I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at the New America Foundation. And the program focuses on a range of policy mechanisms and programs that help families move up the economic ladder. And over the last 20 years, there's been a growing body of work and research that connects social development and economics security to being able to build up a wide range of assets. Jobs and income have always been foundational, but really over the long term, a good job is not enough. Incomes don't rise unimpeded. They fluctuate. They stagnate. Life happens with its emergencies and contingencies. And then things like the Great Recession hit. And there's job loss. And there's also a lot of wealth loss, too. In fact, we've got recent evidence that the recession has wiped out 40% of the average family's wealth holdings. But it was a lot worse the less you had going into the recession, meaning that, among other things, the climb up the ladder became a lot more difficult. And things like the racial wealth gap, which were already quite dramatic, have become even more so. So today marks the release of the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, which almost exclusively is devoted to this issue and exploring how the future of success in America is going to depend on more than jobs. It's going to also depend on being able to access a range of productive assets. It's going to depend on families being able to rebuild their balance sheets, being able to save more, and connect to these assets, both human and financial, that can make a difference over the long term. So for our Twitter discussions, if any of you are out there, we're using hashtag jobs are not enough, and certainly are interested in your comments. There's also a Washington Monthly feed that you can weigh in on. We're interested in your comments and feedback on the articles and the package. There are 12 articles altogether. The topic really gets the full Washington Monthly treatment. There's in-depth reporting. There's some sunlight on some policy ideas. There's connection between information about what the unfolding political debates should look like so readers are really armed with some real valuable insights. So it's a really interesting, I think, and very proud of this package. The first panel today features the authors, some of the authors, some of them, a couple others are in the room, but we're going to talk about some of the different perspectives on this work. It's going to feature Phil Longman, Dana Goldstein, Mark Schmidt, and myself. And then the second panel is going to be a discussion led by Paul Glastres, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly, featuring Heather McGee from Demos and David Leonhard from The New York Times. All of their bios, extended bios are in the handouts, but we're really pleased to co-sponsor this event with The Monthly. It's been a pleasure to work with them. It's always great to have their flag flying up here at New America and really an excellent publication. It's been a nice partnership. So we're pleased to co-sponsor today's events with them and also to acknowledge some of the work of our funders who have supported us in this endeavor. The Ford Foundation and the City Foundation have provided generous support and really helped produce a very timely and important issue. So I'm going to turn the program over to Phil, who is a long-time colleague who also was the project editor at The Monthly for the package. And he's actually one of the most insightful and prescient people that I know. He identifies trends decades before others are talking about them. It doesn't help sell books, but it adds to his reputation as a free thinker. And then he's going to tell us a little bit about the issue, why the politicians aren't talking about it, and why there's a hole in the bucket. Phil. Thank you, Reed. I guess my task here at the moment is to help give you a little bit of a road map to this issue and to describe its inner logic. And that logic really begins with the observation that even before the Great Recession we had pretty much near full employment, and yet the American middle class was in deep trouble, and particularly in trouble with its balance sheets. The savings rate had dropped to zero. Levels of personal debt had exploded. I can remember, I think it was five years ago in this room where we did an event with McKinsey and Company studying the baby boom generation's prospects for retirement, and as of 2006 at the height of the housing bubble, only a third of baby boomers had adequate financial savings for retirement, and even when you counted the then very inflated home equity, only about 39% of baby boomers were on course to have a reasonably comfortable retirement. Levels before the Great Recession were encumbered by unprecedented student loans, often on predatory terms. It was a generation that was already coming to be known as generation debt. Gen Xers by the mid-oughts, a third of all children born to the middle class in the late 60s and 70s had already dropped out of it, and so we had a situation in which we had this hollowing out of the net wealth and solvency of various different generations of middle class people, and it got to a point of course where even many people with jobs could no longer keep up with their mortgages, and that essentially was the precipitating cause of the Great Recession. That's what was the spark that set off the financial contagion. Now there were many reasons to fear that, or as bad as it was, things of course got a lot worse, right? It's sort of like to borrow a phrase that James Carvel is using with his new book. It's like we all had pneumonia and then we got run over by a truck, right? So as Reid said, now we see a situation where since the beginning of the Great Recession, the average family has lost 40% of its net wealth. If you look at that in generational terms, it makes a big difference. The greatest loss is concentrated among Gen Xers and younger people with baby boomers not being in much better shape. So we start with the observation that net wealth matters, that balance sheets matter, and that even if we were by some miracle of stimulus and tax cuts or whatever, we were able to get the unemployment rate back to where it was in 2007, we would still be in a lot of trouble. So how did we get here? Why did this happen? I think it's useful to recall that some people, including myself, I'll say immodestly, were able to predict as far back as the early 1980s, that by the end of the last decade, the middle class would be facing an insolvency crisis, and you didn't have to be a genius to see this. The basic reason was changing demographics. We had a gigantic baby boom generation then in its prime productive years, and it was not producing children at the rate that their parents had, and that was going to cause a challenge to the future of Social Security and private pension plans. That challenge came relatively quickly in what was probably the last act of true grand bargain bipartisanship in Washington. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill came together in 1983 to bail out the then completely bankrupt Social Security system. Social Security had zero cash flow by the end of 1983, and we were literally months away from the system no longer being able to put out checks. So both parties came together and they made a grand compromise between raising taxes and cutting benefits, and the details of that was they raised taxes on younger people, and they cut their younger people's benefits. And it took a couple of decades for the average person to figure out what had happened, but those of us who were following it knew what had happened. Our ideas of what a normal middle class retirement look like were based on the experience of our parents who had on average taken about $250,000 to $300,000 more out of the system than they had contributed to it. It was a windfall benefit that became built into what we conceived to be the standard of living for the American middle class, but going forward there would be no more surpluses. Under this grand bargain there would only be people would basically get back from Social Security what they put into it, which was okay, except it meant everybody was going to have to save a lot more than they had in the past if they expected to live like their parents did in retirement. So we came up with all kinds of ideas. We came up with 401Ks. We came up with IRAs. And these were in many ways an appropriate response to this great demographic change that we're having, not only the aging of the baby boom generation, but the dramatic change in role of women in the workforce. The traditional pension plans very poorly served women because they typically only would serve people who had lifetime full full-time employment with a single company. They didn't really serve the younger generation that was moving around from job to job much more. So it made sense that we rethought our retirement policy and really in benefit of hindsight the changes we made back then were on the order of the new deal in their ultimate effects on American life except that they were mostly on the downside as it turned out. Because while these changes were appropriate, we neglected certain key details like how are we going to make sure that people actually funded their 401Ks or participated in IRAs. And as time went by, we found out that most people, literally most people never got a chance to take advantage of these new savings vehicles. And when they did, most people were not prepared to manage these funds well. And of course, this also happened to come simultaneously with the deregulation of Wall Street. So we were basically saying to this generation, trust your retirement savings to the sharks on Wall Street while we're saving, telling the sharks on Wall Street that there were no more rules. And the result is a really a disaster for the next generation of elderly. So most people now with the verge of retirement have no retirement savings. Those who do have about $60,000 in income. And if Social Security is not cut, Social Security may replace about a third of their income. And with the current course of health care spending, even if Medicare is not cut, will he dramatically lower rate of standard of living for the next generation of elders? The next thing that happened was on the, we've been talking so far about the asset side. The next thing that happened was on the debt side. And here the story is really incredibly dramatic if you have any sense of the grand historical sweep. So going back to the code of Hammurabi, right, the earliest civilization we know of. What was in the code of Hammurabi? A law against usury. Going back to the Old Testament, we have Ezekiel telling us that usury is an abomination. Roman law kept interest rates at 12%. The Quran says that usury is the devil's work. Dante put usurers in the seventh circle of hell down there with sodomites. Martin Luther said that highest interest rate you should ever have is 8%. The Puritans when they got to America, the first law that they passed, was a usury law which stayed in place 150 years before the Constitution, through the Constitution, through all of American history until we came along. Because in the late 1970s, some people decided we didn't need usury laws anymore. And so what we had was an explosion of predatory lending, or usually not kind word for it, usury, legalized. One way to frame this is at the same time that we were telling baby boomers and younger Americans that they were on their own for retiring, for saving for the retirement, we exposed the same population to predatory lending without them having the financial education or the government protections they needed. And what happened in essence is the conditions that led to the Great Recession. So what do we propose to do about it? In the piece, or in the package, right, we have a great piece by John Kruvoff drawing attention to that wonderful brainchild of Elizabeth Warren called the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which turns out to be a much bigger deal than I think most people realize. And we can talk about that later. But in short order, we need to go back to the kind of financial regulation that has prevailed since the Code of Hammurabi until the 1970s. I don't think that's incredibly radical. And the CFPB will probably be our mechanism for doing much of that. On the asset side, you know, we argue for something that was back when I first started working these issues in the 1980s considered completely radical and bizarre because it was against the then libertarian grain of both Reaganism and much of Democratic Party thinking. We proposed a mandate, right, that people, human nature being what it is, if people need to save more for their retirement and old age, there needs to be a requirement that they do so. And in this issue, I sketch a blueprint for how we could craft a mandatory savings program for the millennial generation and its children. It's a daunting task. According to the math I developed in this piece, if we get kids starting at age zero to save and we have them save 4% of their income, a typical lower middle class worker by the time he or she ages age 67 under kind of reasonable assumptions on what returns on capital might be, could maybe look forward to a lifetime annuity of $33,000 a year starting at age 67, right? That's the magnitude of the challenge here. That's how dramatically important it is to get people saving early because even when you do, you're looking at $33,000 in income. And that with social security might get you by, right? But that's what it takes. Another approach we take in this issue is something that's not really much discussed in the normal conversations of the asset-building community, the people who've been focused on these kind of issues all along. And that is, what can we do to help people derive more income and more security out of the assets that they already have? So we're not just talking about getting people to defer current consumption to buy little pieces of paper offered by Wall Streeters, right? What can they do, for example, with their own house to monetize that asset? So one example we describe in the piece, in the package, is a very innovative program that the VA has that allows homeowners who have some sense of patriotism and civic purpose to earn a modest supplement to their income by taking in aging veterans who need nursing care in their declining years. Another we'll hear about or another one we discuss is why is it that we are, as a government, spending billions of dollars supporting green energy and having almost all of that money go to large corporations and very wealthy individuals? What could we do to get more of that, those green energy subsidies into the hands of ordinary Americans for, by example, doing what the Germans have done and allowing ordinary people to put solar panels on their house and sell electricity back to the grid? We'll also hear from Dana Goldstein in a minute about other ways that people can improve themselves through more savings. These things, I think, are within our reach. The key practical takeaway I hope you get from this is that we are, at the moment, spending about half a trillion dollars a year in subsidies for asset accumulation of one kind or another. That would be the money we're spending on the home interest deduction, on the preferential treatment of capital gains and other benefits, tax subsidies to savings and investment, and about 80% of that money is going to the wealthiest Americans. The top 1% is getting about $50,000 a year in tax subsidy, while the average person is getting about $3. So we have a completely, we have an actually very aggressive asset building program, but it is completely focused on people who are already rich and does almost nothing for people who have yet to accumulate assets. So we have the opportunity to turn that around and we also have the political moment coming up very soon, because I think it's the Washington consensus right now that right away after this next presidential election, it's all going to be about tax reform. And everybody wants a simpler, fairer, better tax code. Well, this is our moment to begin to readjust these tremendous half trillion dollars in tax subsidies and get them going to the people who need to have it go. I'll just leave you with one thought, which comes to us from James Galbreath, who's kind of known as a very liberal Keynesian economist. Keynesians are often at least perceived to be rather hostile to savings, but he makes the observation that with the benefit of hindsight, what really happened during the 1930s and 40s that got us out of the great recession? Of course, we had a new deal, and the new deal did a lot of very good things, right? It built a lot of infrastructure, it created a lot of temporary jobs, but at the end of the 1930s, we were still pretty much stuck in the rut. What changed was World War II, which of course tremendously boosted product production and raised income, but more importantly, and this is the part that people forget and that James Galbreath is reminding us of, it boosted savings because we had the entire population practically out there buying war bonds. So when the war was over, people were expecting just to go back to the great recession, except something completely different happened. What happened was of course the great post-war boom, which was brought to you by the accumulated savings of working class Americans in the form of those war bonds. Those war bonds are what allowed the expansion of credit to the middle class that financed the great post-war boom. So I think if we are going to take a lesson from history and learn from the last time we were anywhere near here, it is savings ultimately and rebuilding the balance sheets of ordinary people that brings us long-term broad prosperity. Thank you. Thank you, Phil. I'm glad to be glad to be back here in the embrace of two of my favorite institutions, New America and Washington Monthly. I want to talk a little bit about the piece that I have in this issue and the broader context. I like the framing of the cover of the magazine and the pitch of the event that these are kind of the ideas that the presidential campaigns aren't quite talking about because one of the issues that I've, one of the questions I've been dealing with is kind of how did our politics and particularly progressive politics, how do we sort of lose track of really creative ideas about how to build security for middle class families? And I think it's hard to, I think there are definitely good policies out there about pumping up the economy and things we can do. But I don't feel like there's as robust a generation of ideas and fresh approaches that really deal with the challenges as there has been in the past. So one of the things, my kind of larger project over the last six months or so is to really think about where do ideas come from? How do you make this happen? How do you inject ideas into the political process? And so one reason I really wanted to write a piece about the assets movement was really almost as a way of looking at how, as I put it in the piece, not so much how a bill becomes a law but how an idea kind of gets injected into the mainstream and takes life and gets refined and gets to the point where you can do more with it. One of the things I didn't do in the piece was put any I in it. I mean, there's none of me in it, although I wanted to write the piece in large part because this is an issue I've sort of been on the margins of for a long time. So I'm going to put the I back in here in this talk a little bit, helped by the fact that this is a kind of, this is your life panel for me. I think just about everybody here on the two panels, except for David Leonhard has been a colleague of mine at one time or another. So what's interesting, where I first kind of got interested in the ideas of helping use assets as a strategy for building economic security for poor people and the work of Michael Sheridan, which has really inspired the assets program here at New America, was when I was working on the Hill in 1991-92, I was working for Senator Bill Bradley, and we were really interested at that. There were a bunch of things he was interested in. Part of it was we needed a way, you know, we were, this was the beginning of the welfare wars. We needed a way to talk about poverty and welfare that wasn't just about work requirements and time limits. We needed something that captured a sense of possibility and human potential that people weren't always defined as, you know, dependent or, you know, welfare recipients or not that people could get to a different level. We're very affected by the statistics that kind of came out starkly in the early 1990s about the difference between African American and white wealth, which is, which remains staggering. And there's a whole new round of studies on that. There was a real, I mean, if I can, it may be impossible to pull you back to this moment, because it's been so forgotten. But there was a moment at that time when, in a sense, the Los Angeles riots of 20 years ago were almost like the Occupy Wall Street of today. And there was a moment when people thought this really will change everything. And there will be a focus on poverty again that we haven't had before. And of course, that wasn't true. And it wasn't really true of Occupy either. But these are how we sometimes think about things, which is to say, when Michael Sheridan came forward with book assets and the poor, and the idea of individual development accounts, which is to say, you've got individual retirement accounts and all the other asset programs in the middle class, why not do something that help, that help poor people, you know, actually, by saving a little, you match it a lot, and you get people to the point where they have a significant, significant account was, you know, was an idea that answered a lot of a lot of what we were looking for in poverty circles. And this was a poverty debate at the time. And, and it's, you know, so it's a, it's a bill. I remember, you know, I remember, I actually, I in the how ideas catch on, I knew Ray Bushara socially. My boss at the time, Ken Apfel, who was later the head of the Social Security Administration, knew Bob Friedman from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, also, I think, through Tacoma Park circles. And, and, and, you know, so we were kind of connected to this idea and, and, and put it together as a bill. And, and, and of course, nothing went with it, you know, it nothing really came of it, although it did kind of catch on in both, in both, as I say in the piece, and as Ray has written, in both kind of liberal democratic circles, conservative democratic circles, it was a big priority of the Democratic Leadership Council, Progressive Policy Institute, and then among those Republicans who were looking for something, you know, what would later be called compassionate conservatism at the time. So it caught on in a lot of areas. But of course, as, as, as Ray's also pointed out, we had no, you know, it was, it was purely an idea. I mean, there was no real experience with making these accounts work and actually figuring out what it, what was involved in helping people save, and those incentives and so forth. I mean, there was, there were, we were kind of running wild, as, as Ray put it, the politics were way ahead of the practice, you know, nobody had really, had really done this in any way. It's almost dangerous sometimes for an idea to kind of get picked up in the political process so fast, you know, ahead of the, ahead of actually learning what works. So in a sense, what happened after that, although there were, you know, there were some grand political proposals, I think Bill Clinton, at one point proposed like a, you know, a $50 billion program or something like that. Now, what really happened was, you know, the foundations and nonprofits getting involved and really building out this experiment and, and feeding back a ton, you know, really almost like casebook how American social policy ought to be developed, you know, which is to test it, see what works, build things up to scale, use the foundation sector along with government to create some, some feedback and information and they really built up through the American Dream demonstration some, some real answers to, to, to how these things work. And now we're in a totally different place. I mean, partly because of the, of the stagnation of the middle class. And, and, and the issues that Philip talked about, we're, we're, we're moving so far in a different direction. One of the things that we, you know, a couple years ago, here at New America, we put together this project on the next social contract. And one of the things that one of the ways I think we think about that we should think about this now is that, you know, assets are an essential part of economic security at every level, assets being having some positive assets as well as manageable debt. So that you're, you know, so that you're looking at overall, overall net worth. The way I often put it is, when you look at economic security, there's no economic security better. There's no, there's no basis for economic security that's, that's more reliable than having $10,000 in the bank. Nothing helps you through a rough patch. And if you think about it, I mean, the social contract of the patent, the New Deal social contract essentially is a set of social insurance programs of, of various kinds. And whether it's unemployment, insurance, disability, so forth. And social insurance is a brilliant, it's like one of the most brilliant concepts in human history. But there's limits to what social insurance can do, because social insurance is essentially for predictable outcomes, like you like short term unemployment in, in along the business cycle and so forth. So that the next wave of the social contract really has to involve helping ensure that people are invested with those basic flexible assets that, that can, that can kind of get people through tough times. That's something you can't do with social insurance alone. So that that becomes, so that that becomes the framework in which you think about these ideas more than just, more than just thinking about, about poverty. One of the things I found, one of the things I asked a lot of people in the course of doing this article was really the question of whether the financial crisis had, you know, had, had kind of thrown, thrown this movement, this effort for a loop, because there was a real fundamental problem, particularly with the home, you know, the, there's an, there's an assets movement that's looking at, you know, helping people really build economic security, build savings for whether it's for entrepreneurship or home ownership or whatever. And then there was the movement to really raise the levels of home ownership for, for poor people. And those are closely linked. I think even though it is, it is demonstrably false to say that the movement to increase the rates of home ownership among, among poor people caused the financial crisis, it is true that in many cases it wasn't good for those people themselves, that the, that the push to, to home ownership left them actually more vulnerable and with less assets than they, than they had going in. I thought this was an interesting, I was interested to see how the assets advocates had dealt with that. And really I think what I found was that it's almost, that, that really well structured programs that were real, that were not only helping people save, but also helping people make sure they were, you know, they knew what their choices were and were making good decisions about their assets and making good decisions about home ownership at the right time in their lives. I mean, in a sense these were actually protected, these, these turned out really well. The program in, in North Carolina run by self-help for example, you know those people are actually have much more equity in their homes, they, the default rates and foreclosure rates are much lower, they're much better off than, than a lot of the people who were just, you know, victims of the, of the financial industry. So I think it's a really good case for these programs, especially for structuring the programs well. And then the last evolution that we've seen, that we've seen here is really been to link the, the savings accounts with college, essentially with college promise programs. So that, so that governors, mayors in San Francisco and other cities for example are, you know, making that commitment that if you're coming out of one of our high schools and you're, you know, you're basically getting decent grades, we will make sure you're able to go to college. And coupling that with an account in which, in which people can save that brings them and their families into the economic mainstream creates an expectation of success that isn't there before using all these small pieces together. It's a very, very different model from this, you know, rough idea that we latched on to 20 years ago of the individual development account. The individual development account depended on, you know, a big match, sometimes like four to one match of savings to kind of get people up to the point where they had the, where they had sufficient savings. But what, what all the work that's happened since then kind of shows is that if you do this right, you don't need them, you don't need the match to be quite as high. And the match, in a sense, isn't as important as simply having that account, having that expectation, making it easy, tapping into some of the things that we know from behavioral economics about what encourages people to save and the value of savings and expectations, and that together those kinds of things created a different kind of asset.  So it's been great to see this, this idea kind of from afar, but to see the leaps it's taken to the point where it really, it's about time that it really does play in a sense that the politics catches up with the practice, as Ray would put it, and that it's time for it to once again have a much bigger place in the political debate. Thank you. So this is a really good lead-in for what I want to talk about, because what my article in the monthly looks at is what a new generation of researchers in social psychology, behavioral economics are looking at, people who are in their 20s and 30s and early 40s now, in terms of what role education plays in this, and there's two ways that education is really important when we talk about assets. First, we want to help people save so that they can get an education, and I'm going to talk about college today, but I don't mean a four-year liberal arts degree exclusively. I mean, two-year degrees, four-year degrees, occupational certificates, basically what President Obama has asked people to aspire to, which is some sort of post- high school credential, which is what's really important and crucial right now in terms of being in the economic mainstream, having the chance to put away that 4% that Phil was talking about so that you can have that payoff later on in retirement and hopefully work toward a better future for your own children. So I was looking particularly at the work of a guy named Willie Elliott, and he grew up really poor. His father and mother were both in and out of jobs all the time. They struggled with homelessness, and he actually dropped out of high school. He was quite talented, a sports player, and academically had talents that were identified, but he didn't have a lot of good advice, and he decided that he had a born-again conversion in high school. He dropped out of school and decided he was going to pursue his dreams sort of off the beaten path. He was a little bit naive about what it took to be successful out in the world. He eventually did go to college, and then he realized that he hadn't studied anything that would lead to a job, and he hadn't done internships, and he hadn't done all these other things that upper-middle-class kids do. And his parents said, oh, we have jobs right now. We can help you go to law school. But then his parents lost their jobs in their home again, and he ended up joining the military, and it ended up taking him a really long time to get on track. So when he ended up becoming a social worker and then getting a PhD, and he worked with Michael Sheridan who Mark Schmidt was talking about earlier, sort of the originator of the asset building concept, he wanted to ask this question of how can you help kids get on track earlier in the process at a younger age? And it really turns out that savings accounts can be a really powerful lever. When we talk about savings college saving accounts that either parents open for their kids or that a program can open for a kid or even that a kid can open for him or herself, it's important to realize that we're talking about relatively small amounts of money that typical savings account for a student has only $401 in it, which is really small when you think about the staggering, staggering cost of a year of college. I mean, even a community college would be several thousand dollars a year, all the costs associated with it. So how can $401 that's in an account help a child achieve their educational goals? And the answer to that is sort of there's two ways to think about it. The way that Willie Elliott, the researcher who I was just talking about terms it is that it creates a virtuous circle. And then there's another phrase I really like that's coined by the social psychologist Daphna Oysterman called bringing the future closer. When you grow up in a college educated family, you're constantly being asked to project forward. And just the act of having the savings account and having it seated with a small amount of money can help kids who grow up perhaps in families where they don't hear as much about that. It can help bring the future nearer to them in a way that is really powerful. I'm going to come back to this idea because it's important that when we give kids these savings accounts, we also combine that with financial literacy.  Once they realize the mismatch between their small savings account and the cost, that they're going to end up a little bit scared and I'll talk a little bit about some kids who've told researchers what that's like and what researchers have found is a great way to combine financial literacy education with that to counter make that. So just to give you a few more statistics about this, 79% of American kids expect that they will attend four-year college. And that is that there's a huge expectation gap. Interestingly, when I was talking to the researchers about the same number of kids in sub-Saharan Africa now also believe that they will attend a four-year college. So this message of college going as your pathway to economic success is an international phenomenon and it's just huge. And I think as a society, we just need to do a lot more in terms of thinking like, how are we actually helping children achieve this goal? Because if you send a message to somebody that this is what they're expected to do and then you don't provide a pathway there, it's a very, very frustrating and discouraging thing which I think can lead to a lot of the cynicism that is out there, especially with the recession. But 55% of kids without savings accounts end up actually enrolling in college. So just about half compared to 80% with accounts. And this is true if you hold parents like family income level constant. In fact, the accounts are greater predictive college success when you are poor. So if your family earns $50,000 or less annually and you have an account, you're three times more likely to attend college and be on track to graduate than a similar kid who doesn't have an account. So three times more likely. So that's a pretty powerful indication. Just to tell you a little bit about some of the students I talked to who are participating in these programs and what their experiences have been like. One young woman I spoke to is Marcia Jackson.   She and her twin sister were raised by their dad. He was always unemployed. He was addicted to drugs and he was violent toward them. And her twin sister was sort of she and her twin were kind of just dealing with this. And she decided one day after a fight that she couldn't deal with this anymore. And she ran away and she was put into child protective services in New York City. And she lived out the rest of her high school experience in a group home in Westchester County. And she actually did make it to a four year college. She made it to a place called Hilbert College, which is outside of Buffalo. And this is one of those four year private schools where a lot of kids just drop out and assume a lot of student debt and they don't finish. And that is in fact what happened to her. She had gotten to some credit card debt. She had never had any sort of financial literacy training in terms of how to make this leap from growing up very poor to being at college. So eventually, she ended up back in New York City and she became part of a program called Youth Financial Empowerment. And this is one of these matching savings accounts programs. So for every $1 she saved up to $1,000. She got $2 back as part of this Bloomberg program. So you could save up to $3,000. And it's not a lot of money, but she was quite successful at saving. And this was combined with financial literacy training. So for example, for youth that are aging out of foster care in New York City, there's special housing available that's very inexpensive that's particularly targeted toward them. And when I talked to Marcia what I thought was really interesting is that she said, most of her peers who are living in this special housing, they feel like the best thing to do when they get savings is to get out of that housing because it's not that nice and they would rather live in a regular apartment and they see that as a big marker of achievement. But she learned, like, what a great deal that she was getting in terms of how low cost this housing was and that investing in her educational future would be a smarter way to spend her savings. And this is something that would not have occurred to her because all the messaging in her peer group was that you want to get out of this subpar housing, which is completely understandable in the short term, she didn't love living there. But it's really important that she participate in this program because what she ended up doing with the money is she bought a Mac but computer and a digital SLR camera because she's really passionate about graphic design and that's what she wants to do. And she found that when she was enrolled in her community college graphic design courses, she couldn't actually compete and work at the same level as the kids who had parents who were buying them those sorts of tools. So it's giving her a more positive feeling about what she's doing in school and it's just helping her step forward. And so her new plan is to transfer to a four-year college and continuing studying graphic design and we'll see what happens to Marisha.  And I think it's the combination of the financial education that she's getting and the savings itself. I think if you had either one without the other, it wouldn't be as powerful of an effect. So yeah, another organization that's done this is the Kip Charter School Network. They partnered with the Citi Foundation, affiliated with the Citi Corp, to provide kids with these sorts of savings accounts. And I spoke to one young man here in DC, who's a high school junior, who is one of seven siblings and he's in a Kip school. And he got $100 in his account from Citibank. And his parents were not able to put any extra money. But again, he's embedded in an educational environment where he gets the message constantly about college. And he has the savings account. So as a result of all these factors going on in his life, he does a lot of research on scholarships and financial aid and all of this. So that's really, really powerful. When the charattans did research with kids as young as eight years old in Missouri, who are participating in I Can Save, which is a savings account program, some of these fourth graders were saying that they were scared that they couldn't save enough. So that's why we know it's really important to combine the education. Because the cost of colleges is staggering. And kids need to know about financial aid, scholarships, and all the options available to pay for it. Having the account actually can inspire them to learn more about that. So that's that piece. And happy to answer questions about that. Thanks, everybody. I'll hit clean up here and make a few comments on policy ideas, some of which we've heard a little bit about. And then we'll open it up for some questions before our next panel. And just opening remarks, that the recession has really been so debilitating because it really eroded the household balance sheet. And it stripped assets away and families are left now huddling under this debt overhang. But if you buy the premise of the magazine and this conversation that jobs are not going to be enough, and increasingly, people are going to need to access very productive assets, then we need to know about policies that help people do just that. And I have a piece in the article that kind of highlights in short description a number of ideas across the spectrum. And the first step, as we've often talked about already this morning, to promote the asset building process is savings because that's the flexible resource that can be converted into a variety of forms. And if we want to promote savings, we really should be looking at the tax code in doing so in ways of changing it to promote savings over consumption, especially for those who would benefit from it the most. So we know the tax code is a mess. It's filled with this confusing array of tax-preferred accounts with all kinds of qualified uses and exemptions and penalties. And we need to simplify and consolidate that. But when we do so, let's not just create new tax sheltering opportunities for people that already have assets, but let's create opportunities for introducing some fairness into the system so everybody can participate in meaningful ways, not just those at the top. We've done some other analysis here at New America around the tax expenditures that promote asset-building and wealth-building that Phil referred to. There's a nice infographic that shows the kind of regressive nature of this existing policy. So one way to kind of invert that is to create an accessible and incentive, we call it the savers bonus, but it would reward families for making deposits into targeted savings accounts. You could put a dollar in, get a dollar matched to $500, $1,000 a year. And eligibility could be linked to some of the existing tax credits that are out there, like the earned income tax credit. You could have eligibility for different savings products like some of the restricted retirement accounts, but also short-term products like savings bonds and certificates of deposit. So those are the incentives that we need to kind of enter into the mix. But we also need to create more savings opportunities for people, connecting people with savings plans. And we can do so at different stages of the life course. As Phil described, we've transitioned who's responsible for retirement security, but many workers are not connected to retirement savings plans. Everybody should have one. It's an essential kind of foundation for being able to augment whatever the social insurance system is able to produce years down the line. And enrollment should be automatic. The administration actually has a proposal that does this partially called the auto IRA. Workers wouldn't be required to elect to opt in. They could choose to opt out, but inertia is very powerful and would get us a lot of the way there. Then when people want to contribute, they can. We need to go further and make sure that everybody is included, not just people that are with employers that offer these opportunities, but part-time workers, contingent workers, people enter and exit the workforce. They need to access an infrastructure that is there that can lead to a savings platform that will be there for the long term. Another approach is to not wait until people are in the workforce, but to start early. Start early in life. We could start at birth. It was a bipartisan idea we've been pushing for a number of years in this bill called the Aspire Act, which had previously bipartisan support. You could do it as soon as a kid gets issued a social security number. You could also do it when they enter public schools, such as the city of San Francisco, has their kindergarten to college fund, which they're just getting off the ground with kids entering in these early primary grades. And then the Department of Ed has just announced a large-scale demonstration where they're going to test this with high school students. And this is really linked to a lot of the experience and practice that Dana was describing in her talk and in her piece. This is going to be connected to their gear-up program, which is a college readiness program focused on lower-income kids. But those kids that are in schools, everybody in a grade, will be able to get access to the savings account with financial education. And the idea is, based on research that shows these accounts, help people prepare, get ready for college, access, and actually complete degrees. So we've got some data that it's based on, but I think there's a lot more that we're going to learn from this demonstration. And of course, as many of you might know, currently we have a system of college savings, these 529 college savings plans. They actually have a lot of nice features in terms of how they deal with the economies of scale and a nice set of investment options that are not too complex. The problem is, right now, they're benefiting middle and upper-income families. Everybody should be able to benefit from this type of infrastructure, and not just those at the top. And then also, another concept that was talked about was cleaning up the financial services marketplace, where we've had a lot of actors in there who are not offering good products. And we need to ensure that people get access to high quality and low-cost financial products. And we need to shut down these modern-day loan sharks that through the course of human history, it sounds like, all the way back to the classics, has been a broad concern. And there's been a broad consensus that somehow we let break down. And in America, at this point, it's fairly unique among developed countries in the number of families that don't have access to basic bank accounts, transaction accounts, that we still have 10% estimate 10% of families don't have a basic bank account. Other countries do this by offering these accounts at post offices, low-cost, basic services. We don't. We've allowed families to then be preyed upon by these nefarious actors, these payday lenders, expensive check cashers, the fringe financial sector, where the business model is the debt trap. And it's very debilitating. So this new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has to be empowered to do its job and to shut down some of these practices and create high standards for these products and services. This basic banking should be more like a public utility where creating just opportunities for people to do the very basics of moving money around. FDIC insurance, not a lot of hidden fees. And finally, just a few more words on home ownership, which for many families is a primary wealth-building strategy. It offers the opportunity to pay down the mortgage. We build up equity. It creates opportunities for appreciation, for leveraging, also for accessing local amenities, neighborhood amenities. It's clearly not for everybody at all times. It does come with risks, as we've seen with the bursting of the housing bubble. But we also know, from experience, that many of these risks can be mitigated with more effective oversight and regulation. And this is where there's some data that's out there that's detailed in the magazine where if people got good products, appropriate products, that matched their circumstance with the support of a network of other intermediaries and nonprofit groups, they could make home ownership work for them. People that have come out of these programs have very much lower rates of default and foreclosure than the general population. They've maintained their housing equity, and it really is a still a viable path for them. And so as we kind of enter into a number of policy conversations, the one around what's the housing finance system going to look like in the future as we kind of continue to figure out what happens next after we wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we have to make sure that these opportunities are still available for moderate income families, families with lower incomes initially, initially fewer resources. But to help them get on an upward asset building and wealth building path will be very important in the coming months. So for more details on these ideas and many others, there's information in the magazine, there's evidence, there's stories to tell on how to help more Americans save and build assets and build wealth. And I invite you all to read the magazine. So those are my remarks. Thank you. Since everyone else got some applause, begging for applause here. But we have time for some questions from the audience before our second panel. And we'll move a mic around here, here, and also let me know in here. So yeah. Basil Scarlus, I want to comment on one aspect of the and comments can be made if they're brief. Yes. In addition to questions. So there you go. One aspect of the the idea of reducing consumption and increasing savings. This is already happening. And unfortunately, it also has a macroeconomic impact. There's a drag on growth. So wouldn't you want to combine this sort of effort with a massive public investment program for which I don't see much political support? I would. Mark. Yes, and public investment is savings as well.  There's uncertainty. The savings rate has gone up from where it was before the recession. But we can't do this on the backs of people that don't have a lot that are now in debt. And this is exactly the time for the public sector to make large scale investments. In fact, years ago, I remember standing up here at this very place saying, we also need 40 to 50 billion dollars for state and locals so they can keep services. We didn't do that.  And that's been a travesty. OK, right there. Hi, my name is Michael. I'm with Education Writers Association. This is a question probably for Dana. In the research promoting small savings accounts for students, is it more of an inspirational thing to pursue higher education or is it linked to better scholastic achievement? So if you start, there's some interesting research from Daphna Oeserman showing that if you start talking to kids about the link between earnings and earning a post high school degree of some sort, they actually, their scholastic achievement does go up. So it's easy to see how that sort of teaching moment can coexist with these savings accounts and the best programs do combine both of those aspects. So anything that brings the future near, including the account, including talking to kids about the link between your lifetime earnings and degree attainment. All of this creates this so-called virtuous circle. But yeah, a lot of it is aspirational and it is about closing that expectation gap. It's not enough just to tell kids that they're expected to go to college. 80% of kids have got the message. So it's about taking it to that next step. Meredith? Hi, my name is Meredith Dotson with Results. So number one, I actually really like the, I always find that statistics around how much more likely kids are to go to school if there's a savings account in their name. But one of the things I really appreciate which I had been thinking about is the, well, they figure out that even 400 bucks, $3,000, is not very big when you're talking $40,000 a year for some schools. I'm wondering if there's any data about savings and how likely that is to make sure folks, kids stay in school? Yeah. And so, cause obviously, just getting them there could just be a way to accumulate even more debt rather than actually impact their future security. Yeah, these sort of big longitudinal data sets usually look at 17 to 23 year olds whether they are currently enrolled in or have completed school. And there's, Willie Elliott and his colleagues are in the next year or two are gonna be looking a lot more at completion, which so far it's been a little bit hard to pull all those strands apart. So that's definitely on the frontier of what researchers are asking about. I will say that with $3,000 you can do something like buy your books and supplies for the year.  And especially when you grow up in a chaotic environment saying like I have the power to buy my books, I'm not reliant on anyone else for that can be a really important achievement for a young person. We have two in the back and then we'll come here. Robert Treta, international investor. I've spent 20 years working for Wall Street and another 15 looking at financial regulation. Probably nobody in this room is more skeptical about the notion of investing in Wall Street today than I am. My question is I would be equally skeptical of savings programs that would encourage people even at a young age to continue to invest in what Wall Street has to offer today. There was one suggestion of the first one about tying savings bonds to infrastructure. There are other ways to separate risk for investors from the possibility of long term substantial returns but it would take probably a government sponsored program to separate that risk but we can recommend several. So again, I caution all of you when you're trying to say to yourselves look, we have to do something to help even the youngest people start to save for their future. You have to really start thinking seriously about where these markets are going in the future and what the likelihood is of them continuing to lose money rather than gain over their long term future. Thanks. That's helpful. I'd also say with some of these especially the education accounts, some of them it's not about the return that's driving the behavior. It's having the account. Look, interest on savings accounts is just nonexistent essentially. Of course there are other 401Ks, the thrift savings plans or other models of where you're in the market and you want to match someone's risk profile long term but there's definitely a lot of issues to consider there. Yeah, right here and then we'll come here and then we'll turn it over to the next panel. Some are chatter due from Safe Foundation. I'm just wondering after United States was out of the Vietnam War and the economy seems to have been improved after that. And as you pointed out Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan conned us by saving Social Security and putting taxes and reducing benefits. If we hadn't been in all these wars and saved this money and creating more enemies through these wars which will continuously drain our assets, would we have been any better in terms of our Social Security and education and jobs for our future generation? I'm sort of out of hearing. Well, there was other wars or other investments that drained money away, public money into these other endeavors and are we worse off because of those or would we have been better off? Would we have needed that Social Security deal if we hadn't had those other kinds of needs? Well, we did squander the illusionary surpluses in Social Security through wars and tax cuts. But the basic picture is that Social Security works really great. Each generation can get more out of it than they paid in so long as the population is growing quickly. But when the population begins to moderate and at the same time race of salary and income moderate, you've got a real challenge and it's not just Social Security, it's private pensions too. So we needed to change course. We needed to do something, not abolish Social Security but supplement it with a system in which people pre-finance their own predictable cost of old age and we just botched the execution of that. Right here, last question. I've been associated with the Assets for Independence program for a long time but I really appreciated the recognition of the evolution from just the IDA to many other aspects of asset building. I really think that's where the field has gone. I don't know anyone now who talks about IDAs in isolation. All of us who are down in the trenches, I think really we link it to tax assistance, we link it to financial education, we link it to various kinds of savings and all this kind of stuff. So the field really has evolved substantially. The second thing is, especially for Dana, I'd like for her to be aware and maybe the rest of you, that in the past year or so, the folks who are responsible for child welfare and for youth in foster care and transitional living situations and in some other areas too have become very, very active around getting serious about linking youth to asset buildings of somewhat like the program in New York but there are some other angles on this too and so there are national TA centers and whatever are investing quite a bit in this have been recently and will be in the future. And the child support system touches something like 50% of all children in the country and they're also looking at how they can make these connections. Okay, thank you panelists for the discussion this morning. We're gonna bring up Paul Glastres, David Leonhardt and Heather McGee. Thank you for a discussion on the new issue and the issue of the day. You can stretch briefly. We're gonna begin promptly. To begin a conversation with two super smart and informed writers and thinkers and to kind of get their thoughts on, in some sense what we've produced in this special report but also to think more broadly about the economy, about the upcoming campaign and so forth. David Leonhardt is the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times. Previously, David wrote the paper's economic scene column for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also staff writer for the New York Times magazine, another long form guy and he helped found the economics blog, which a lot of us probably in this room read religiously and he also found it in an analytics sports column called Keeping Score, so Renaissance man here. Or at least a sports fan. A sports fan. And Heather McGee is the Vice President for Policy and Outreach at Demos and here in the DC office in 2009, she co-chaired a task force with the Americans for financial reform that helped shape key provisions of the Dodd-Frank law and also co-authored a chapter on retirement insecurity in the book Inequality Matters and her work has appeared in numerous outlets, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, Washington Post and the New York Times. So I'm just really grateful for them joining us here today. And David, you wrote a noteworthy essay for the review section of the Times a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to begin by having you talk a little bit about that piece in relation to what you have, what's in the package and the issue of wealth. In your story, you basically said one of the growing dividing lines in American politics is between the young and the old. That previous to 2004, young people and older people voted in ways that weren't all that different and since then there has been this growing divide with younger people voting democratic, older people skewing Republican and there's underlying reasons for this and one of the underlying reasons is this wealth gap between the younger generation and the older generation and that leads to all kinds of political and policy dynamics that are baleful and worrisome and I just thought if you've continued to give thought to this idea that we have a growing cleavage in this country between the younger generations and the older and what can be done about that and where it's leading us. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of the magazine. I think there are two really, I mean there's a series of economic developments and a series of political developments in terms of the age gap and I don't think we know exactly how connected they are but I think the both developments are really clear and I think they are connected and so the political development, as you said, is that I mean if you look in the 80s and 90s, the young and the old both voted, a majority of each voted for the winner in every presidential election. So this cliche that the younger, liberal and the older conservative is actually often not true. The young voted for Reagan in very large numbers and so but sometime around 2004, you really saw this divide opening up in which older people as a group moved right and younger people under 40 moved left. It's true on economic and social issues. The young are more open to an activist government. They are obviously far more liberal on social matters, whether it's gay marriage on all kinds of things. The one exception actually is abortion. The young are not more liberal than the old on abortion. They're sort of similar, that's a separate topic. And so the political question I guess is will that continue? I think from a social standpoint, it strikes me as very likely that it will continue, right? I quoted Matthew Dowd, the former George W. Bush strategist, he said, I don't think younger people are gonna wake up when they're 38 and decide they're against gay marriage, right? And that seems right to me. I think on the economic aspect of it, it's deeply uncertain. So the economic gap between the two is that the young have just been doing much worse than the old. I am not suggesting that the old have done well in this really bad 10 years of economic activity performance that we've had. They're not, but they're doing a lot better than the young. The young have been hit much harder from both an income and a wealth perspective. The gap in home ownership, the age gap in home ownership is wider than it's ever been in the 40 years we have statistics. The wealth gap by age is wider than it's ever been. And I think there are a few different things going on there. One is that older people got to ride the kind of great inflation of the stock market and to some extent of the home market. And they haven't totally deflated. I mean, the stock market in a historical perspective is still by no means cheap. And older people got to buy into that market when it was legitimately cheap in the 70s and 80s and ride it up and younger people didn't. And so I think one of the big questions when you look at this is if young people continue to struggle economically, will they remain more liberal? And I don't think we should be highly confident that they will. I think there is a chance that they will and they will continue to say we want an activist government to help us out. We want an activist government to help make investments in things like climate policy and education. But I also think there's a chance that people will get really frustrated and they'll say, hey, you know what? I've been going years without getting any kind of raise. I'm sick of spending, sending my tax dollars to Washington so they can be used on the baby boomers. And I think it's also entirely plausible that we could see a sort of Reagan-esque government backlash from people who are today quite liberal. Thanks. Heather, I saw a wonderful interview that Bill Moyers did of you recently where he, I think rightly said you're a fine spokesman for the millennial generation. And I wanted to draw you out a little bit on to the extent that you have thought about the economy from the millennial point of view and picking up on what David said. Are, is the gap between the wealth gap, the assets gap in this country, something that has political significance to younger people know the disadvantages that they're laboring under? Where is it headed? So thank you. And thank you to the New America Foundation and to the Washington Monthly for putting on this great event today, which actually was a really great pairing with an event that Demos and the American Prospect did yesterday on poverty and it's just really, I see a lot of people who, oh, sorry. I see a lot of people who have been at both. So it really gives me great hope that these conversations are happening in Washington today. So Demos is an organization, and I personally have done actually quite a bit of work on the economic challenges facing young adults. We have a report that we've done a number of times now called the State of Young America that this past year was actually accompanied with a poll that asked millennials, 18 to 35 year olds, roughly, what their sort of economic situation was, their feelings about their economic situation, their economic policy preferences, and a lot about their sort of policy prescriptions and optimism about the future. And I'll say a few things about what we learned. One is that on the poll side, it was clear that young adults have, particularly because of the recession, a much higher understanding of the unique economic challenges that they are facing than they did, say, in the 90s or in the 2000s if we look at comparing it to other polls. And I think that's great because for a long time it's been very clear that this generation, this generation, my generation, that came of age in the Reagan era, that came of age after the post-war economic boom, has really gotten the poor end of the stick in terms of a number of economic policy decisions, all of which are really focused on those pillars of economic security that we think of. Asset building is clearly one, where the housing bubble has not benefited young adults as they try to make their way. Child care, the fact that young people are, just as a given, a two income families or single parent families, and there is virtually no support for this new way of living. Education policy, we've gone from the majority of federal assistance for education, going from grants from our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation, to loans. And many of those loans are not even then keeping up with the tripling of college tuition that has occurred since 1980, so that we're now taking on private student loans, which can carry interest rates as high as 20%. I can go into healthcare, I can go into unemployment insurance, I can go from the transfer between defined benefit pensions to 401ks, which are really not useful for people who go from job to job, which are really, as the previous panel talked about, just inadequate. Demos has done actually a lot of work on sort of trying to take down the 401k as our private retirement model. We recently did a report that found that $155,000 in hidden fees are accumulated in the course of the average family's 401k. So all of these different policies that have shifted, as a lot of people have talked about, has shifted the responsibility for the basic building blocks of economic security from government and employers on to individuals have really come to bear on this generation that has experienced sort of none of the previous set of asset building, wealth building, family security building policies, and all of the really radical experiments around devolving those to the individual. So yes, young adults are in a very different place economically. Young men are making 10 cents on the dollar of what their parents did, of what their fathers did, young women are making four cents on the dollar of what their mothers did, but most of their mothers didn't work. So you would really hope that there would have been some increase. And generally, overall, we've seen a wage decline from generation to generation, so that this generation is the first to be not likely to do better than their parents economically and thus far hasn't. The one other thing that I think is an important part of the puzzle when you think about these economic policy decisions, when you think about the effects and also when you think about the politics is that this generation is also the most diverse in American history, right? This is the inequality generation, it's generation debt, but it's also the most diverse generation. Half of young people under 18 are people of color. So what does that mean? I will start with a little bit of what that means and I hope we'll keep talking about it again, but just for the politics, I don't actually think that we are in at risk of losing this generation's economic progressivism simply because of the demographics. Generally speaking, the sort of economic libertarianism has not been something that people of color have been very responsive to. Herman Cain and Alan West not withstanding because people of color tend to see the world more structurally than individually for a lot of reasons, right? This is what some of the cognitive sciences is beginning to tell us. And so the idea, if you look at even among the millennial generation, the support for government investments in sort of a minimum income in really strong education funding, higher taxes to pay for all of these things is actually much higher among youth of color than it is even among white youth. And of course those trends are only going to continue in terms of the demographic shifts. So I think if we have a politics that is responsive to these economic challenges and that gives an option that meets the values and the willingness to self-sacrifice and the sort of interest in the common good that the younger generation is currently open to, then our politics could see actually quite a major shift that is enduring. David, I wanna bore in a little bit on one of the things that Heather talked about and that I know you and I have both done a fair amount of nosing around in it and that is education. I'm old enough to remember people slightly older than I saying I worked my way through college, remember? And what worked my way through college? I mean, I had a job for 20 hours a week and that's all the money I needed to get through college, right? To just give you a sense of how far we've come in my lifetime, it is not possible now to work one's way through college. Even the least expensive college, when you add books and other things, can't be purchased on a part-time job. So we have now in this campaign, David, we've seen a fight that the president has helped nurse over student loan rates, right? Kind of positioned the Republicans into backing his lowering of student loan rates, but it was a very small thing. And talk to me a little bit about the role of student debt and tuition costs both in economic mobility generally, but also in this issue that we're talking about of the different experiences and the different circumstances that younger and older Americans find themselves. Absolutely. So college costs are clearly a problem, right? If you look at what's happened to the cost of college, it's gone way up over time. But I actually think, I'll disagree a little bit and make it more interesting. I think it's an exaggerated problem. I don't think college costs are as big of a problem as you often would glean from the discussion. And so here's why I would argue that. One, the increase in college costs looks very similar to the increase in costs of nearly every other high-skilled white-collar business, right? College costs look, the cost of college looks really abnormal if you compare it to inflation. It looks really normal if you compare it to the cost of healthcare. If you compare it to the cost even of certain forms of entertainment. Basically, services that require high-skill labor and are not vulnerable to competition from overseas have costs that generally look like college costs. Second of all, when we talk about college costs, we tend to exaggerate how much they've actually gone up. We talk about the college costs of the kind of colleges, the list price of the kind of colleges that our kids are gonna apply to, right? Those are highly abnormal colleges and most people don't pay the list price, right? So if you look at the work done by the college board on the net price, right, the actual price people are paying, you see that community colleges are essentially on average free. You see that public state universities are essentially on average, someone can correct me, but I think they're in the ballpark of $10,000 a year. And remember, that's the average, right? That includes if I send my kids to the University of Maryland, I'll be paying a lot more than $10,000. So someone who comes from an average income, which puts them well below the average in a college population is gonna pay well less than that. And so if you're talking about kind of a typical person trying to get through college, they're looking at college costs that over the course of four years might be on the order of $25,000 or $30,000. There is a big psychological hurdle for a lot of people to get over, right, because they think of costs as being higher than that. And so that prevents people from getting through college. Some of the stuff Dana was talking about before. But that $25,000 or $30,000 is something that people can repay, even if they take it out as debt, over a lifetime, quite, quite, I don't wanna say easily, because I've had student loans, but they can repay it without any problem. The gap between what college grads make and what everyone else makes is at an all-time high, despite the fact that college grads haven't done well. They've withstood this recession a lot better than everybody else. So paying off college debt is one of the single best investments you can make. It's vastly better investment than mortgage debt, obviously a better investment than credit card debt. So I think costs are a problem. I don't wanna go too far. I think they're a problem because of the psychological message they send. I think they are a problem because we have these perverse incentives in which we don't really have good ways to restrain the cost of college and we need to be thinking about it in ways to do it. But I think the bigger problem is the massive failure of kids who enter college to get through college, right? That is the problem. The problem is not the exception of the exception, the poetry grad who graduates from Sarah Lawrence College with $150,000 in debt. They're not a problem. They are so much the exception. The problem are the kids from really sort of middle to low-income backgrounds who go to a state university, who rack up 10, 15, $20,000 in debt and then don't get a college degree. They're really the problem. And they are not an exception. Something like one out of every two kids who enrolls in college doesn't graduate. And so I would argue that what we wanna do is shift the discussion a little bit more toward this whole question of getting kids through college and away from the question of is Dartmouth too expensive? Right, no, I think that's very, very well said. Let me complicate the picture just a slight bit and say that, and really this doesn't disagree with what you're saying, but within any group of colleges, be it elite colleges, public four-year, public two-year, there's great variation in graduation rates. There's great variation in the value of those degrees. And there are kids getting degrees, certainly from for-profit schools, with sizable debts in the tens of thousands and not being able to pay them off and with loans that are usurious, I think is the term. But I think in general, you're right, that it is the completion issue that we should most focus on. Yes, of course, please. So I think this is one of the big, not big arguments, just one of the big important debates of today. Finally, I think with the $1 trillion and student, an aggregate student debt marker that was hit this year, more of the policy elites are trying, are starting to talk about the issue of student debt. I do think the conversation actually is quite a bit on completion because of the Gates Foundation and a lot of other really sort of heavy hitters in this field. I wanna, because of the research that we've done at DEMA, sort of throw out a few things that may complicate the picture that you gave David. So one, I agree, of course, that healthcare costs have risen phenomenally and that college tuition is sort of similar to that. Of course, you have to compare that as the individual payer to incomes, which of course have been stagnant for the middle and working classes, right? So that's really what it comes down to. I mean, that's sort of looking at it from a supply side when you're looking at sort of, yes, if you are the sort of cost for these things have gone up because of the competition among highly educated people who are providing the services, right? The doctors, the college professors, et cetera. We took a look actually just earlier this year at what on a 50 state basis was really the main driver of the increase of college tuition and found in a report called the Great Cost Shift and found that overall, the primary driver of the increase of cost college tuition over the past two decades has been a cutback in state funding. Over the recessionary cycles when states, which of course have to balance their budgets every year, are pulling back on big ticket items such as higher education. Generally speaking, before the 1990s, they would once they were surpluses again, restore the funding. It's looked like this instead where the states have not gone back and sort of reinvested at the level that it would have cost to keep the per pupil investment in their state colleges the same. And in fact, it's about 26 cents on the dollar per pupil as an average, a national average that has been the decline since just 1990 in state funding per pupil. So that's a big part of the story that really gets I think missed when we talk a lot about sort of the drivers of cost being the things that we in this room, generally speaking, sort of recognize and see as the sort of big ticket items on college campuses, you know, the big new stadiums and all of that, right? At the elite college campuses that many people in Washington are tend to send their kids to. The other piece that I think is really important is that it is true that there is a lot of federal aid for college. I would not discount the effect that five figure student loans have on first generation college students on people who have no family assets to rely on, on people who if you just sort of sit down and do the budget for that person coming out of college if they're lucky to graduate has to actually stack up that $400 monthly payment against the $700 rent against the, you know, it just adds up. And we've done this a couple of times where, you know, your average student or graduate is gonna have about $51 left per month once they pay all of these bills. So it really does matter. And fundamentally, I think that we have to see education as a public good, not as a private cost. It is not the same. People often say, oh, well, you know, what's the big deal with $25,000 in average debt? That's, you know, that's a car, right?  But it does not do really much of anything for our society except, you know, it's great for Detroit. Trust me, buy cars. But it really doesn't do much for our society when someone takes out a loan to buy a car. It is essential that we are making the public good that is education in the information age in the global economic age, in a democracy where we ask people to be intelligent and engaged and informed enough to make the decisions over each one another's lives, that we continue to make this public good something that's not a private cost. So I think that all of those things need to be taken into consideration before we dismiss what has been a real generational withdrawal of the social contract. It reminds me of something that I wish I could remember who it was, and I can't. I apologize to that person. Someone recently said which is that this is the first generation who in order to achieve a middle class lifestyle and above, right, cannot basically do so with education that is free, right? It doesn't change the fact that for any individual going to college is massively worth it, right? It would be an enormous mistake not to take on that $25,000 in debt. But the fact is that, you know, people in the early 20th century didn't have to pay to go to high school, right? And as Heather notes, the fact is that even if it's economically the single most rational thing you could do, it does discourage people from doing it because debt is really frightening. And Paul, I'll just add one thing that I think is important about that generational gap and what you just hit on, David, the idea that it's the first generation to not to be able to do it essentially for free is that that disconnect when we talk about Washington policymakers is really, really evident. There was this incredible moment a few months ago where I believe it was Representative Virginia Fox who is the head of the Higher Education Subcommittee. In the house, you know, there was a panel about student debt, a briefing, or I guess it was a hearing. And she just sort of went and laid into this idea that students can be graduating with five- and six-figure debt.   This is a woman who's in her late 60s who went to the University of Virginia in state tuition who absolutely worked her way through college and was able to. And just this idea, of course, the average age of legislators in Congress is like triple the generation, you know, the age of the people that are actually facing this debt. And so there actually really is a disconnect because people don't understand that you can't, that people today can't do what they did. And it's a real empathy gap and it's a problem. Yeah, I think another aspect of that is what Phil Longman was saying in his remarks that we grew up seeing a certain lifestyle of retiree, right? People who lived in their homes and vacationed in Florida and they were getting a two or $300,000 bonus out of Social Security and they were living in a time when there were much wider spread, defined benefit pensions. That's our idea of retirement. I think we grew up thinking that would be easy. And what we find is it's not easy at all. It's harder now than it was then. Let me... The one piece of good news there is, right, we live longer, we're much healthier in our 60s than past generations were and we live longer, right? And I think that's why you see some of the serious discussion about to 65 makes sense as a retirement age. Problem is wealthier people live longer. No, everyone lives longer. But I mean, if you look at women of color in working class jobs, those women, those women, women in my family are living less long. No, lifespans have gone up across the population, income and race. They've gone up much more at the top but they've still gone up across the population. There is no large subgroup that's living less long than its parents or grandparents were today. Well, let me ask a question that's a little broad in scope but also on point of the generations. Wasn't it the case that in the past, the United States had asset-building policies? Heather, I think you prompted me on this one. What were the policies of asset-building, wealth-building in America's past? And did they redound mostly to the affluent and mostly to the older or was it more broad spread? So they redounded, well, here I'll start with what the policies were. I mean, starting with the Homestead Act, with the GI Bill, with the creation of the Federal Housing Authority, with the very fact of financial regulation, the very fact of usury laws, the very fact of the advent of the 30-year mortgage, which was done not on exploding, floating subprime teaser rate, right, but on a rate in that terms where, before securitization, the banker lender actually had the interest of the borrower at heart. All of those public structures, whether they were sort of the legal constructs that allowed for sort of a huge massive land grab earlier, or just regulation created the asset policy, were the asset policies that we don't really think of as asset policies the way we think of asset policy today, but absolutely were what created the building blocks for family wealth. And I think that Gowryth's addition, I think, to all of our understanding about the role that war bonds played, I think is fantastic. So the question is, who benefited from those? For most of those major policies, it was to benefit what families that would then become, in some cases, white families, male-headed families, right? So from the Homestead Act to the GI Bill to the rapid suburbanization to FHA, all of these were policies that were racially discriminatory and that were sort of created at a time when there was one breadwinner. So the question, I think, for our time is can we do that again in a more diverse America with two-headed, you know, two-income households? Can we do that again for the modern economy? Do we have the political will to do something as transformational as those policies were? Or will we keep sort of buying into the idea that success is an individual project and that nobody who's wealthy and successful and gets to be a job creator now ever had any kind of help, nor did their grandparents or parents that enabled their success.  It is really sort of, I think, the political question of our time. If we can recognize where policy played a role in creating the great middle class that we're so proud of and recommit to that kind of big-thinking generosity of spirit, generosity of imagination for a much more diverse America. Well, you know, thank you for your answer. It seems to me that the confounding thing about asset policy is that it has not had a great fandom on much of the liberal side, which historically has seen it as a diversion from the focus on more important policies having to do with income. And a kind of sense that if you don't have an income, you can't save. So why are we talking about assets and savings? And it has had, maybe not now, but in the not-so-distant past, right, certainly as recently as the 90s, buy-in from a certain portion of the conservative movement. Rick Santorum was one of the, as in Mark's piece he makes clear, Rick Santorum was one of the great champions of asset building.  Is there a way to talk about asset building, to talk about wealth creation for the average person, right? When we hear wealth creators, job creators, there's a dog whistle element to it, but I'm saying wealth creation and asset building for everyone that either side, I don't wanna say it could have bipartisan support because we don't have that now. But maybe it would be good for both sides to compete over whose asset building ideas are the best. And can you see in the next few months, as we have the play out the presidential campaign, or afterwards in this period that Phil talked about where we're gonna be discussing tax reform, can you see this becoming an issue? It's hard because even setting aside the politics, it goes against a fairly basic human instinct, which is that you don't necessarily wanna put aside for tomorrow, you wanna have something today, right? Economists sometimes talk about hyperbolic discounting and it's just this notion that, do you wanna have one candy bar today or two candy bars next year, right? And so I think that's one of the reasons why you've seen a big push in some of this policy stuff toward these nudge like policy ideas, right? In which you make it easy for people to save. You essentially say people are really busy, they're not gonna sit down and kind of analyze all their different options and try to make the best choice. And even if they did that, they might get it fabulously wrong, right? I mean, look at how many of us got the housing market wrong. Essentially, vast majority of the country, both people and experts. And so I think that's why you've seen some of the push toward things like, if you go and you start working for a company, if you do nothing, 6% of your income is set aside. You still retain the ability to say, no, no, no, I wanna put aside 10% of my income or I wanna put aside 0% of my income because I gotta pay for something right now. But I do think that you've seen kind of a lot of intellectual activity around the idea of how do we come up with ideas for savings that feel either nonpartisan or cross-partisan, right? I mean, you have some of that right in here as well. And I think, I don't know whether it'll work, but I clearly think a lot of smart people have decided that's the way to try to go. Well, let me push that idea a little bit further. In our package, Reed talks about making the 401k, or the IRA, the 401k which corporations can adopt, make it so that they must adopt a 401k or something like it so that no one who works full-time, part-time, contingent would be without at least the option of having a retirement vehicle. And then you add to that the opt-out provision that you discussed where you have to affirmatively say, I don't want you to put aside a portion of my pay. And then what Phil Longman has proposed is an even more paternalistic or draconian notion of mandatory savings that from birth and throughout your life, you have a savings account that's yours, long as there's no security number. And when you start working, 4% of your income will go into that savings account.  And that it's the mandatoryness of the annuitization that allows the annuity. And if we all go out and try to take our foreign K and annuitize it, turn it into a series of monthly payments, you're shocked at how little it is because of adverse selection. People who annuitize tend to think they're gonna live longer and the insurance companies know that so they pay less. But if everyone must annuitize, then the annuity payments are a little higher. Well, we just had a Supreme Court case where mandatory health insurance was upheld. So, again, I'm just throwing this out there, actually to either of you, can you imagine one of the candidates floating the idea of some kind of either forcing companies to offer 401ks, no more choice here, or saying to younger Americans, beginning out of date certain, we're gonna have mandatory savings. I mean, mandatory is a really tough sell in this country. It just is. The Supreme Court upheld the mandate, but they did a backflip to do it and it remains deeply unpopular in the country. And so, as Heather talked about, I mean, 401ks from a substantive perspective are really problematic, right? They're also one of the few ways in which younger people are actually more conservative than older people. Younger people are more in favor of private retirement accounts. I think because more of them see themselves as working more than one job, I think because more of them are skeptical that Social Security's really gonna be around for them. I mean, I wonder whether some combination of sort of incentives, perhaps sort of big ones, to have companies do this 401k stuff along the lines of what you're talking about, with when you think about the massive amount of money that's now spent on these tax breaks, which the issue also covers, thinking of that as a pot of money, that instead of going as tax breaks for all the things we now have tax breaks for wasteful healthcare, second homes, you could imagine that as sort of a pot of money that might be available to help people save. So I think mandatory is possible. I think in this country, mandatory is a very hard sell. I think it might be difficult. So there are two parts of kind of the big reform on individualized retirement accounts. And one would be an auto IRA where you're just saying, here's the IRA, you have to opt out. The other is the idea that it actually does, and then part of that is also a little further is a mandate that employers actually provide one, which so many don't today, let alone a match. But the other is the idea that actually it shouldn't be related to a company, but that every child born should just have some sort of savings account. And I think that that is such a like phenomenally new idea, particularly I think for young people who, and I think this is part of actually why young people are skeptical about social security, is that A, they've grown up hearing constantly that it's going to be insolvent, it's not there for them, and then B, it is so far from the type of policy that they've seen in their lifetime, the sort of on your own policy message on every single aspect, whether it's healthcare, education or childcare, everything. It's sort of, it's a relic. It does seem far from the ethos that we've grown up in. So I do think that the skepticism is responsive to the policy shifts of our time. So the idea of really giving every young, every child born today a savings account seated with some money with neighborhood groups, being able to contribute parents, being able to contribute all of that is so sort of wildly socialist in nature. I will say that just the idea that there is something that the government is actually just sort of giving everybody just to start out with, that I do think a mandate on top of that might be a lot more workable than a mandate just on what employers are providing. Which I think is also part of the sort of the healthcare problem is that it's sort of this mixed employer, individual, government, payer, and providing a man, and creating a mandate on that actually sets the entire sort of libertarian and lobbyist sort of infrastructure on fire in a way that I think it might not if it were just something that we've never seen before for free and there were some obligations to that. I mean the one thing to keep in mind with the background of this is whatever you're talking about, you now have a federal government that is overwhelmingly devoted towards supporting the old and not the young. Right, and so however you get there, it's important to remember as a starting point that the federal government through Medicare and Social Security sends an enormous amount of its resources to the over 65 population and a very small part of its resources to the 30 and under population. Right, right, and as Phil Longman was saying, the deal in 1983 over Social Security was, we're gonna raise the taxes on younger people and lower the benefits on younger people and older people didn't pay. I'd like to open it up now, we've got a few minutes for some questions from the audience and we'll start when we have a microphone here. And the first question might be from Reed Kramer saying, why did you just call our signature policy idea socialist? Yeah, that's a good word. Just later right here, please. Thank you so much, my name is Mary Ann Stein, I'm the president of the Mariah Fund. I'm curious, so much about your discussion has been young versus old. You did raise the gender issue a little bit since women are still earning much less than men and women often don't acquire the height of wages or the length of employment, et cetera. My understanding is Social Security as it has been operating has been a major transfer and also the divorce rate, I guess I could say has been a major transfer of assets towards women and I'm wondering to what extent you have been thinking about some of the inequities that exist and will continue to exist in ways that some of your ideas would either work or not work to counter some of these gender inequities. I'll just say that's exactly right and I think that there are some great proposals out there actually to even increase what still remains even in Social Security inequity in terms of offering a caregiving credit for the time that women generally spend out of the workforce. I do think that that's another reason why we should really think about it any kind of lifelong savings account not being tied to an employer. I mean, I think if you look at the statistics of women and men and women, you see that in many ways women have just made enormous progress, right? I mean, they're now doing better than men in education a lot better at every level, right? More women graduate from high school, more women enroll in college, more women graduate from college, more women enroll and graduate programs at every level women are doing better than men and yet we still have this wage gap and so you ask what is the reason for that? Well, I think some portion of it is still kind of outright sexism but I don't think it's the majority. I think the majority of it is the different way we treat parents. If you look at the studies that have followed people coming out of school, the sort of trajectory, wage trajectory of men and women looks incredibly similar once you control for things like education. Incredibly similar in the early years of their working lives. You don't see men and women getting the same degrees and coming out and the men making 10% more than the women. It is, if not equal, it might be equal, it might be just off a little bit. What happens is when women leave the workforce, they take a large and permanent hit to their earnings and social security is just a great example of that, right?  Two of them have one person working and one person at home caring for their own kids and the other two have one person working and the other two people also at home but they're caring for each other's kids, right? That second group of people, the people taking care of the kids are getting social security and the first aren't, right? Just because they're taking care of the other kids as opposed to their own kids. And so to me, social security is a really good example of how our economy is structured in a way that massively penalizes in almost every single economic way people who take time off to raise children or to care for sick parents or people who even work part-time to do it. And you don't think of it as much because it's the long-term, right? The short-term hit is the income, the medium-term hit is the career trajectory but the long-term hit is social security. And let me also add that a society in which you take this enormous hit to do right by society and raise the next generation is a society that doesn't raise very many of the next generation and the heart of a lot of our economic sluggishness, the heart of some problems in social security and pensions and so forth is not enough kids. Phil Longman is the king of this issue but they've tried to tweak government policies in some European countries to see if they can't affect birth rates and so forth by higher social insurance like social security. They haven't had a ton of luck at it but just a plain equity issue, it's important. And at some point we've got to stop penalizing the folks that are raising the kids. Next question, can we go to the back there? Make our guy walk a little bit. Astrid Doerner with Germany's Business Daily Handle Splat. Can you hear me? Yeah, okay. My question is for David. I'd like to go back to something you said in the very beginning that young voters might be becoming less liberal when it comes to economic issues and I'd like to get a little bit more color if you can. What does that mean for this election? What does that mean for the president and for the Obama camp? Are they worried about it? How are they dealing with it? How dangerous is that development for the president? So I don't think there's a lot of evidence of it happening yet just to be clear. I don't think we see the evidence that younger voters are becoming more conservative economically yet. I mean, the whole countries could become more conservative over the last two or three years, right? But young people have done that in line with everybody else. I mean, I think Heather made a really important point which is that while it's true that sort of across races, within each race, younger voters are more liberal than older voters, it's also true that the ethnic mix of younger voters is different and there is some reason to expect over the long term that African American, Latino, and Asian American voters would remain more left than white voters. Now, the growing parts of the population are Latino and Asian American, not African American and Latinos and Asian Americans while to the left of whites are to the right of African Americans. So I think it's a little bit hard to know exactly what would happen. I guess my main point was simply that when a group of people is doing bad economically, you can see them reacting two ways in terms of the right left spectrum economically. One is to say, I want more help from the government. And that's I think what we're seeing so far from younger voters, although again, we don't know how much of it is simply the social stuff, how much of it is simply younger voters saying, I'm not voting for a party that is unfriendly to immigrants and gays, right? But I think some of that is the younger voters saying they want a more activist government. But I don't think that's the only reaction people who are struggling economically could have. Another reaction could be, let me keep my money. Don't tax me, I'm incredibly stressed. And I think you have seen that at different points over the last 30 years in this country. And I don't think we should assume necessarily that the economic struggles of young people will keep them economically liberal forever. There's also somebody back there, we can. Hi, Tara Dunderdale, I'm at Ed Policy, doctoral student at GW and my BA and my MA were at public universities and I graduated with five figure debt. Now I'm heavily subsidized for my doctoral work. Given, Heather, like you said, that the average age of Congress is 60, so older than my parents, and overwhelmingly male and wealthy, and so are their donors, what is the political impetus that's going to drive forward any of this change that is potentially on the table in terms of legislative change that has to happen to enact these kinds of policies? I think that's a really, really great question. I think that the questions about who has the ear and the power over our elected officials, leaving aside for just a moment who they are, is really the most fundamental one. So who are the donors? Are we allowing people to donate as much as they have and therefore we will never have people who have $5 to spend have as much of the ear of their elected official as someone who has $5 million to spend? Who is able to easily vote no matter how many times they move, no matter what kind of identification they may have, no matter what their criminal record, no matter what their, as we're seeing now in Iowa, credit report? Those are the key questions, because it does actually matter. If let's say we have the elected officials that we have now with their demographics, their backgrounds, their life experiences and all of that, in the immediate term, we do have the ability to hold elected officials accountable for the policies that they create that impact our lives. But those people, those same people are actually setting the rules, actually about campaign finance, about access to the ballot that make, I believe in Demos, this is why in addition to focusing on all of these economic issues, we equally, excuse me, focus on democracy issues, that question of access to our elected officials is really the key one. And so in a way, I would actually argue that it's great to have all these policy solutions that we hope that fair-minded and responsive elected officials are going to adopt for the next generation, but first we need to make sure that they're listening and that they are listening to a broad diverse segment of the society. Makes you wonder whether anyone will ever start an American Association of Unretired People and try to get younger people to vote more because while there are certainly voter suppression issues, as you're saying, the most of the gap between the rate at which old people vote and young people vote is purely voluntary. Young people choose not to vote and that's one of the reasons why the government is so much less geared toward them than it is toward people who do vote. We have time for one more question and I'm gonna offer this to Mark, who... Well, I just wanted to, I'm Mark Smith. I just wanted to add to this. I think it's been fascinating to me to see how much the Paul Ryan budget plan sets up a very stark generational split, age 55. You're over the 55, nothing changes. That's a very significant marker. That means you entered the workforce. Basically, if you're 55 and older, graduated from high school in the mid-70s, you basically didn't have any time in the workforce during those post-war booming years where people did accumulate savings and so forth. It's a very stark choice and yet the political response has been on the Republican side is to basically say, seniors, don't worry about it. The Democratic response is to still go after older voters and say they're gonna take away your Medicare. And I think it's a missed opportunity to actually draw out this generation. I mean, we've had social security privatization and that was an interesting lesson that it was an attempt to create a generational warfare which actually didn't happen. And you realize that in fact, even if a lot of younger people didn't think social security was gonna exist, but a lot of people, they knew contemporaries who'd been protected by social security survivors insurance. It was felt there was a little cadre of us who had received social security and we did care about it. It didn't happen. The point is you can win it. These things can be won without always turning it in to scare the elderly. And the challenge I think for our politics is how do you do that? I try to ask a question, but I don't know. I mean, it's that's like European style, socialized single payer medicine if you're 55 and older and health savings accounts if you're 54 young. I wanna thank everybody for coming. It's been a great discussion. Thank you panel. Thank you. Thank you.