| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
We'll get into what I thought some of the lowlights were. | |
| It went up fairly high, in my opinion, up the income distribution to be assisting better off. | ||
| I don't want to call them wealthy better off families as well. | ||
| And so the highlights were we did what we did for child poverty, which everybody here estimated. | ||
| We were looking at calling up the Columbia folks and like, you know, what has this done? | ||
| What are your simulations telling us? | ||
| Right? | ||
| We had a significant reduction in child poverty. | ||
| I think that was a huge accomplishment, showing that it's possible to do this. | ||
| I don't know if you had the conversation of what the impacts might have been on labor supply. | ||
| We don't think it was very large. | ||
| And so this was, it's demonstrated it was a way to significantly increase the material well-being for families with young children. | ||
| So that's highlight. | ||
| Low light is, I think it was a little too generous. | ||
| So in the rooms, like I really think that the full refundability was important. | ||
| I thought that that was more important than going up higher on the income distribution. | ||
| And so, but when you try to do both, it gets expensive, which made it a bit of a target. | ||
| And an administration that was, you know, in hindsight looks really fiscally responsible in comparison. | ||
| It's, you know, it's all relative. | ||
| But nonetheless, we had those conversations in terms of what the trade-offs were. | ||
| So, you know, do I wish it were more generous today than, do I need it to have been as generous as during the American Rescue Plan? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think it would, but I wish it were still fully refundable. | ||
| So there's a pretty robust debate about how to deliver the credit monthly versus annual. | ||
| There's a large body of research that shows when people get large tax refunds, some important things happen. | ||
| If you have a college-age kid in the house or an older high school student, there's work out there that shows you're more likely to enroll in college. | ||
| There is plenty of work out there that says you get the big refund, you can do mobility-enhancing activities, you can put a down payment on a new apartment, you can buy a used car, you can buy a refrigerator. | ||
| All of these seem like very noble things. | ||
| And then there's also a discussion that people have monthly needs. | ||
| They're living on a knife's edge. | ||
| They're taking payday loans. | ||
| They're paying enormous amounts of money to get their tax refund faster. | ||
| And so that sort of cuts into the maybe we ought to deliver this thing monthly. | ||
| And I am interested in both of your thoughts about this annual versus monthly program. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| I'm the habitographer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I think you've laid out a lot of the pros and cons. | |
| I think that, look, I don't do politics, I don't do the politics, but there was also a discussion of if we give people the monthly benefit, then they're getting that on a more regular basis. | ||
| They can really count on it. | ||
| They don't have to wait till the end of the year. | ||
| On the other hand, it cut down on the salience. | ||
| So it was just something that they were getting in their bank account. | ||
| They're getting it every month. | ||
| And I think the Biden administration got very little political credit for it. | ||
| I don't know how I haven't seen the evidence on whether it made a difference for families to receive it on a monthly basis. | ||
| It was a huge lift for Treasury to be able to pull that off. | ||
| Larry Summers, I think, complained, like if they were doing that instead of focusing on other things, because that diverted resources. | ||
| Let's be real, implementation matters for this. | ||
| And so I don't know if you did a full accounting for whether getting what we accomplished by giving it monthly, because there were a lot of other resources that were going to families. | ||
| But we were worried about families that were credit constrained and for which having the smooth injection would make a difference. | ||
| But I haven't looked to see sort of on net whether the benefits of doing that outweighed the costs. | ||
| And one thing you mentioned earlier is how good Social Security is at delivering checks, and they do it monthly. | ||
| So I think it interacts with the sort of nature of the design in the following way. | ||
| So a feature of the Affordable Care Act, as it was originally enacted, came out that troubled me was the fact that where they drew the line between the Medicaid expansion and the ACA, many people transited that line once, often twice in a year. | ||
| So they're bouncing on and off the premium tax credits on and off the ACA exchanges. | ||
| They're changing their providers at the same time. | ||
| It's actually impairing the quality of the health care that's being delivered. | ||
| And that just seemed like a problem to me. | ||
| I don't know what the volatility looks like in this, and I haven't seen anything on that. | ||
| Where do you, if you deliver it monthly, do you just say, okay, we make a determination at the beginning of the year, we deliver the same amount monthly no matter what happens to them? | ||
| That might be a practical reality that you need to just accept. | ||
| But how much of a problem is that going to be when you start getting into the politics? | ||
| Someone says, well, this person's not supposed to be getting this. | ||
| They're making too much money. | ||
| So I think a little bit about that. | ||
| And then it also depends how quickly you phase it out and things like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think that's a lot of the issue. | |
| When you have this credit that goes to nearly every child in the country, 90% of families, then you got to believe that some families, it's going to hit differently than other families. | ||
| I don't think, I think the understanding, but I could be wrong. | ||
| I'm sure there are people here who know, who can answer this better. | ||
| But I think the view was they were going to make the determination of eligibility once and just spread it over the year as opposed to... | ||
| We'll leave our recorded program here. | ||
| You can watch it in full on our website, C-SPAN.org. | ||
| Live coverage now on C-SPAN of President Trump's arrival in Tokyo, Japan. | ||
| For the | ||
| latest comments from President Trump. | ||
| We returned now to our scheduled programming already in progress. | ||
| Some additional cash assistance to just to make it flat out say we understand. | ||
| I mean, what is it? | ||
| I think it isn't there a baby bond, maybe even in the one big beautiful bill, right? | ||
| So we're going to be need, right? | ||
| That is child assistance. | ||
| So I don't think it's, I don't think it's like a dark day where nothing is going to move here because I think there's just going to be a demographic need. | ||
| And if you look at some of the politics, politics are, you know, going to be pushing in that direction as well. | ||
| So I personally think that this is still a time to be thinking innovatively, thinking creatively, because I think that there will be some political need. | ||
| And I think the states are going to be part of that solution. | ||
| And I think the federal government may be stepping in as well. | ||
| So I think on the child care per se, that the states are the ideal laboratory for that to take place. | ||
| For just the cash support, I think the politics line up. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of conservatives who are very pro-family, are very concerned about the fertility decline. | ||
| They're going to be all in for a set of reasons that aren't exactly the same as trying to get it to the worst-off circumstances for kids. | ||
| And, you know, it is going to be a future with finite resources to do things. | ||
| So you've got to find things that are going to appeal to both sides. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kids often land in the middle of that sweet spot. | |
| There's maybe some looking, some optimistic, you know, future. | ||
| So I will remind everyone online: if you have questions, feel free to send them in. | ||
| And they're supposed to magically pop up on my iPad here, though I don't see any right now. | ||
| So I will go to one more question. | ||
| So both of you are in the business of leading organizations that produce policy research. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of researchers out here, and we would be interested in your view on what are you doing to prepare for these moments, either the budget crisis that's here and will stick with us, or anything else. | ||
| I forgot my Milton Friedman quote that I rely on all the time in Capitalism and Freedom. | ||
| And so I'm going to sort of butcher it, but it literally has a quote that says, you know, there are periods where it looks like there's a lot of inertia, but our job is, you know, you have to wait for the moment where the politically impossible becomes inevitable. | ||
| And our job, and people are looking for ideas that are lying around, and our job is to provide those ideas. | ||
| Because if the ideas aren't lying around and aren't there, when the moment arrives, you will have missed the moment. | ||
| So this is our moment. | ||
| I mean, I'm excited for this for our researchers and for people who want to think creatively and boldly. | ||
| There may be a moment that didn't exist, you know, six months ago, two years ago, whenever, for various demographic reasons or whatever might come, but you got to have the ideas. | ||
| And so that's our job. | ||
| That's your job. | ||
| That is your job. | ||
| The business model at AAF is a little different than the traditional think tank. | ||
| I realized, well, I realized a couple things. | ||
| Number one, if you lose an election, you're unemployed. | ||
| And I hadn't really focused on that. | ||
| And so I had to figure out what I was going to do with myself. | ||
| And what I realized is that the White House, the CBO, and on the campaign, you did policy research, policy education, policy options, policy advice, but you did it in a very particular fashion, which is you worked on whatever was happening that day. | ||
| You don't have the luxury of saying that's not my area, call me later. | ||
| You work on what's happening. | ||
| You have to convey your results in English to non-experts, to non-specialists. | ||
| And you have to be cognizant of the political lay of the land. | ||
| CBO by stash is nonpartisan, so you can't get involved there, but everything in the White House is about the president's agenda, everything on a campaign, well, that's sort of obvious. | ||
| And I came to the conclusion that I had done that for my political masters. | ||
| The average American might benefit from that as well. | ||
| That, you know, an oil blows up in the Gulf. | ||
| They haven't been reading white papers on offshore oil production. | ||
| They're like, okay, what are my options here? | ||
| And, you know, we are apologetically market-oriented in our solutions, and there are people like that. | ||
| So, you know, they can come to us. | ||
| And so our papers in particular are meant to be digestible. | ||
| If we write eight pages, that's war and peace. | ||
| Our target audience is a congressional staffer who's not on the committee of jurisdiction, needs to get smart quick. | ||
| And so it relies on everybody in this room for the deep research and to have those ideas be out there. | ||
| We're always reading that, being ready to convey what does the literature tell us about what we should do in this thing. | ||
| And that way, we're part of this, you know, Milton Friedman guerrilla warfare that is policy, right? | ||
| You get an opportunity and you do it. | ||
| You have to do it and try to do it and work in real time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excellent. | |
| So I think that is an excellent place to end this conversation. | ||
| There's marching orders for everyone. | ||
| As I close this event, I want to, of course, thank the Doris Duke Foundation for their support. | ||
| We are grateful. | ||
| We feel like we've been able to do a lot of fun research and we've learned a lot along the way. | ||
| Thank you to Urban's events teams, communications team, governor affairs team. | ||
| You are the best at what you do, and we are so grateful here. | ||
| And I particularly want to thank Greg Och and Hilary Hoynes for being co-directors of this initiative with me. | ||
| And also Joe Bratas and Margo Crano-Hollick, who are at their war station, I believe Margo calls it, in the back. | ||
| They keep everything running, but more than that, they provided a lot of the substantive background that made the content of this convening what it was today. | ||
| And so I'm grateful. | ||
| We're in a policy moment, I think, where a lot of us wake up each day and everything just feels hard. | ||
| And I will say that looking at this room full of people who are dedicated to thinking about children has been very uplifting for myself. | ||
| I have a little thing on my computer, and it says there is no future without children. | ||
| And I think that is a reason why we do this work. | ||
| And I'm so grateful for everyone who has stuck with us through it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington to across the country. | ||
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| Congress returns this afternoon for day 27 of the federal government shutdown. | ||
| The Senate gavels in at 3 Eastern. | ||
| Lawmakers will vote later in the day to confirm two of President Trump's nominees for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. District Court in central Alabama. | ||
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| Governors Andy Bashir and Mike DeWine discussed bipartisanship and policy solutions with former Ohio Senator Rob Portman. | ||
| They shared their experiences working across party lines to achieve results for their constituents and talked about the federal government shutdown and the deployment of the National Guard to U.S. cities. | ||
| This is less than an hour. |