia a few years ago enacted a program to guarantee universal access to pre-K for all four-year olds. And that was an issue in the presidential campaign. The guy who advocated that did not become president. It's still a good idea. There ought to be a partnership between the federal government and the states in order to encourage all the other 49 states to move in Georgia's direction.

And finally, I believe that if we're interested in school readiness and the closing of the achievement gap that we see right at the threshold of formal education, that every state should move as quickly as possible to full-day kindergarten as part of its regular system of public education. The issue, in my judgment, is not child care, it's school readiness. We ought to reframe the way we think about the zero to five years as a school readiness issue first and foremost. If we do that, I think we'll get a lot more agreement along the political spectrum and we'll make a lot more progress.

Thank you.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Terrific. Mickey Kaus.

MICKEY KAUS: Well, I don't have prepared remarks, so I could answer questions and I hope to subtly pervert them to my own ends. (Laughter.) I think all the focus on poverty is a bit of a trap here. Now we're in a situation where people on the left are saying, "Well, you've reformed welfare; people are working, but poverty hasn't budged as much as the caseloads have budged." And my response is, "The people who care about poverty obsessively and the poverty figures and what happens to the people in the bottom quintile lost the debate."

The welfare reform was not about reducing poverty; welfare reform was about, as President Clinton said, altering the culture of poverty specifically in urban ghettos, characterized by out-of-wedlock childbearing, male joblessness, all the cultural symptoms that are associated with ghetto poverty. The supporters of the welfare reform bill, the people who won the debate, were actually probably willing to take a short-term hit in terms of poverty increasing for a while, if that was the price you had to pay for transforming this culture of poverty in the long term.

The fact that welfare reform hasn't produced that result, that it's been, in fact, quite successful in terms of reducing poverty, as Ron's paper in the Brookings Review shows, all the dire fears about what's going to happen to poverty haven't materialized shouldn't sucker us into thinking that we should judge the success of welfare reform by what happens on the poverty tables. The reason I think that is because I don't think the goal of social policy is to reduce poverty, although that's obviously a good thing. When I thought about it, I think the goal of social poverty is to achieve social equality. If you ask why do we care that people are poor, why is that bad, it's because they can't live lives of dignity and participate in the mainstream society, and I would go beyond that is to say as Americans we sort of want people to have equal dignity.

That's not a universal notion, but it is an American notion. And you can't have equal dignity in our society if you don't work. Even if we heap benefits on you so that you're above the poverty line, if you're not participating in the mainstream working society, you're not going to be respected as an equal. So it was incredibly misguided of the left to focus on income, getting people in poverty income, because that doesn't necessarily give them the equal dignity that comes with the job.

So I approve of the direction that welfare reform has taken us, which is away from a welfare state toward what I call a work ethic state, where benefits are targeted on people who work and there's a work test more or less for every benefit program. We do not recognize a social obligation to bring everybody above the poverty line even if they don't work. I would divide the answer to those questions into two categories.

First, what do we do about those people who aren't working now? And here there are sort of two shoes that haven't dropped with welfare reform, two senses in which my own hopes for the bill were certainly over optimistic. There hasn't been a race to the bottom, as Henry said, but there also hasn't been what I expected, which would be a race to the top, as it were, basically of state governors rushing to gain popularity by emulating the best programs in the nation, the best of which I would say is Wisconsin's.

Welfare reform, I think, has by and large been a success, but one of the great failures has been the failure of the vast majority of states to move in the Wisconsin direction. The governors have been quite content to see the economy eat away at the caseloads and take credit for it without doing what Wisconsin has done, which is to provide both in effect a guaranteed job and all sorts of supports for the working poor.

The second shoe that hasn't dropped is the one Eloise talked about. We haven't seen tremendous changes in the family structure. And certainly if you're going to change the culture of poverty, you have to change the culture of out-of-wedlock childbearing. And I was probably incredibly over optimistic to think that you would see something right away. I do think the statistics are more optimistic than many people think. If you just look at African American family patterns, the out-of-wedlock child ratio has stabilized and even declined a little bit.

So I do think we are going to see some encouraging results. And I tend to be a Marxist on the subject of will welfare reform promote fatherhood and marriage. I read Ray Horen's (ph) paper and I see we're supposed to have all sorts of gimmicky programs to support fatherhood. You know, as a Marxist I trust the power of the economy in changing these economic substructures, I mean in changing welfare to change all these others things like family structure. So I think once women know that if they have a child out of wedlock they're going to have to work to support that child, and they see that that's really a hard way to go, they will begin to demand that the men in their lives do something to help support them and help them in that enterprise.

And I think we're beginning to see that happen in a very sort of slow sort of conflicted process. I recommend Katherine Bouse's (ph) article in the recent New Yorker, where she talked about just what you can see by looking at the lyrics to rap songs. There's a female group, I think it's TLC, that talks about "all the honeys making money," i.e. all the new, new single female workers who are now in the work force, and then there's sort of a counter reaction from a male group saying basically they didn't like all these "uppity females," you know, they would rather have—I don't want to say the word—but they would rather have hood raps I think is the word. And this shows that something is happening. I mean, there is a change out there and eventually I think I have faith that the men will come around.

I don't think having a professor of marriage studies at the Universities of Oklahoma is going to do it. I think changing welfare will do it.

In terms of what you do for the working poor, I endorse all of Henry's agenda except for food stamps. I think it's a real mistake for the left to use food stamps, which is a welfare program, as a work support program, and to try to sort of sanitize a program that gives to people whether or not they work and is rightly stigmatized as a welfare program, to suddenly say because a whole lot of people on this program are workers we're going to use that as the basis of our work support.

I would say sort of our motto when it comes to the working poor should be programs for the working poor should actually be restricted to the working poor. That's the lesson of welfare reform. If you give money indiscriminately to workers and non-workers, the public will focus on the non-workers and say, "That's a welfare program; we don't like it." If you give money to workers, as the Earned Income Tax Credit does, the program will be so popular that Congress will rush to increase it every year as more or less it's done. So food stamps is a welfare program and it's rightly stigmatized and we don't want to tell people it's okay to be on food stamps if we want a work ethic. We shouldn't be unhappy if the food stamp take up rate goes down.

So I would say let's have work supports and let's restrict them to workers. And ultimately what I worry is not that we will fail to achieve those work supports but that we'll be so successful that toxic side effects will eventually fit in. I think the current research shows that the Earned Income Tax Credit has not had the effect of discouraging people from work. I think Gary Burtless has done some work on that. I'm sure other people have. But eventually either it's going to have side effects where people decide, "Well, you know, if I go out and work, make $10,000, I'm going to get $20,000 in benefits, so maybe I'll only earn $8,000 and get $16,000 in benefits," either it's going to have a bad effect on the labor market or it's just going to be so top heavy, where if you go and earn $10,000 you get $40,0000, you qualify for $40,000 of work-tested benefits that people are going to say, "Well, you didn't really earn those benefits," and the political support will eventually erode. So I don't think the agenda of helping the working poor will be that hard to achieve.

What I worry about is that there are eventual limits it will bump into. And what I would suspect is that then we can shift either to universal provisions of social services, which are like health care, which are unfortunately very expensive, or we can achieve social equality just by creating a public sphere of life where people are treated as equal, regardless of how much money they have. And one way to do that, the obvious way to do that is through some form of national service.

A second way to do that would be the equalizing effect of a health system that treated rich and poor alike, where everybody went to the same doctors. And quite apart from the effects on income, it would have a socially equalizing effect just in terms of everybody would be treated alike. And I will shut up.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Okay, thank you very much. It's a very good, disciplined panel here. Let me circle back a bit and get some comments from each of you on some of the ideas that have been put forward here. Let's start with minimum wages and food stamps. Two of you have said we ought to increase the minimum wage modestly and Bill Galston has suggested indexing it in the future, and you're in favor of indexing as well.

HENRY AARON: I said it.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Okay, I missed it. Sorry. And Mickey, though, has said he doesn't think that food stamps, Henry, that he quite agrees with you on that. And so any further comments on these two issues from anyone?

HENRY AARON: Yeah. I'd just stand back a bit. What you're hearing within very strict limits on this platform and broader limits in the popular discussion is a debate that's been going on for two and a half centuries. It dates back to the debate about the English poor house and the concern that by providing assistance one would pull the sting from poverty and thereby destroy the incentives that people face. What has occurred in the national debate in general is a movement in the direction of linking any assistance to work, and that's apparent in what I said. Mickey got there first and harder and has gone further. But the whole debate has moved along distance in that direction. That leaves open the question of whether one should go 100 percent of the way and say that all assistance should be conditioned on work and one should be available, particularly if linked to something as basic as food or medical care or in some cases housing to those who are simply destitute.

So what I'm just suggesting is that although the debate has moved, it is not clear that because of the success of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is linked to work, one should therefore abandon all forms of assistance that are not. It is quite possible that a mixed portfolio of incentives that increase the return to work, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, such as other benefits that are key to a real work effort, together with some assistance that is simply provided as a result of low income, is the right balance of hardheadedness and softheartedness. I am not worried, as Mickey is, that we need to be concerned currently about pushing the Earned Income Tax Credit too far. I'm reminded of the old joke about in driving from Boston to Los Angeles the first thing to know is head West. And I think the first thing to know in the current situation is we should increase the return to work. I am not worried that we are going to drive into the Pacific Ocean, which I take to be Mickey's concern that we're going to push this too far. There will be time enough to face those concerns down the road. We're not close yet.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Okay, we've had a lot of discussion of marriage and family structure up here. Eloise, in particular, focused on this, but several other people mentioned it as well. And I think the really open and difficult question about all of that is what can be done specifically to encourage marriage, even assuming that we had more consensus than I believe we do right now in our society about the value of marriage. As you mentioned, Eloise, there is a lot of resistance to even practicing advocacy on behalf of marriage in turn, but even beyond that it's just not clear what can be done. I'd like any further comments from the panelists on that issue. I think you mentioned fixing the marriage penalty in EITC but—

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, let me make a general comment and then a specific comment. You know, first it was, I must say, refreshing to hear Mickey resuscitate the old Marxist-based superstructure distinction. (Laughter.) And there is something to that, but only something. And I am much more inclined to see culture and cultural change as an autonomous force in our social life and in our social policies rather than what the social scientists would call a "dependent variable," where the only significant independent variable, in good Marxist fashion, is economic change. I just don't believe that that's true analytically. And if I had a lot of time, I'd try to say, with a lot of circumstantial detail, why I don't think that's true analytically.

So thing number one that I think we can try to do much more systematically as a society is to continue the effort that's been really begun in the past ten or 15 years to change the climate of opinion as to what makes sense for children, for families, for young men and young women.

Secondly, to the extent that Mickey is right and it's the economic base rather than the cultural superstructure, well we should try to think more creatively about economic incentives and disincentives that can push us farther down that road. I think it's nuts to have an economic policy and a labor market policy where if you have two low-income workers working hard, you know, a man and a woman and they decide to get married, that they are facing a huge increase in their tax burden because of the way the Earned Income Tax Credit is structured. I just don't think that's sensible policy. You know, Belle and others have shown that it's very expensive to fix that, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to do it. And I think there are lots of features of TANF as it now exists that have not been used nearly aggressively enough by states in order to promote appropriate changes in marital choices and in family structure. So there are lots of things we could do, and I think we ought to be open to a very robust discussion on this question in the next year.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Eloise, do you want to say something more about this issue? And also I'd like you to address how you feel about this agenda of support for the working poor that several other people have mentioned. Are you in favor of some expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit or the minimum wage and those kinds of things?

ELOISE ANDERSON: Well, I'm trying to see which one I want to go through first. Let's go to marriage and then I'll come down to the benefits. We have lots of opportunities to promote marriage; we don't. One, many states have done hospital paternity. We are sitting there with couples who are both interested in a child and we ignore an opportunity for marriage. We don't ask the question. We just sort of throw off, "Well, you know, you do this lifestyle that you have, it's perfectly fine and it's going to get you somewhere," all of which we know are lies. So right there when the child is born we have an opportunity. We usually have an opportunity while the women is getting prenatal care, where we know from watching who comes into our WIC programs or our Medicare prenatal programs is the guys come along with mom to the care, except that we don't welcome the men. We could have a conversation about marriage then; we don't. So we have all these opportunities for conversations about marriage; we leave it alone, one, because most of us who are dealing with them are not married ourselves, are living the same kind of lifestyle or we're divorced, and so we don't know how to approach it or we don't like it or we're still angry at our mate. And we're a very women dominated system. Our systems, if you look at who is actually providing the service, is a bunch of women providing the service, and I usually say that they are negative to men because everything we do drives men out.

So one of things we have to look at are how do we get men in, and I'm not so sure—Mickey believes that if you get women to start behaving differently, they will get men to behave differently. My history says that we have had a long history of driving, particularly black men, out of the economic labor market, and black women have historically worked, but that seems not to be the way, so for blacks we may need to go after getting black men into jobs, putting more programs in that actually work to get them educated and trained.

For white poor, which there are a lot of, I don't know what the issues are for them, because they don't have the same histories here. I suspect when I walk through poor white communities, and I lived with poor whites and poor blacks, that there are different sets of issues going on here, and so the same things are not needed. But I also see a lot more marriage in their communities than I see in black communities. Now, maybe it's cohabitation that I'm seeing and it's really not marriage. So divorce seems to be more the issue on their side, so how do we keep them married over there. I don't think these are governmental roles. I think these are society starting this stuff up to do society's work, which is be involved with your community. I'm also concerned about social service agencies and social service people and academics do not live with these people. We read statistics and then we make decisions; these are not us.

So I like people who are closer to people to start talking about what people need. Benefits: The Earned Income Tax Credit I actually like, but we can't have both the Earned Income Tax Credit and cash assistance. One of them has got to go. And if you like the Earned Income Tax Credit, then get rid of the other one. But having these two systems?

ISABEL SAWHILL: Even on a temporary basis? In other words, you don't buy Henry's argument that for a limited period of time at least people might need some straight—

ELOISE ANDERSON: No, see, I think if we put people to work they fall back on unemployment compensation. If they have other kinds of issues, we can figure out how to do maybe more charity. I just think the two systems running side by side are problematic for us in the long run to turning the larger pool off against people who are in need. I think it's too big of a burden. I hate the food stamps program. I hate how it behaves. I hate working with it. It was the worst program I've ever tried to run in my entire life.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Why did you hate it?

ELOISE ANDERSON: Well, because it was cumbersome. It didn't fit with the other programs I was trying to run and it had its own set of rules and regulations, different than all the other set of rules and regulations. When you got to the store, it made a difference between you and other people who were buying groceries. So everything about the food stamp program to me was negative. What I believe is that maybe we need to go to something a little different. If food stamps is still—and I question this—a benefit for the farmers, then let's give people produce. Let's give them real food and get out of this notion that I'm going to give you this third way of getting it. If it is not a benefit for the farmers and it's really food, then maybe we ought to just give them food.

So either way I think we ought to get out of food stamps and maybe go back to a commodities program rather than having a program that's hard to administer and still brings a lot of stigma at the grocery store.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Mickey.

MICKEY KAUS: My problem with food stamps is the attempt to repackage it as a work support. Henry talks about it as a last resort guard against poverty for people who have no money. Maybe we want some last resort guard like that, but we shouldn't then say that that last resort aid, which is welfare, goes to people who work or who don't work, is then a work support, which is what people on the left, especially the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and other people are trying to do is trying to say, "Well, food stamps, they're part of our package that we help the working poor with." No. If they're the last resort, a safeguard against poverty, then they are a welfare program and they will be stigmatized because people stigmatize in our society, rightly so, people who get cash without working for it. And as long as food stamps are like that, they're going to be stigmatized and you're not going to be successful in raising them to the levels that you want to raise them to, because voters don't like that. They like work-tested programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit.

So I would say let's keep food stamps and let's not pretend that they're part of a system to help the working poor. If you want to help the working poor, have some other work-tested food stamp program or something.

ISABEL SAWHILL: You're nodding as if you more or less agree with that distinction.

HENRY AARON: I quite agree with the point that if a benefit is available whether or not one works, it may be tactically advantageous but it is not perhaps intellectually kosher to treat that as a work incentive program. The point I was trying to make more generally is that we have this balance between wanting to assist people who are in desperate circumstances and not wanting to destroy the incentives to engage in the behaviors that will prevent you from being in those desperate circumstances. This is a tension that has gone on for a long, long time, and I was suggesting that a 100 percent emphasis on everything that's conditioned on work and "if you aren't working and you don't have cash, too bad, is simply not a viable position for a compassionate society.

Politically, there are advantages, perhaps as Eloise hinted at, in possibly bringing together a coalition between representatives interested in farmers in general and those interested in the poor, that suggest that food stamps will have an advantage over cash assistance in the political realm, but that's a political issue. What I was suggesting though is that I don't think a nation such as the United States can sustain a pure strategy of emphasis only on work incentives. We are going to have some unconditioned aid for people in desperate circumstances, and doing it in a way that is administratively as streamlined as possible, that does not have its own separate set of rules, that runs against other programs, as Eloise emphasized, is a very important thing to do, but abandoning them is also not a good idea.

MICKEY KAUS: I would just say look at Wisconsin. Wisconsin has one element that we haven't talked about, which is in essence a guaranteed job. So I think if you have a guaranteed job, it's a lot easier to say we're going to base our entire system on whether or not you work. And Wisconsin does not provide a lot of cash assistance if you don't take the guaranteed job. Now, I admit there's still a food stamp program in Wisconsin, but we can go a long way toward conditioning all benefits on work.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Bill Galston wants to get in. I'm going to turn to the audience in just a moment now. The last sort of general question I would pose to the panel, and maybe you're going to get into it, Bill, is the set of issues you raised about education and particularly early education and school readiness. But say whatever you'd like at this point and then we'll open it up.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, I just want to make a brief comment about the colloquy, the very enlightening colloquy that you just heard?actually two comments. You know, HENRY AARON: has pointed to one classic tension in the provision of these sorts of services.

There is another one, the classic tension between what we think about adults and what we think about children and to what extent children are held hostage to the sins of their parents. This is not a simple matter, but whatever we think about parents who could work but for one reason or another do not, I think we have to pay some attention in the short term to the consequences for children of withdrawing social supports that are more general and not necessarily linked to work. That is a real conundrum. I don't think there's an easy answer, but we shouldn't pretend that there is one.

Secondly, excepting this matrix of the moral preference for work and for work-related benefits, what we have now is a perverse system in which as you move from the world of welfare to the world of work you don't become more likely to get food stamps and health care assistance, you become less likely. And this is in part a programmatic question, but I think it's more an administrative and managerial question, but unlike many administrative and managerial questions, it is not a technical, narrow or wonky question. It is a very important question if you have people making this transition who are then falling through the cracks of the supports, which for them would be work supports. And I think we have to in the next phase of the administration of the welfare and income support system, we have to think about how to fix this problem, because it's a big problem and getting bigger.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Okay, let's open this up to the audience that's here, as well as the people who are watching us on our Webcast. For those of you who came in late, if you're watching on the Webcast you can send in a question via e-mail by going to yourview@brookings.edu and we will try to include questions that come in that way as well. For those of you here in the audience, if you would stand and identify yourselves and we'll bring you a microphone. Who wants to start? Okay.

Q: I'm Edith Fierston (ph). I'm a retired lawyer. I come at this question out of an experience of ten years at the Labor Department and OEO where I worked on education and training. And the biggest problem we had was to get people who signed up, possibly because we were paying them to be in education and training, to take it seriously. And I concluded that they lacked any motivation, which is the reason why I have looked favorably from the start on welfare reform. If people know they're going to have to work, perhaps they would be more interested in learning how to do a job and to read and write, et cetera. And I also think parenthetically this is one of the basic problems with the public schools in the inner city where people are not growing up thinking they are going to have to work.

But now what I'm wondering is has anybody looked to see whether welfare reform has had any effect on those people who sign up for education and training?

ISABEL SAWHILL: Anybody? Eloise, you probably have as good a look with that as anyone up here?

ELOISE ANDERSON: When I was in California and we went to a "Work First" model, what we saw is that when people did get into work, to educational programs, they actually worked harder in them. I think one of the reasons why we went to a "Work First" motto is because we had so much experience in the past where we sent people to school and they didn't do well in school, but when we sent them to work and then they went to school they took school much more seriously.

I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that most of the people in the programs in which I've worked in have failed school already. School is not high on their agenda. They don't like school. They had no good experience with school. We put in front of the poor models that have made us successful. I mean, we like school. We stay there, get Ph.Ds and all kinds of other stuff, so we're really into school. That is not necessarily the experience of poor people who have not done very well in school. And what they tend to like, and we've done at least 30 or 40 years of getting rid of vocational education or what we call vocational education, when you look out at welfare reform across the country you see very little of the vocational schools engaged in this discussion. And I think that work, beginning to understand the language of work, beginning to understand the language of your trade or your school that you're going to be going into makes you more successful in a classroom. And to me that's what you were seeing. I don't think it was motivation. I think it was where is this going to take me: nowhere. And I think we've turned it around where people can see where the education can take them and now they're much more willing to do the job, much more willing to do the educational work that they were not willing to do in the past.

Q: Because they weren't motivated?

ELOISE ANDERSON: Right. Well, you know, that's true.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Yes?

Q: Tom Clair (sp) with the New America Foundation.

One of the issues that I'm interested in exploring is whether these new information technologies that we're creating can have any impact on low-income individuals and communities. And some of the things that people are beginning to experiment with are GIS systems that allow us to reduce childhood lead poisoning, or public health information systems that increase rates of childhood immunization, adult literacy and adult basic education software that would be as compelling and engaging as the best videogame. And I don't want to suggest that IT is as important a policy issue as family structure or EITC, but I'm wondering whether anyone is thinking about how we could use some of these new technologies in ways that could help?

ISABEL SAWHILL: I see lots of nodding in agreement with you right here. Do you want to add anything?

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, only to say, Tom, I think all of the above and in particular there is some emerging evidence—I consider it to be promising and suggestive, but not yet compelling—to the effect that information technology, appropriately integrated into education in the early year, can have a very positive effect in stimulating interest in the learning process, particularly among kids who need to have that interest in the learning process stimulated the most.

And so I do think it is part of a package that can begin to deal with the problem of the achievement gap. Like a lot of other things in the area of education, particularly early education, its advantages tend to flow most to the least advantaged. The same is true for issues of teacher quality and class size reduction. All the evidence suggests that if we take that seriously for the least advantaged, you get the biggest bang for the buck. And so I would see this as part of an important compensatory strategy, although clearly it's society wide.

ELOISE ANDERSON: I want to address that because several years ago one of the information technology companies had a program out for adult literacy. It was a great program. We tend to want to get to children early because we want to avoid their parents; this notion about half the gap is the difference between what kids bring, so what we want to do is start school early. Well, kids living at home with parents who are either illiterate or not, who are readers or not, have huge influences on their children but we never address that.

My view is quit running around the parents. You know, "I don't like you; you're not raising your kids right, so I'm going to do all these things for your kid," which usually get undermined by the parent. What we need to do is take what we know about adult literacy, teach it to the parents so they can teach it to their children. We refuse to allow parents, poor parents to be the educators of their children, and they are, whether we like it or not.

So the skills that I think IT brings to us can be brought into the home, taught to the parent, giving parents reading and literacy skills, getting them to like reading, getting them to read to their children so they can then transfer that new knowledge to their kids. That is not a discussion we're having. It's all about how us out here are going to teach those kids.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Alan.

Q: Alan Lyle (ph), Irving Institute.

Isn't there a way that we can try to reduce some of this tension between work and full time work and part time work and making work pay and marriage and these sort of cultural battles by thinking about more broadly the question of what kind of parenting should we be supporting for children in poor families and what kind of then policies come from that, that support better parenting as opposed to just separating out work and marriage as if they are totally distinct from the kind of parenting that children get?

Eloise, I was struck by the notion that middle class values may sometimes be bad for poor people. And based on the conversation this morning, it seems like one of those middle class values that seems to be too good for poor people is the value of parenting. I'm trying to figure out why it is that all the conversation is about work as an individual value as opposed to maybe a family context that's important for raising children, or marriage as a value in and of itself as opposed to what I think you were saying in your remarks really being part of the context of good parenting.

ELOISE ANDERSON: I don't think I was trying to make a distinction that marriage was a part of being a good parent. Actually, I was trying to show that a marriage environment was one of the best things for kids. I am a believer that work in our society—I don't know about other ones, but in our society gives parents a kind of respect for their children that helps them parent their children better. Now, maybe in other societies that's different. So when mom and dad go out, because we're so into going out, they bring home a certain kind of respect that the children then feed on. It helps them nurture.

Also if you're poor, what I've noticed about poor people who go out and work is they bring other things home. They bring the world home to their children. They bring new information home to their children. They're not isolated from the world. They bring their children a way of behaving in the outer world so that their children are successful. So when a parent isn't working, a parent isn't bringing the outer world home to their child, so their child now knows how to behave in the outer world.

So work has more than just income issues; work has what I call civility and socialization issues that are brought home. And when no one in the family is working, then the child is isolated from that outer knowledge, the outer world, how to mainstream outside. So those are the issues that I see not just about income that are a part of work.

WILLIAM GALSTON: And I'd just add one thing to that. The arrow of respect points in both directions. It's not just that work increases the respect, as you rightly pointed out, that parents bring home to their children. I have a pile of clippings, anecdotes of children who report increased respect for their parents because they see their parents working. In other words, the culture of work in the United States is not a culture from which children are excluded; they're part of it. And so when they see their parents out there, it creates an atmosphere not just of one-way respect but of mutual respect that I think improves the entire atmosphere for parents and for children in families, including low-income families.

So this is one of many ways in which economic, social and cultural issues cannot be decomposed into the base of the superstructure.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Way in the back there.

Q: Hi. My name is Tom Downey. I've spent some time thinking about these issues and working on them. And when I was in the Congress, I used to say in the absence of marriage counseling or dating we had welfare programs. And now I've seen you, Ms. Anderson, elevate it. And there are a couple of questions

I would like you to expand on, if you would, from your experience in California. You mentioned that you don't think it's the role of government to encourage marriage but rather that of society. And what I'd like to have you explain to me a little bit in more detail is exactly how that would get done, because I think it is a good idea.

And the other is—and I don't mean this to sound like a wise guy, since I agree mostly with what Mr. Galston and Mr. Aaron have been saying. I pay a lot of attention to people who don't agree with the things that I think about. And the idea that food stamps is a burden, was a burden for you to administer in California, what in your experience led you to believe that a commodities distribution program would somehow be better in either dealing with the poor or alleviating hunger, because that has never been anything that I think made much sense to me?

ELOISE ANDERSON: Well, let's take the commodities first. Once I actually received commodities, so I've been on the other end of that one. And what I thought was very interesting about commodities, as long as it wasn't cheese, because I was in Wisconsin—(laughter)—is that actually you get a good package of food, a good package of things to deal with.

What I thought was also interesting at the time was most people who went to get commodities sold them because they didn't know how to use them, because they couldn't cook, which I think is a very big issue in nutrition and feeding is the lack of ability to cook that we need to address, but that's not a food stamp issue. And I'm not saying it would be different, but at least maybe the government wouldn't be doing it. And if the government is not doing it, it might have different kinds of commodities, it might be done some other kind of way. And I haven't really worked out how that could be done, but I thought commodities were much easier to get than I saw food stamps being easier to get. And I think the reason why it was such a difficult program to run at the state level is because it's really a federal program in every way, and the Feds are too distant from anything to know how anything ought to run. So I thought that was a real problem with it coming out of the Department of Ag, trying to be administered in programs that were in the Department of Human Services in states that had a variety of different ways of handling things. Some were county run, some were state run. Trying to put that all out of one administrative package I think was extremely difficult, so that's food stamps.

The issue about whether or not I think government ought to do marriage programs, I think the government ought not to stand in the way of marriage. I think they ought to have more incentives in their policies. If we're going to have tax policies that drive social positions, then they ought to be more pro-marriage than anti-marriage and they're not. But I think that society should step up to this, our churches, our community organizations, and we have tons of them, our sororities, our fraternities. We have things that are non-religious organizations, ought to be more about talking about marriage, helping people stay married, helping people understand marriage and working more with men. I am sick and tired of all our emphasis on females. We need to do more about jobs, relationship education and all these things that men walk into relationships and not understanding. It is two people that make a marriage work, not just women. It's two people that makes parents, not just women. And we have spent no time in this society focusing on the other side of this.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Tom, since you have the floor at the moment, sort of, and since you were an author of a very nice essay based on an earlier forum we had here at Brookings, and your essay is in the Brookings Review, I'd love to give you the opportunity just to make a few more comments based on some of the things you said in the review or anything else you want to say in response to what you've heard this morning.

TOM DOWNEY: At the end of my career in the Congress, I had spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what we talked about, and that is how do we stimulate a discussion about the role of fathers. And I did it specifically around the concern that I had in lack of payment of child support enforcement and I spent a lot of time traveling around the country listening to people and listening mostly to women. And what I found appalling was the fact that I found that these women not only had to be mothers and fathers, they had to be detectives, they had to do—we placed an extraordinary number of burdens on them in our society.

And what, I don't want to say troubles me, because I don't think that's fair, but the discussion of marriage, it strikes me that it's intuitive, yes, is it better for children to be raised in nuclear families; yeah. I mean, they only happen to be 25 percent of the families currently in our society these days. I mean, the Swedes get along cohabitating without marriage quite effectively, and there are just huge cultural differences there.

But as I think about this reauthorization of TANF, which is what the forums have been about, you know, what are you going to say to members of the Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee about programs that will really make sense, that they can really think about that might that might be effective in this regard. And your answer to that is, well, the churches need to do this, we need to do this societally. I mean, I don't know that that's going to happen. I know in their mind they agree with a lot of the things that you're talking about, but they're going to want to make this more programmatic. I mean, you talked about cash assistance and earned income credit. Well, the current tax plan doesn't make the expansion of the child credit refundable. It doesn't do anything for the marriage penalty for low-income people. It doesn't make the earned income credit for a third child; all of the things that we need to do.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Actually, the Senate bill does now.

TOM DOWNEY: Well, okay, but the House doesn't. And the amount of money that's going to be spent on this tax bill is going to make any future efforts to do some of these programs very, very difficult. And I'm sorry to trespass on everybody else's time.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Not at all. Yes? Yes, you.

Q: Hi. My name is Jennifer Lavereaux (ph). I'm on the staff of the Millennial Housing Commission. We're preparing a report to Congress on the nation's housing, the importance of housing to the nation's infrastructure, the role of the private sector. I don't know anything about welfare reform. But the hearings that we've held across the country, we have heard consistently that no person—married, single, black, white—working at minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment, not in one county in the United States. A two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent is unaffordable to a working person at minimum wage.

What can you tell us about housing? What should we be thinking about housing? Is this a work support for adults? Is it important to the stability of a child who wants to stay in one school system until they get to first grade? How do we think about this? And I would just add that we're talking about an aging housing stock that has incredible capital needs, operating subsidy needs and rental subsidies for this population in particular.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Okay, does anyone have comments up here on housing and housing assistance? I mean, I would say one thing about it is it's a lottery right now in which there are few fortunate people who get very large benefits because they're getting some housing assistance, and then there's everybody else. And some people would argue, and I have some sympathy with this view myself, that assuming it were politically feasible, it's better to give people the resources that they can then use for housing or anything else that they need rather than to have a lottery in which some people get these benefits but most people do not.

WILLIAM GALSTON: If I can piggyback on that, I think that there is at least in principle a case for taking the Section 8 program and universalizing it. And here is the way I would think about this, that there is a reasonable fraction or percentage of a budget that a family, including low-income working families, can be expected to spend for housing. It's not realistic or appropriate to expect working families to spend 50 or 60 percent of their incomes on housing, because there's not enough left over for everything else.

And so what I would do is sort of universalize the Section 8 principle, define an appropriate percentage of income for housing, and then after you've taken all sources of income, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, into account, have a housing subsidy, which is, in effect, a resource or cash subsidy to fill in that gap.

That is also, by the way, the strategy that I would use in order to subsidize health care for low-income families, define an appropriate percentage that families can be expected to contribute to their own health insurance coverage, and then to the extent there's a gap, after all sources of income have been taken into account, fill it in. And I think a resource model is far superior to a direct provision model. If I had my druthers, I'd back the federal government out of the business of owning and operating housing altogether. I don't think that's the way to go.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Right here.

Q: Hi. I'm Sue Fernandez Cansell (ph) for the governor of Puerto Rico. I actually have two questions.

One of the issues that we're very concerned about is there is a tension between the desirability of having a nuclear family and having the government and government agencies and health and welfare and so forth promote and intervene to a certain degree into promoting this idea versus the tension of dealing with the incredible amount of violence and abuse that women and children face in these relationships, and that it's not necessarily always beneficial. It might to some extent be beneficial economically in the short term to getting another paycheck there at home, but in the long term not only for the health of the women in question, but also children who have to grow up in this kind of environment, that there is something that we have to build into the system where we understand this and respect women who are trying to take control over their lives and a little bit more autonomy over these situations and not in some way punish them or socially isolate them because they're making decisions that are for the benefit of their health and welfare and that of their children.

That would be one of the questions that we have, because, you know, in our state—well, we're not a state—in our jurisdiction we do have a serious issue with a lot of violence and partly because of cultural understanding of a woman's role, which we're changing little by little. We do have a women governor now.

But the other question that I have is we're all for social dignity and that that's something that we to work on and it's imperative in our society, but there's also just sort of the bottom line of what good is your social dignity and equality if you can't feed your children. And we have to find, you know, we're trying to figure out ways where we can balance these two issues and working is extremely important, but when you're in a jurisdiction where you have a 15 percent unemployment rate and you can't guarantee a job for everybody, then what do you do and how do we still find ways to have children have breakfast to go to school and understand what the teachers are telling them at the same time that we promote the dignity of the parents who, as much as they're trying to find work, they just simply can't. It's not a question of pushing them to want to or to be motivated, it's just not out there.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Mickey, I think the second question is for you and, Eloise, the first one might be for you.

MICKEY KAUS: My point was that having enough money to feed your children isn't sufficient particularly, not that it's not a necessary condition. I'm for all of the working poor supports, except for with my food stamp caveat that Henry is for, and I'm for giving the same amount of money as food stamps; I just think it should be work tested. I don't think you should try to get the working poor under the same program as the last resort. If we had 15 percent unemployment in the United States in general we would have a very different situation, and I would be arguing for a WPA like guarantee jobs programs. I do anyway, and for the very reason that not many people would take it. If you offer everybody a full time sub minimum wage job, not that many people would take it because there are better jobs to be gotten in the private economy. But I agree that if you have 15 percent unemployment, that you have special problems.

ELOISE ANDERSON: The issue of violence I think I addressed in my opening is that I said when violence was an issue that marriage may not be on the discussion list. But the question I would have to ask, and this is having worked with families who are situations of domestic violence, we do a lot of taking a woman away from the guy and programming her. What we do for men is put them in jail, which usually doesn't do anything for them but make them worse. There are very few programs out there that say if this is a learned behavior, which we said it is, that violence is a learned behavior, then it can be an unlearned behavior. So it seems to me that we ought to have more programs in place to help men deal with their violence.

The other concern I have here is that the woman in this situation tends to go back to him. So we can have a lot of views about what that relationship is for them, but what we probably need to be doing is working with some of them, not all of them, because some of them are way beyond help. And the guys, we ought to be trying to figure out how to reduce his violence, eliminate his violence, and if they're going to be a couple, even if we think they shouldn't be a couple, then how to make them a working couple without the violence.

And looking at some of this data where the women continue to go back, we need to come to grips with how do we make that a working, safe place for her and for him, and then on the other end how do we deal with this violence, and then the children who grow up looking at that and the new violent behavior that's going to come out of this family. If it's learned, then what are these boys learning and then how do we undo that? And the girls are learning too. The girls are learning these are the kind of men I want. I mean, we don't pay attention a lot. This is the kind of man that I should be looking for because this is the kind of man my mom has. So we have two sets of learned behavior here that we have to figure out how to undo, as well as deal with the immediate adult situation.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Ah, Bill.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Let me just add a bit to that. I'm glad you asked that question. You know, I'm pro marriage, but abuse is intolerable. And as far as I'm concerned, if the cost of continuing a marriage is continuing to endure abuse, then the cost is too high. And people who say they're pro marriage have to be very clear on that point. And in my judgment, in any reasonable legal system—first of all, abuse is a crime, full stop.

Secondly, it ought to be a full and sufficient cause for the termination of a marital relationship as a matter of law and also as a matter of social understanding.

Secondly, and here, you know, you're just going to have to take my word for this, because I'm summarizing a huge body of research in one sentence, the incidence of abuse between men and women who are in the same house but who are not married is far higher than the incidence of abuse between men and women in the same house who are married, so that the notion that marriage breeds abuse is the opposite of the social truth.

ISABEL SAWHILL: All the way in the back there, and then we do have a couple of questions from the Web Site that I'll get to in just a second, for those of you who are waiting patiently. Margie.

Q: Margie Waller. I was struck by the fact that none of you mentioned the MDRC findings from the Minnesota Family Investment Program, and wonder if anyone would comment on the impact that that program seems to have had on supporting marriage.

HENRY AARON: I probably should take that one. When that finding came out, it was a real eye opener for everybody involved at MDRC and for an advisory panel that I and some other folks at Brookings happened to sit on. It was the complete reverse of the finding of a generation ago that helped to sink President Carter's welfare reform proposal. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the finding was that the provision of rather generous assistance, connected to work in Minnesota resulted in an enormous increase in the marriage rate in the experimental group versus the control group. MDRC is used to finding statistically significant 1 percent, 2 percent shifts. This was a 10 percent shift in the marriage rate.

ISABEL SAWHILL: And people remaining married who were already married particularly.

HENRY AARON: That's right. That's right. It was such a shock that the advisory panel and the staff decided that they would put a lot of resources into going back and looking in detail, case by case, at marital records, at other information that could be obtained on these families to verify that it had, in fact, occurred and wasn't some peculiar statistical artifact. And it was elevated. That was the bottom line. It was a real finding.

The question is what do you make of this. And, you know, there are various possible answers here. One was that there were certain characteristics of the way in which cash was provided, the assistance was provided in Minnesota that made the difference. The second consideration was it was Minnesota; everything works in Minnesota. (Laughter.)

Minnesota and Oregon, I might add are the two states. In the end, the group was left with the finding, (a), that it was different from previous research, (b), that it was real, and, (c), they weren't quite sure why it had happened this way in Minnesota but not elsewhere. But the emphasis that you are giving this by raising it I think is well deserved. This was a really dramatic finding. It is worthy of additional research effort. And just as the earlier finding about the supposedly corrosive effects of assistance on marriage had a very dramatic political effect, there's no reason why this one shouldn't have gotten equal attention. Assistance related to work helped people stay together.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Interestingly, just to add another footnote there, as you probably know, Margie, but I'm not sure everybody does, in the demonstration program in Canada that provided very generous support to the working poor, in one province it had a very positive effect on marriage; in the other province it had a negative effect. So that's very confusing to interpret as well. And it may be that the work support interacts with the culture in a way that we don't fully understand yet, suggesting that going back to the earlier discussion up here between those who were emphasizing culture versus those who were emphasizing economics or Marxist-type explanations, it may be that those have some role to play, and I think probably everybody thinks that to one degree or another.

Let me take up a couple of the questions that have come in from our viewers on the Web, and we are pleased to have them. One is about Charitable Choice, which was, of course, part of the original welfare bill. And Tom Kerwocky (ph) from Tacoma, Washington would like to know how it's being implemented in various states and what its impact and effectiveness has been and what is the role of the administration's faith-based initiative in the TANF reauthorization legislation. Are faith-based organizations going to be giving a level playing field in addressing the issues of family education and the like?

Anybody up here want to talk a bit about that? Bill?

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, let me just say a few things quickly. This is an enormously complicated and controversial topic, as everybody knows. I've been right here in months past talking about it at length.

The short answer to the question as to how it's being implemented in the states is that our knowledge about how it's being implemented in the states is at a very early and very fragmentary stage, although there are some national efforts now going on to try to round up the evidence. So I would hesitate to make a definitive announcement.

If you wanted my seat-of-the-pants summary of all of it, it has been that the impact of the Charitable Choice provision in the 1996 welfare bill has been smaller than a lot of the optimists hoped, small enough to be regarded as disappointing to date by a lot of the optimists. To some extent, it's because a lot of states have been slow to implement it. To some extent, it's because a lot of faith-based institutions who might conceivably participate and benefit, don't know about it. And in part it's because some of these institutions that do know about it are worried and scared about participating in it. They're afraid of oversight. They're afraid of paperwork. They're afraid that their faith mission will be distorted and perverted in some ways. So this turns out at the state level to be a very complicated question, and some of these complexities are now being mirrored in the national debate, triggered by the president's faith-based office and the proposals that have been coming out of that office or will come out of it. Will there be a level playing field? I think on the books and on paper there's likely to be a level playing field or more level playing fields than there are now. I think that many forces are pushing in the direction of expanding this.

At the same time, a lot of hard questions are now going to be asked about the details of Charitable Choice that were not asked earlier on. For example, people are going to ask about the constitutionality and appropriateness of public funds, especially federal funds, flowing to faith-based institutions that can use religious tests for hiring. And I would predict that there will be a legal challenge to that particular aspect of Charitable Choice that ultimately will end up being adjudicated by the Supreme Court, because that is an unclear and unsettled area of our law.

ISABEL SAWHILL: I might mention that we have a smaller meeting here at Brookings on this whole set of questions about charitable choice, and we have a paper that's been prepared based on some of the research that was presented at that meeting and other data that exists on how this is working around the country, and we hope to make that available to a broader public sometime soon, for those of you who are interested in that topic.

The second question coming in over the Web: What information is available on the success of supports, which allow two parents of low or moderate income families to choose to keep their children at home? And this person is particularly interested in health care and housing again, and whether this is happening anywhere. I assume this means that this individual is concerned, as someone in the audience was earlier, Alan Lyle, I guess, on this whole issue of what we're doing to support parenting and particularly stay at home parenting. We've already had some discussion of that, but I want to see if anyone has any further comments on that. This question is from Bernice Mayfield from Reston Interfaith Laurel Learning Center. I feel like one of those TV moderators that's talking to the whole audience.

ELOISE ANDERSON: Is this a question for welfare or this is a child welfare question?

WILLIAM GALSTON: Or an education question.

ELOISE ANDERSON: If it's keep the kids at home, it suggests it's a child welfare question.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Well, it was a little unclear to me. If we could ask this person, they could probably clarify, but we can't.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, you could pardon me, I've been talking too much, but there seems to be silence in the face of this question so I'll talk some more.

HENRY AARON: We don't know what the question is.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, then let me parse the question. If the question is about home schooling, then the research evidence available to date, which is accumulating, is that a lot of the pessimists about home schooling were wrong. They were wrong academically and they were also wrong about the social development of kids. And we're now beginning to see the first generation of home-schooled kids making it to college and they are not social isolates, and if anything they are academically forward rather than backward.

If the question is about economic supports for the parents of young children who are keeping them at home rather than putting them in child care, there the obvious thing to say is that the principle that tax reform and other sorts of government programs should be evenhanded as between families who choose to put their children in child care as opposed to families who make the very difficult work-family tradeoffs needed in order to have children at home, that our tax system and our program should not be structured to provide strong incentives in one direction or another but should ensure that appropriate children and family supports flow to both kinds of families. And that principle, which I think was not so clear ten years ago or even five years ago, has had a lot to do with the debate over, for example, the extension of the child tax credit or the dependent tax credit, which is neutral as between those two kinds of families.

ELOISE ANDERSON: If it's about child welfare, and if you remember one of the goals of TANF was to keep children at home in their families, so it's a big child welfare piece sitting in here that it seems to me that states have totally overlooked. And one of the things that I think the states could try to do is to look at those welfare families who are in the child welfare system and bring the resources of TANF, because TANF has a lot more resources than child welfare has, around these families. And one of the things that TANF has is the ability to actually put the resources around the mom, where in child welfare we put very little resources around the parents. We expect the parent to get to where they need to be without almost any resources at all. So the work incentive, which helps parents, the mental health issues, the drug and alcohol issues of these families can all be addressed in TANF, while we work with the parents around their parenting through TANF, which is not being done.

We've said to these two programs, "Yes, you're on aid, but if we take your kid away from you, you're not on aid anymore." So now we've lost the resources of TANF to the parent while we've got the kid over here. So if we rethink how we structure parents who are aid around TANF, who are in the child welfare system, we may be able to keep more children at home with their families, reunify the family in better ways than we've ever done before, and provide the mental health services and alcohol or the drug services that we need to get the parent to work and also support the family.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Could I just add a codicil to that?

ISABEL SAWHILL: Sure, okay.

WILLIAM GALSTON: I mean, I'm delighted that you brought up the drug issue, which we haven't touched on, because if one of the principles of social policy is that whenever possible it ought to be rooted in the principles and understanding of the public, it's a matter of no small interest that in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation, Kennedy School of Government survey, when people were asked our long list of things, major causes of poverty, minor causes of poverty, not a cause at all, the runaway winner in the category of major cause was drug abuse—runaway winner. Nothing else was even close.

And so most people believe that substance abuse is the single-most important impediment to participation in the world of work outside the home.

HENRY AARON: Most people also believe that foreign aid is one of the largest programs of the federal government. (Laughter.)

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, Henry, if you ask people what they mean by foreign aid, then it's not simply the narrow category—

HENRY AARON: It's still wrong.

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well—

HENRY AARON: The question I'm asking or raising is whether the perception corresponds with reality.

ELOISE ANDERSON: In child welfare it does.

HENRY AARON: You're saying that—

ELOISE ANDERSON: In child welfare substance abuse is one of the big reasons why we take children away from their families, because it leads to neglect.

ISABEL SAWHILL: I'm going to take one more question or maybe two at most from the audience and then I'm going to ask everybody up here if they want to make a very short closing statement in terms of emphasizing anything that may have been said all morning that they want to leave us with as a final thought. In the back row here, yes?

Q: My name is Fred Taylor. I'm the director of For Love of Children here in Washington. We're involved with children in the child welfare system and try to keep them out of the child welfare system.

My question has to do with the tension and how might we make some headway in the tension between uniformity and flexibility. In thinking about the Minnesota experiences, the example of flexibility, the world changes so rapidly, for example, gentrification, when it hits an area and rent goes up like in a single year 33 percent and wages might go up 5 percent and all of these things occur and crack comes in like in one or two years and changes the situation. So federal policy seems to move like a glacier pace, but reality often moves like avalanches. And I know this is abstract, but I wish you would speak to how in our national conversation and national, local and state policy we can address that incredible important ability to have flexibility?

HENRY AARON: I think the answer is that as far as national policy is concerned, we basically cannot, that national policies are modified gradually. They tend to come with regulations that are difficult to change and require extensive hearings. They come with administrative law procedures that generally bring a fair measure of bureaucracy. If they entail the direct provision of services or establish conditions for paying benefits, it is part of the furniture and it is one of the considerations that should govern whether a national policy intervention is desirable in a particular set of circumstances. It's part of the background; it's a cost. It has benefits, too, in terms of procedural fair play. But if one is looking for agile, quick-moving changes in policy in response to fast-moving developments, I don't think it's going to come from legislation enacted by Congress and implemented by federal government agencies.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Okay, I think we want to stay on time here, and to do that we need to have some closing, final closing remarks here. And, Henry, I'll give you a moment to think since you just answered the last question. So Eloise, any final thoughts?

ELOISE ANDERSON: Yes. I guess my final thought is as we think about welfare and beyond and our concern is on children, that we not move to eliminate or not think about the parent role in educating their children. And we tend to want to subvert that. My other concern is that the new welfare program has many more opportunities for fathers in them than we have had in the past, and getting women off the stage and getting men on the stage, and that may mean that we have to do things very differently than we've done in the past in order to get men to step forward and claim their children and to then provide for their children, and then, three, take on very different roles in their community than they have in the past.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Thanks very much. Bill?

WILLIAM GALSTON: Well, I believe that as we consider the issue of welfare, welfare and beyond, I think it's going to be very important for us to begin from where we are and who we are as a distinctive society, because the United States has not only a distinctive political structure but also a distinctive political culture. And public policy that goes with the grain of our distinctive public culture will tend not only to be politically sustainable, but also effective on the ground. Policies that go against that grain are much less likely to. And so if you go with the grain of a public culture that believes in equal opportunity, that believes in education, that believes in work and believes in family, and you orient yourself around those grounding values, then I think you'll have a policy that is both sustainable and effective.

Conversely, arguments on the basis of abstract income distribution tables have never had much purchase in this country and are not likely to anytime soon. And so that is not a good way of thinking about the problem of poverty in this country and it's certainly not a good way of advocating for policies to overcome it.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Mickey?

MICKEY KAUS: In terms of changing the culture of poverty, not the income distribution tables but the culture of poverty, I guess I would argue we've done a good chunk of what needs to be done. I mean, this may be the substructure/superstructure perspective, but it seems to me if you require everybody to work, even single mothers, you provide the work, which we're now doing through a full employment economy—if we ever get 15 percent unemployment, we may have to think of other ways to provide the work—and if you make work pay, which is an unfinished agenda, but an agenda that progress is being made on even as we speak, at least as Belle pointed out, in the Senate committee there's a provision that gives married families who make $20,000 a year $2,000 more in benefits; that's not chopped liver, that's a good chunk of the marriage penalty being eaten away. If we do that, we've done 80, 90 percent of what needs to be done to change the culture of poverty.

And I tend to see—and this is sort of an unpleasant thought—I tend to see faith-based services, I tend to see parenting programs, I tend to see elaborate interventions to help reconnect fathers once the family is split as that's the last 10 percent, the last 15 percent of what we can do to deal with the problem. Basically, welfare reform will eventually I think do the work of convincing people that to make it into society you not only need to work but you have to have a partner help you raise the children, and eventually that will work its way through the culture and people will adjust to that.

So the basic message with welfare reform is so far so good. The dire effects predicted by the left have not materialized. A lot of the positive effects have materialized. And we just need to stick with it and eventually it will do its job.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Thank you. Henry?

HENRY AARON: Two points. One, the experiment in welfare reform that we are I think successfully, by and large, now carrying out was initiated and has continued in an economy better suited for its success than any we've had in a couple of generations, one in which labor markets are very tight.

Ron Haskins correctly pointed out that tight labor markets are insufficient to explain what has been happening, because we have had tight labor markets in the past, notably in the 1960s when welfare rolls grew rapidly. But I do believe that the economic conditions we now enjoy still even are necessary for the carrying out of this experiment. And this whole debate I believe would be transformed dramatically, even I think Mickey would have some problems with an all-work approach, if we return to an era in which unemployment rates of 6 and 7 percent were the norm. There's no reason to expect it. I don't think it will occur. But I think it's very important to keep one's eye on the fact that a really tight economy is the best anti-poverty program that we've got.

My second comment is that whatever we do with respect to welfare, if we are interested in the well—being?and I stress this not in the economic sense, but the general well-being of Americans who are relatively disadvantaged, primary attention must go to extending health care services on a more equitable basis than our current financing systems now provide. It's perhaps we should look at ourselves and see ourselves through our own eyes rather than through the eyes of foreigners. And if you've ever had a conversation with people from abroad and the subject of the U.S. health care system comes up, eyes cross, heads shake, they just don't understand why our nation continues to permit the low level of delivery of services, symbolized by the lack of health insurance coverage that continues to exist.

There are practical ways of carrying current policies forward. I believe the leading candidate would be the extension of the Child Health Insurance Program, which can be used as a supplement to Medicaid. And I would hope that we would move aggressively in that direction. Access to health care services really ought not depend on whether you're at work or not. We can use other incentives. It ought not depend on whether women and men are married or not. It ought not depend on whether kids are in school or playing hooky. And I hope that we will keep health care as a separate agenda item in mind.

ISABEL SAWHILL: Thank you very much. Let me just remind you that once more, as Ron Haskins said at the beginning, that we will be having public forums like this on a regular basis. We hope all of you will continue to come. We hope you'll visit our Web Site, which has lots of material on it, and we'll have continuing new material put on it as time goes by. There are also some hard copies of various papers you might be interested in out on the table. And let's give a hand to these terrific panelists.