A half-century after America launched its "War on Poverty," millions of families are unstable and have few prospects for achieving sound economic footing, according to experts participating in a Washington, D.C., conference Wednesday.
But they agreed that there's broad bipartisan interest in some of the steps needed and great opportunity exists to help struggling families.
The "Roadmaps to Opportunity: Federal Policy, Poverty and America's Kids" conference focused on policy ideas to create opportunities for families in poverty. It was co-sponsored by the newspaper The Hill and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which produces the annual Kids Count reckoning of childhood well-being in America.
Panelists said closing several gaps that divide American families across areas as diverse as employment, early childhood education and marriage would help raise families out of poverty and strengthen the future of the country. Suggestions for fixing problems included a "constellation" of short-term and long-term approaches from restructuring the tax code to protecting and even expanding tax credits and bolstering employment opportunities for low-skill workers.
"We really need to renew the war on poverty and create some new opportunities for more people who have been left behind," said keynote speaker Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland.
A country considering where it wants to be in 25 years must consider how its children are doing, said Patrick McCarthy, president of the Casey Foundation. He said that half of children are born into families at risk of falling into poverty and 20 percent are already there. One in 10 lives in deep poverty, meaning below 50 percent of the federal poverty line.
"Clearly, we have lots of kids that face the barriers that come with growing up in poverty," McCarthy said, adding it's no help that the bottom of the income ladder is "sticky," the kids glued in place. Those in families in that bottom fifth economically are five times less likely to move up that ladder.
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said the challenges are what Robert D. Putnam, author of "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis," calls a "perfectly purple problem," referring to the color labels of Democrats (blue) and Republicans (red). Republicans and Democrats both have insights into making things better and that bipartisan cooperation is needed. When agreement is reached on diagnosis, "we can start the competition of ideas to find solutions," Gerson said.
Persistent gaps
Gaps exist across demographic lines. America has a two-tier family structure, as the more educated and more wealthy approach family life following tradition, including getting married and then having children. The poor are more often unmarried, less-educated and more challenged by their situations, facing what Gerson called "toxic stress."
Along with difference in family structure and stability, Brookings Institution senior fellow Isabel Sawhill listed other areas with growing gaps, including income inequality, test scores that seem to follow income lines, college attendance and graduation. In all those cases, those with money and education fare better.
The fact that there is such a difference between what happens to families with money and education and those without "threatens the ideal where anyone can work hard and make it. We are becoming a much more stratified society and that's worrisome," she said.
Gerson said Putnam believes "Americans in general are willing to live with a degree of inequality in a society with social mobility. But in a society without social mobility, it becomes a caste system." Social mobility is a person's ability to improve social strata.
Gaps in the workplace are key to a discussion of prosperity. Several panelists noted that young male adults with few skills and little education struggle to find work. Gaps exist for those with jobs, too. For example, American productivity has greatly increased in the last half-century, Van Hollen said. But that extra effort has not been rewarded with higher wages or better benefits. He questioned why a company that doesn't let workers share in what their increased productivity provides gets tax breaks on paying out bonuses of more than $1 million for the chief executives.
The monetary gains "have gone disproportionately" to the people at the top and have not been shared," he said. "Right now, we reward return on capital more than the return on hard work."
He predicted "trying to make sure we have an economy that works for everyone and not just the folks at the very top is absolutely going to be the fundamental conversation in our country going forward."
Adjusting policy
Although anti-poverty programs haven't ended poverty, Van Hollen said experts believe 40 million more Americans would be poor without them, in addition to the 50 million who are poor.
The group said that recent and proposed cuts to social programs would "shred" the safety net, including cuts to programs that provide nutrition assistance or access to medical care for the poor. America already has a "stingier" safety net compared to other advanced countries, Sawhill said.
But fixing social policy is challenging. The war on drugs was singled out as an example of a policy effort that did more harm than good. Van Hollen called it a "fundamental mistake to treat the war on drugs as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a public health issue. The result is we're seeing hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses."
Sentencing reform has drawn bipartisan interest, said Doug O'Brien, senior policy adviser for rural affairs to the Domestic Policy Council and the White House. So have other social policies and suggestions aimed at strengthening vulnerable families, from the earned income tax credit and child care credit to supported-employment efforts.
McCarthy said stabilizing families takes a two-generation approach that helps children learn and thrive while also giving parents supports, including in the workplace. Poor families often have to prioritize work over family.
"We have to figure out how to make work pay, but also how to make work work," McCarthy said.
Sawhill's list of fixes includes job creation, "more sensible economic policies" and continued efforts to support couples so they can wait to start families until they are ready to be parents, which includes being in stable relationships.
But they agreed that there's broad bipartisan interest in some of the steps needed and great opportunity exists to help struggling families.
The "Roadmaps to Opportunity: Federal Policy, Poverty and America's Kids" conference focused on policy ideas to create opportunities for families in poverty. It was co-sponsored by the newspaper The Hill and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which produces the annual Kids Count reckoning of childhood well-being in America.
Panelists said closing several gaps that divide American families across areas as diverse as employment, early childhood education and marriage would help raise families out of poverty and strengthen the future of the country. Suggestions for fixing problems included a "constellation" of short-term and long-term approaches from restructuring the tax code to protecting and even expanding tax credits and bolstering employment opportunities for low-skill workers.
"We really need to renew the war on poverty and create some new opportunities for more people who have been left behind," said keynote speaker Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland.
A country considering where it wants to be in 25 years must consider how its children are doing, said Patrick McCarthy, president of the Casey Foundation. He said that half of children are born into families at risk of falling into poverty and 20 percent are already there. One in 10 lives in deep poverty, meaning below 50 percent of the federal poverty line.
"Clearly, we have lots of kids that face the barriers that come with growing up in poverty," McCarthy said, adding it's no help that the bottom of the income ladder is "sticky," the kids glued in place. Those in families in that bottom fifth economically are five times less likely to move up that ladder.
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said the challenges are what Robert D. Putnam, author of "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis," calls a "perfectly purple problem," referring to the color labels of Democrats (blue) and Republicans (red). Republicans and Democrats both have insights into making things better and that bipartisan cooperation is needed. When agreement is reached on diagnosis, "we can start the competition of ideas to find solutions," Gerson said.
Persistent gaps
Gaps exist across demographic lines. America has a two-tier family structure, as the more educated and more wealthy approach family life following tradition, including getting married and then having children. The poor are more often unmarried, less-educated and more challenged by their situations, facing what Gerson called "toxic stress."
Along with difference in family structure and stability, Brookings Institution senior fellow Isabel Sawhill listed other areas with growing gaps, including income inequality, test scores that seem to follow income lines, college attendance and graduation. In all those cases, those with money and education fare better.
The fact that there is such a difference between what happens to families with money and education and those without "threatens the ideal where anyone can work hard and make it. We are becoming a much more stratified society and that's worrisome," she said.
Gerson said Putnam believes "Americans in general are willing to live with a degree of inequality in a society with social mobility. But in a society without social mobility, it becomes a caste system." Social mobility is a person's ability to improve social strata.
Gaps in the workplace are key to a discussion of prosperity. Several panelists noted that young male adults with few skills and little education struggle to find work. Gaps exist for those with jobs, too. For example, American productivity has greatly increased in the last half-century, Van Hollen said. But that extra effort has not been rewarded with higher wages or better benefits. He questioned why a company that doesn't let workers share in what their increased productivity provides gets tax breaks on paying out bonuses of more than $1 million for the chief executives.
The monetary gains "have gone disproportionately" to the people at the top and have not been shared," he said. "Right now, we reward return on capital more than the return on hard work."
He predicted "trying to make sure we have an economy that works for everyone and not just the folks at the very top is absolutely going to be the fundamental conversation in our country going forward."
Adjusting policy
Although anti-poverty programs haven't ended poverty, Van Hollen said experts believe 40 million more Americans would be poor without them, in addition to the 50 million who are poor.
The group said that recent and proposed cuts to social programs would "shred" the safety net, including cuts to programs that provide nutrition assistance or access to medical care for the poor. America already has a "stingier" safety net compared to other advanced countries, Sawhill said.
But fixing social policy is challenging. The war on drugs was singled out as an example of a policy effort that did more harm than good. Van Hollen called it a "fundamental mistake to treat the war on drugs as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a public health issue. The result is we're seeing hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses."
Sentencing reform has drawn bipartisan interest, said Doug O'Brien, senior policy adviser for rural affairs to the Domestic Policy Council and the White House. So have other social policies and suggestions aimed at strengthening vulnerable families, from the earned income tax credit and child care credit to supported-employment efforts.
McCarthy said stabilizing families takes a two-generation approach that helps children learn and thrive while also giving parents supports, including in the workplace. Poor families often have to prioritize work over family.
"We have to figure out how to make work pay, but also how to make work work," McCarthy said.
Sawhill's list of fixes includes job creation, "more sensible economic policies" and continued efforts to support couples so they can wait to start families until they are ready to be parents, which includes being in stable relationships.
