Should Conservatives Favor Child Allowances?
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American Enterprise Institute Web event — Should conservatives favor child allowances? Welcome and introduction: Scott Winship, Director of Poverty Studies, AEI Conversation on the lessons of welfare reform: Robert Doar, President, AEI W. Bradford Wilcox, Visiting Scholar, AEI Scott Winship, Director of Poverty Studies, AEI Panel on the child allowance Panelists: Angela Rachidi, Rowe Scholar, AEI Lyman Stone, Adjunct Fellow, AEI Matt Weidinger, Rowe Fellow, AEI Scott Winship, Director of Poverty Studies, AEI Moderator: Timothy P. Carney, Resident Fellow, AEI Tuesday, March 2, 2021 2:30–4:30 p.m. Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/should-conservatives-favor-child- allowances/ Scott Winship: Good afternoon and welcome to this American Enterprise Institute event, “Should conservatives favor child allowances?” I’m Scott Winship, director of poverty studies here at AEI. There are different ways of measuring poverty. By the official poverty measure, 10 million children in the United States — they are poor, that’s about 14 percent of all kids. Regardless of how we measure it, there are too many poor children in America. Even among working- and middle-class families, raising children is expensive, raising difficult choices around work-family balance, when to marry, begin raising children, and how many children to raise. Fertility in the United States and in other rich countries has fallen markedly, raising concerns about the future impacts on economic growth. Today, we’re here to talk about an idea receiving a lot of attention among policymakers that seeks to address all of these issues: a child allowance, a near-universal per-child benefit available to families without any conditions attached. The child allowance proposals from the Biden administration, House Democrats, and Republican Sen. Mitt Romney have generated a lot of interest among AEI scholars. In fact, normally, in an event like this, we’d bring in researchers from other organizations to make sure that we’re representing multiple perspectives here. But in the case of child allowances, AEI does not lack for a diversity of opinion. Indeed, we could have filled another two panels with my colleagues who have written on the topic beyond just the folks who you’ll hear from today. So, we’ll have two hours this afternoon, we’ll do our best to cover as much ground as possible. Later, we’re going to have a panel moderated by Tim Carney, which I’ll be joined by several of my colleagues, but we’ll hopefully have time for some audience questions at the end of that panel. But first, I’ll be interviewing as AEI’s president, my predecessor as director of poverty studies, Robert Doar. After Robert and I chat a bit about his perspective on child allowances from an antipoverty angle, we’ll bring in our colleague Brad Wilcox for some additional thoughts and reactions, and we can discuss some of the broader family policy issues related to child allowances. Let’s get the discussion started, make the most of our limited time. Hopefully, it’ll go more smoothly than the Golden Globes did. So, it’s my privilege to introduce American Enterprise Institute President Robert Doar, who is also the Morgridge Scholar here. Robert was brought in in 2014 to stand up the poverty studies program, which today built from scratch by him, it’s one of the most important think tank programs on poverty and opportunity currently in DC. Robert became president in 2019. In his time at AEI, he served as co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger. He’s also been centrally involved in all of the major cross- organizational efforts in town over the last few years to develop policy agendas around reducing poverty and expanding opportunity. Before coming to AEI, Robert was commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, where he was in charge of 12 public assistance programs in a citywide bureaucracy administering them. He was also in New York State Commissioner of Social Services under Gov. Pataki. More than anyone, Robert can take credit for making state and city models for the implementation of welfare reform. And as a fun fact, Robert, Richard Reeves, and I saw “The Rise of Skywalker” together, which was terrible, despite the good company. So, thank you, Robert, for joining us today. Robert Doar: Thanks, guys, for having me. Glad to be here. Scott Winship: Great. So, let’s see, while we’ve got just you here, I want to start with a question that’s really about the bio behind the bio. How did you become interested in poverty and antipoverty policy generally? Robert Doar: Well, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. My dad had run an antipoverty program in central Brooklyn in Bedford-Stuyvesant that had had limited success in the 1970s when I was between the ages of 7 and 12. And I love New York and I love the city, but the ’70s and ’80s and early ’90s were not a great time for the city and not a great time for low-income New Yorkers. Lots of people were receiving cash assistance, lots of people weren’t working, lots of families in distress and difficulty, and an absence of hope and upward mobility. And so when I became of age in the mid-’90s, I decided I wanted to work in the field that would expand opportunity and reduce poverty in New York, and so I went to work for a new governor, Gov. Pataki, in 1994, right at the beginning of the reforms that became — welfare reform that began to take hold in New York. New York, prior to those reforms, was a welfare entitlement state, a welfare right state. Benefits were granted as right, as a matter of right, and there was very little expectation of activity or movement toward work. And it wasn’t working, people weren’t happy, people who were receiving benefits weren’t happy, neighborhoods weren’t strong, and there needed to be change. And because we had a governor who believed in it and a mayor who believed in it, and then we also had a president and a Congress that wanted to change cash welfare, we were able to make very significant changes there. And I was really there for the whole time, I can’t take the principal responsibility, other people were a lot more responsible than me. But what happened and who was most responsible for the success were the people who had been receiving benefits. The people who, when given a message and an expectation of employment and of an effort to become independent, not completely independent, through work, went to work and their earnings rose. They also were, by aggressive efforts by us and by them, connected to other benefits that, as President Clinton used to say, “Made work pay.” So, SNAP benefits and public health insurance and childcare aid, housing assistance, we provided it with a spirit that was if you work, we will help you. Now, obviously, we’re talking about able-bodied adults, non-senior citizens, people who could work, and that combination of work plus benefits significantly reduced child poverty in New York State persistently over the whole period and have continued even after when I came to AEI. And so, I was drawn to it perfectly as a desire to help people in need live more positive and flourishing lives, I wanted to treat everyone with dignity, and I wanted to respect that they all had potential, and the old welfare system didn’t do that. And I think what we did in New York and around the country made some important progress in that regard. Scott Winship: So, I want to ask you something that will draw on your particular perspective, having really been at the forefront of administering some of these reforms. You hear a lot of this from progressives, from libertarians as well, that the current system is too paternalistic, it’s too inefficient. You know, we’ve got these antipoverty budgets that get distributed to states and localities, you’ve got a big bureaucracy that administers it, why not, they say, you know, have a program like child allowances where we’re basically just giving families cash? Is there anything that you would say on the side of the system that we’ve currently got versus a system that just gives cash to families? Robert Doar: Well, I could say a lot on the side of the current system compared to just cash. Cash coming from the federal government in a monthly allotment — sort of nameless, faceless, without any human connection — misses all of the aspects of human interaction that people have with an entity that is trying to help people. Now, people, these are the sort of pesky caseworkers and no one likes hassle and no one likes offices. But think of the other side of that — individual alone, isolated on their own, having no need to interact, I think that’s worse. We weren’t perfect in what we did in our engagement with individuals but we did help a lot of people get into employment, and we engaged with them, we showed a human concern for them. And I know there are lots of people that think that all should really take place or takes place better in faith-based organizations and community-based organizations and I have some agreement with that, but it is naive to think that those organizations are really feeling that need. The principal connection with society that some people have who struggle in America is with the government.