Mr. Dionne: It's a real
honor to be here today with my two Presidents --
President Obama and President DeGioia. (laughter) And my
friend, David Brooks, hurled the most vicious
insult at me ever once when he said that I was the only
person he ever met whose eyes lit up at the words,
"panel discussion." (laughter) And I have to confess my eyes
did light up when I was asked to do this particular
panel discussion -- and not just for
the obvious reason, to my left -- and, again,
it's a real honor to be with you, Mr. President
-- or Arthur or Bob. Poverty is a subject we talk
about mainly when tragic events, such as those
we witnessed recently in Baltimore, grab
our attention. Then we push it
aside; we bury it; we say it's not politically
shrewd to talk about it. So I salute Georgetown, my
friend John Carr and Galen Carey, and all the other
extraordinary people who are gathered here for the
poverty summit from all religious traditions
all over the country. Our friend, Jim Wallis,
once said that if you cut everything Jesus said
about the poor out of the Gospel you have a
book full of holes. And these are evangelicals,
Catholics and others who understand what the
Scripture said. Just two quick organizing
points on our discussion. The first is that
when it's time to go, please keep your seat
so the President can be escorted out. The other is that Bob and
Arthur and I all agreed that we should direct
somewhat more attention to President Obama than to the
other members of the panel. (laughter) I just say that -- I
say that in advance so that you know this was
our call and not some exercise in
executive power. (laughter) This was our
decision to do this. (applause) And in any event,
we hope this will be a back-and-forth
kind of discussion. Bob and Arthur, feel free
to interrupt the President if you feel like it. (laughter) My first question,
Mr. President, is the obvious one. A friend of mine
said yesterday, when do Presidents
do panels? And what came to mind is
the late Admiral Stockdale, "Who am I? "Why am I here?" (laughter) And I'd like to
ask you why you decided -- this is a very unusual venue
for a President to put himself in -- and I'd like
to ask you where do you hope this discussion will
lead beyond today? And I was struck with
something you said in your speech last week. You said, politicians
talk about poverty and inequality, and then
gut policies that help alleviate poverty and
reverse inequality. Why are you doing this,
and how do you want us to come
out of here? The President:
Well, first of all, I want to thank
President DeGioia, the Georgetown community,
all the groups -- nonprofits, faith-based
groups and others -- who are hosting this today. And I want to thank
this terrific panel. I think that we are at a
moment -- in part because of what's happened in Baltimore
and Ferguson and other places, but in part because
a growing awareness of inequality in our society
-- where it may be possible not only to refocus attention
on the issue of poverty, but also maybe to bridge
some of the gaps that have existed and the ideological
divides that have prevented us from making progress. And there are a lot of folks
here who I have worked with -- they disagree with
me on some issues, but they have great
sincerity when it comes to wanting to deal with
helping the least of these. And so this is a
wonderful occasion for us to join together. Part of the reason I thought
this venue would be useful and I wanted to have a
dialogue with Bob and Arthur is that we have been
stuck, I think for a long time, in a debate that creates
a couple of straw men. The stereotype is that
you've got folks on the left who just want to pour more
money into social programs, and don't care anything
about culture or parenting or family structures, and
that's one stereotype. And then you've got
cold-hearted, free market, capitalist types who are
reading Ayn Rand and -- (laughter) -- think everybody
are moochers. And I think the truth
is more complicated. I think that there are those
on the conservative spectrum who deeply care about
the least of these, deeply care about the poor;
exhibit that through their churches, through
community groups, through philanthropic
efforts, but are suspicious of
what government can do. And then there are those on
the left who I think are in the trenches every day and
see how important parenting is and how important
family structures are, and the connective tissue
that holds communities together and recognize that
that contributes to poverty when those structures fray,
but also believe that government and resources
can make a difference in creating an environment
in which young people can succeed despite great odds. And it seems to me that
if coming out of this conversation we can have a
both/and conversation rather than either/or conversation,
then we'll be making some progress. And the last point I guess I
want to make is I also want to emphasize we can do
something about these issues. I think it is a mistake for
us to suggest that somehow every effort we make has
failed and we are powerless to address poverty. That's just not true. First of all, just
in absolute terms, the poverty rate when you
take into account tax and transfer programs, has
been reduced about 40 percent since 1967. Now, that does not
lessen our concern about communities where
poverty remains chronic. It does suggest, though,
that we have been able to lessen poverty when
we decide we want to do something
about it. In every low-income
community around the country, there are programs
that work to provide ladders of opportunity
to young people; we just haven't figured
out how to scale them up. And so one of the things
I'm always concerned about is cynicism. My Chief of Staff, Denis
McDonough -- we take walks around the South Lawn,
usually when the weather is good, and a lot of
it is policy talk, sometimes it's just
talk about values. And one of our
favorite sayings is, our job is to guard
against cynicism, particularly
in this town. And I think it's important
when it comes to dealing with issues of poverty
for us to guard against cynicism, and not buy the
idea that the poor will always be with us and
there's nothing we can do -- because there's
a lot we can do. The question is do we
have the political will, the communal will to
do something about it. Mr. Dionne: Thank
you, Mr. President. I feel as a journalist maybe
I'm the one representative of cynicism up here -- (laughter) -- so I'll try to do my job. I want to go through the
panel and come back to you, Mr. President. I want to invite Bob, and
I'm going to encourage us to reach for solutions. But before we get there, I
think it's important to say that your book, Bob,
your book, "Our Kids, " is above all a moral call
on the country to think about all the kids in the
country who have been left out as our kids,
in some deep way. And you make the point that
the better off and the poor are now so far apart that
the fortunate don't even see the lives of the unlucky
and the left behind. You wrote, "Before I
began this research, I was like that." And following on what
the President said, you insist that the decline
in social mobility, the blocking of the
American Dream for so many is a
purple problem. And I may have some
questions later on that, but I really would like you
to lay out the red and blue components. And also, how do we break
through a politics in which food stamp recipients
are still somehow cast as privileged or the
poor are demonized. But I'd like you to lay out
sort of the moral call of your book. Mr. Putnam: Thanks, E.J.,
and thanks to the President and to Arthur for joining
me in this conversation. I think in this domain
there's good news and bad news, and it's important
to begin with the bad news because we have to
understand where we are. The President is absolutely
right that the War on Poverty did make
a real difference, but it made a difference
more for poverty among people of my age than it
did for poverty among kids. And with respect to kids, I
completely agree with the President that we know about
some things that would work and things that would make a
real difference in the lives of poor kids, but what the
book that you've deferred to, "Our Kids," what it
presents is a lot of evidence of growing gaps
between rich kids and poor kids; that over the
last 30 or 40 years, things have gotten better
and better for kids coming from well-off homes, and
worse and worse for kids coming from less
well-off homes. And I don't mean Bill Gates
and some homeless person. I mean people coming from
college-educated homes -- their kids are doing
better and better, and people coming from high
school-educated homes, they're kids aren't. And it's not just that
there's this class gap, but a class gap on our watch
-- I don't mean just the President's watch, but I
mean on my generation's watch -- that
gap has grown. And you can see it in
measures of family stability. You can see it in measures
of the investments that parents are able to
make in their kids, the investments of money and
the investments of time. You can see it
in the quality of schools kids go to. You can see it in the
character of the social and community support that
kids -- rich kids and poor kids are getting from
their communities. Church attendance is a good
example of that, actually. Churches are an important
source of social support for kids outside
their own family, but church attendance is
down much more rapidly among kids coming from
impoverished backgrounds than among kids coming
from wealthy backgrounds. And so I think what all of
that evidence suggests is that we do face, I think,
actually a serious crisis in which, increasingly, the
most important decision that anybody makes is
choosing their parents. And if -- like my
grandchildren are really smart, they were -- the best
decision they ever made was to choose college-educated
parents and great grandparents. But out there,
someplace else, there is another bunch
of kids who are just as talented and just as --
in principle -- just as hardworking, but who
happened to choose parents who weren't very
well-educated or weren't high-income, and those kids'
fate is being determined by things that they
had no control over. And that's
fundamentally unfair. It also is, by the way,
bad for our economy, because when we have this
large number of kids growing up in poverty, it's not like
that's going to make things better for my grandchildren. It's going to make things
worse for my grandchildren. So this is, in principle,
a solution that we -- a problem that we ought
to find solutions to. And historically, this
is a kind of problem that Americans have faced
before and have solved, and this is the basis
for my optimism. There have been previous
periods in American history when we've had a great gap
between rich and poor, when we've ignored
the least of these, in which we've -- I'm
thinking of the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th
century -- and both of you have written
about that period, in which there was a great
gap between rich and poor and we were ignoring
lots of kids, especially lots
of immigrant kids. And America seemed to
be going to hell in a hand basket. And there was a
dominant philosophy, social Darwinism, which
said that it's better for everybody if
everybody is selfish, and the devil
take the hindmost. But that, unlike some of the
ideology of Ayn Rand that you referred to -- but that
period was quickly -- not quickly -- but was overcome
by a real awakening of the conscience of America
across party lines, with the important
contribution of religious leaders and
religious people, to the fact that these
are all our kids. And now is not the time to
rehearse all of the lessons of that earlier period, but
I think it does actually give me grounds for hope. This is a kind of problem
that we could solve as long as we all recognize that
it's in everybody's interest to raise up these poor
kids and not to leave them in the dust. Mr. Dionne: Thank
you very much. By the way, let the record
show the President was not looking at Arthur when he
referred to cold-hearted capitalists. (laughter) But it is nice to have
somebody here from the AEI. Mr. Brooks: Well, D.J., when
the President said that, I was just thinking -- what
was going through my head was, please don't look at
me, please don't look at me. (laughter) But you notice
when Bob said this -- about the social Darwinism,
he pointed at me. (laughter) So I'm more
outnumbered than my Thanksgiving table in
Seattle, let me tell you. (laughter) Mr. Dionne: You just have
to look into your heart, Arthur. And in fact, that's kind of
what I want to ask you to do here. I mean, your views on these
subjects have actually changed, and I think it's
one of the reasons you wanted to join us today. Back in 2010, you talked
about makers and takers in society and a culture
of redistribution. But in February 2014, you
wrote a very important article and commentary --
the open-handed toward your brothers -- and you said we
have to declare peace on the safety net, which I think is
a really important thing to say. And as the President
suggested, the safety net we have
has actually cut poverty substantially. So twin questions: Could you
talk about how and why your own views have changed
-- if I've fairly characterized that. And in the spirit
we're celebrating here of trans-ideological
nonpartisanship -- now, there's a mouthful
for you -- in that spirit, where can Republicans
cooperate with Democrats, conservatives with liberals,
on safety net issues like making the earned income
tax credit permanent or expanding the
child tax credit? I mean, where can we find
not just verbal common ground, but actual common
ground to get things done for the least among us? Mr. Brooks: Thank
you, E.J. And thank you,
Mr. President. It's an honor to be here
and with all of you. This is such an important
exercise in bringing Catholics and
evangelicals together, but having a
public discussion. One of the main things that
I do as President of AEI is to talk publicly about
issues and start a conversation with my
colleagues in a way that I hope can stimulate the
conversation and spread it around the country. At the American Enterprise
Institute -- where we have a longstanding history of work
on the nature of American capitalism -- when we're
focusing very deeply on poverty, it sends a signal
to a lot of people that are deeply involved in the
free enterprise movement. My colleague, Robert Doar
is here -- he came to AEI because poverty is the most
important thing to him. And indeed, the reason
I came into the free enterprise movement many
years ago is because poverty is the thing I
care about the most. And in point of fact, 2
billion people around the world have been lifted up
out of poverty because of ideas revolving around free
enterprise and free trade, and the globalization of
ideas of sharing through property rights
and rule of law, and all the things that
the President is talking about in policy
debates right now. That's why I'm in this
particular movement. But we've gotten into a
partisan moment where we substitute a moral
consensus about how we serve the least of these, our
brothers and sisters, where we pretend that
that moral consensus is impossible, and we
blow up policy differences until they become
a holy war. That's got to stop because
it's completely unnecessary. (applause) And we can stop that,
absolutely, with a couple of
key principles. So how are we on the center
right talking about poverty in the most effective way? Number one is with a
conceptual matter. We have a grave tendency on
both the left and the right to talk about poor
people as "the other." Remember in Matthew 25,
these are our brothers and sisters. Jim Olsen and I have
this roadshow -- we go to campuses and everybody
wants to set up something, right-left debates,
and it never works out, because it turns out we both
have a commitment to the teachings of the Savior when
it comes to treating the least of these, our
brothers and sisters. When you talk about people
as your brothers and sisters you don't talk about them
as liabilities to manage. They're not
liabilities to manage. They're assets to develop
because every one of us made in God's image is
an asset to develop. That's a completely
different approach to poverty alleviation. That's a human capital
approach to poverty alleviation. That's what we can do to
stimulate that conversation on the political right,
just as it can be on the political left. One concept that rides along
with that is to point out -- and this is what I do to
many of my friends on Capitol Hill -- I remind
them that just because people are on public
assistance doesn't mean they want to be on
public assistance. And that's the difference
between people who factually are making a living and
who are accepting public assistance. It's an important matter
to remember about the motivations of people
and humanizing them. And then the question is,
how can we come together? How can we come together? I have, indeed, written that
it's time to declare peace on the safety net. And I say that as a
political conservative. Why? Because Ronald
Reagan said that; because Friedrich
Hayek said that. This is not a
radical position. In fact, the social safety
net is one of the greatest achievements of free
enterprise -- that we could have the wealth and
largesse as a society, that we can help take care
of people who are poor that we've never even met. It's ahistoric; it's
never happened before. We should be proud of that. But then when I talk to
conservative policymakers, and say how should you
distinguish yourself from the traditional positions in
a marketplace of ideas from progressives, you should
also talk about the fact that the safety net should
be limited to people who are truly indigent, as opposed
to being spread around in a way that metastasizes into
middle-class entitlements and imperils our economy. And the third part is that
help should always come with the dignifying power of work
to the extent that we can. Then we can have, with these
three ideas -- declaring peace on the safety net,
safety net only for the indigent, and always with
work -- then we can have an interesting moral consensus
and policy competition of ideas and maybe
make some progress. Mr. Dionne: Thank you. In fact, I'm hoping people
will challenge each other about what that actually
means in terms of policy. And I want to invite the
President to do that. I'm tempted, Mr. President,
to ask you to sort of go in a couple of
directions at once. One is, I am, again, hoping
that you can enlist Arthur as your lobbyist on this. One kind of question I want
to ask is if John Boehner and Mitch McConnell were
watching this and suddenly had a conversion -- and
there are a lot of religious people in the audience,
so miracles -- The President: I assure you
they're not watching this. (laughter) But it's a
hypothetical. (laughter) Mr. Dionne: Well, it's
a religious audience. I believe in miracles. (laughter) So if they said
we are so persuaded that it's time we do
something about the poor, Mr. President, tell us a
few things that we'll actually pass, we'll do this
-- when you think about -- we can talk kind of
abstractly about the family on this side, and
what government can do. What do you think would
actually make a difference? So that's one kind of
question I'm tempted to ask. And maybe you could put
that into the context of Bob's mention of the
Gilded Age. As you know, I was much
taken by that Osawatomie speech -- I even learned how
to pronounce Osawatomie, thanks to you -- back
in 20 -- help me. (laughter) The President: A
couple years ago. Mr. Dionne: A couple
years ago -- 2011. And it really did put this
conversation in context. We do seem in certain ways
to be having the problems we had back then. So what would you
tell Congress? Please help me on this. And how do we sort of move
out of this Gilded Age feeling kind of period? The President: Let me tease
out a couple things that both Bob and Arthur said --
and maybe some of these will be challenging to a couple
of them and they may want to respond. But let me talk
about big picture, and then we can talk
about specifics. First of all, I think we can
all stipulate that the best antipoverty
program is a job, which confers
not just income, but structure and dignity
and a sense of connection to community. Which means we have to
spend time thinking about the macro-economy, the
broader economy as a whole. Now, what has happened is,
is that since, let's say, 1973, over the
last 40 years, the share of income going
to the bottom 90 percent has shrunk from about 65 percent
down to about 53 percent. It's a big shift. It's a big transfer. And so we can't have a
conversation about poverty without talking about what's
happened to the middle class and the ladders of
opportunity into the middle class. And when I read Bob's
book, the first thing that strikes you is when
he's growing up in Ohio, he's in a community where
the banker is living in reasonable proximity to
the janitor at the school. The janitor's daughter
may be going out with the banker's son. There are a set of common
institutions -- they may attend the same church; they
may be members of the same rotary club; they may be
active at the same parks -- and all the things that
stitch them together. And that is all contributing
to social mobility and to a sense of possibility
and opportunity for all kids in
that community. Now, part of what's happened
is that -- and this is where Arthur and I would probably
have some disagreements. We don't dispute that the
free market is the greatest producer of wealth in
history -- it has lifted billions of people
out of poverty. We believe in property rights,
rule of law, so forth. But there has always been
trends in the market in which concentrations of
wealth can lead to some being left behind. And what's happened in our
economy is that those who are doing better and
better -- more skilled, more educated, luckier,
having greater advantages -- are withdrawing from sort of
the commons -- kids start going to private schools;
kids start working out at private clubs instead
of the public parks. An anti-government ideology
then disinvests from those common goods and those things
that draw us together. And that, in part,
contributes to the fact that there's less opportunity for
our kids, all of our kids. Now, that's not inevitable. A free market is perfectly
compatible with also us making investment in
good public schools, public universities;
investments in public parks; investments in a whole bunch
-- public infrastructure that grows our economy
and spreads it around. But that's, in part,
what's been under attack for the last 30 years. And so, in some ways, rather
than soften the edges of the market, we've
turbocharged it. And we have not been
willing, I think, to make some of those
common investments so that everybody can play a part
in getting opportunity. Now, one other thing I've
got to say about this is that even back in Bob's
day that was also happening. It's just it was happening
to black people. And so, in some ways, part
of what's changed is that those biases or those
restrictions on who had access to resources that
allowed them to climb out of poverty -- who had access
to the firefighters job, who had access to the
assembly line job, the blue-collar job that
paid well enough to be in the middle class and then
got you to the suburbs, and then the next generation
was suddenly office workers -- all those things were
foreclosed to a big chunk of the minority population in
this country for decades. And that accumulated
and built up. And over time, people with
less and less resources, more and more strains --
because it's hard being poor. People don't
like being poor. It's time-consuming'
it's stressful. It's hard. And so over time,
families frayed. Men who could not
get jobs left. Mothers who are single are
not able to read as much to their kids. So all that was happening
40 years ago to African Americans. And now what we're seeing is
that those same trends have accelerated and they're
spreading to the broader community. But the pattern that, Bob,
you're recording in some of your stories is no different
than what William Julius Wilson was talking about
when he talked about the truly disadvantaged. So I say all this -- and I
know that was not an answer to your question.
0:27:54.506,1193:02:47.295
(laughter) I think it is important
for us at the outset to acknowledge if, in fact, we
are going to find common ground, then we also have to
acknowledge that there are certain investments we
are willing to make as a society, as a whole, in
public schools and public universities; in, today,
I believe early childhood education; in making sure
that economic opportunity is available in communities
that are isolated, and that somebody
can get a job, and that there's actually a
train that takes folks to where the jobs are --
that broadband lines are in rural communities
and not just in cities. And those things are not
going to happen through market forces alone. And if that's the case,
then our government and our budgets have to reflect our
willingness to make those investments. If we don't make
those investments, then we could agree on the
earned income tax credit -- which I know
Arthur believes in. We could agree on home
visitation for low-income parents. All those things will
make a difference, but the broader trends in
our society will make it harder and harder for
us to deal with both inequality and poverty. And so I think it's
important for us to recognize there is a
genuine debate here, and that is what portion
of our collective wealth and budget are we willing
to invest in those things that allow a poor kid,
whether in a rural town, or in Appalachia, or
in the inner city, to access what they need
both in terms of mentors and social networks, as
well as decent books and computers and so forth, in
order for them to succeed along the terms that
Arthur discussed. And right now, they
don't have those things, and those things have
been stripped away. You look at state budgets,
you look at city budgets, and you look at
federal budgets, and we don't make those
same common investments that we used to. And it's had an impact. And we shouldn't pretend
that somehow we have been making those same
investments. We haven't been. And there's been a very
specific ideological push not to make those
investments. That's where the
argument comes in. Mr. Dionne: And if
I could follow up, which gets to the underlying
problem where we talk, piously, sometimes, about
let's tear down these ideological
red/blue barriers, yet when push
comes to shove, these things
get rejected. How do you change the
politics of that? I mean, as you said, Mitch
McConnell and John Boehner were unlikely to be watching
us -- that actually has a kind of political
significance. Not to this event,
but in general. The President: I was
suggesting they're busy right now. They've got votes. (laughter) Mr. Dionne: No, but I
think you were saying something else. How do you tear
down those barriers? Because you laid out a
fairly robust agenda there. And I want to -- forgive me,
Arthur and Bob -- but I'm curious, how do you
get from here to there? The President: Well, part
of what happened in our politics and part of what
shifted from when Bob was young and he was seeing a
genuine community -- there were still class divisions
in your small town. Mr. Putnam: True. The President: There were
probably certain clubs or certain activities that were
still restricted to the banker's son as opposed
to the janitor's son. But it was more integrated. Part of what's happened is,
is that elites in a very mobile, globalized world
are able to live together, away from folks who
are not as wealthy, and so they feel less of a
commitment to making those investments. In that sense -- and
what used to be racial segregation now mirrors
itself in class segregation and this great sorting
that's taking place. Now, that creates
its own politics. Right? I mean, there's some
communities where I don't know -- not only do I
not know poor people, I don't even know people
who have trouble paying the bills at the end
of the month. I just don't know
those people. And so there's a less sense
of investment in those children. So that's part of
what's happened. But part of it has also been
-- there's always been a strain in American politics
where you've got the middle class, and the question has
been, who are you mad at, if you're struggling;
if you're working, but you don't seem
to be getting ahead. And over the last
40 years, sadly, I think there's been an
effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top,
or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to
suggest that the poor are sponges, leaches, don't
want to work, are lazy, are undeserving,
got traction. And, look, it's still
being propagated. I mean, I have to say that
if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a
constant menu -- they will find folks who
make me mad. I don't know where
they find them. (laughter) They're like,
I don't want to work, I just want a free
Obama phone -- (laughter) -- or whatever. And that becomes an entire
narrative -- right? -- that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear
an interview of a waitress -- which is much more
typical -- who's raising a couple of kids and is doing
everything right but still can't pay the bills. And so if we're going to
change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we're
going to have to change how our body politic thinks,
which means we're going to have to change how the media
reports on these issues and how people's impressions of
what it's like to struggle in this economy looks
like, and how budgets connect to that. And that's a hard process
because that requires a much broader conversation
than typically we have on the nightly news. Mr. Dionne: I am tempted
to welcome Arthur to defend his network. But instead, I want to sort
of maybe invite him to an alter call here. (laughter) I want to invite
you to a kind of alter call, which is, the President
talked about some basis public investments that
are actually pretty old-fashioned
public investments, along the lines of somebody
like President Eisenhower supported a lot of those
kinds of investments -- The President: Republican
President Abraham Lincoln thought things like
land-grant colleges and infrastructure, investments
in basic research in science were important. I suspect, Arthur, you'd
agree in theory about those investments. And the question
would be, how much? Mr. Brooks: Look,
no good economist, no self-respecting person
who understands anything about economics denies that
there are public goods. There just are public goods. We need public goods. Markets fail sometimes --
there's a role for the state. There are no radical
libertarians up here, libertarians who believe
that the state should not exist, for example. Even the libertarians
don't think that. So we shouldn't caricature
the views of others because, in point of fact, that
impugns the motives. I think that what we're
talking about is, one, when are there public goods? When can the government
provide them? And when are the benefits
higher than the costs of the government
proving these things? Because, in point of
fact, when we don't make cost-benefit calculations
at least at the macro level about public goods,
the poor pay. This is a fact. If you look at what's
happening in the periphery countries of Europe
today, as George W. Bush used to say,
this is a true fact. (laughter) It's more emphasis. There's nothing wrong. (laughter) If you don't pay
attention to the macro economy and the
fiscal stability, you will become insolvent. And if you become insolvent,
you will have austerity. And if you have austerity,
the poor always pay. Jim Wallis taught me this. The poor always pay
when there's austerity. The rich never pay. The rich never are
left with the bill. It's the poor who are
left with the bill. So if you join me in
believing the safety net is a fundamental, moral right,
and it's a privilege of our society to provide, you
must avoid austerity and you must
avoid insolvency. And the only way that you
can do that is with smart policies. And I'm 100 percent sure the
President agrees with me about smart macro-economic
public policies, so I'm not caricaturing
these views either. Although can you believe
he said "Obama phone"? (laughter) And he's against the
Obama phone. So let's stipulate to that. (laughter) Just because they took
away his phone. (laughter) Now, since we believe that
there should be public goods, then we're really
talking about the system that provides them and
provides them efficiently. The President talked about
the changing structure of the income distribution, and
it's unambiguously true. What I would urge us to
regret is this notion that it's not a shift,
but a transfer. It's not a transfer. Since the 1970s, it's not
that the rich have gotten richer; because the poor
have gotten poorer. The poor are not having
their money taken away and given to the rich. The rich have gotten richer
faster than the poor have moved up. And we might be concerned
with that because that also reflects on opportunity. And as an
opportunity society, as an equal
opportunity society, we should all be really
concerned with that. But the extent that we can
get away from this notion that the rich are
stealing from the poor, then we can look at this
in I think in a way that's constructive. Why? Because the rich are our
neighbors and the poor are our neighbors, and everybody
else should be our neighbors and they're all our kids. And I think getting away
from that rhetoric is really important. And then the last
point, actually, as we come to consensus is
remembering that capitalism or socialism or social
democracy or any system is just a system. Look, it's just a system. It's just a machine. It's like your car. You can do great
good with it, you can do great
evil with it. It can't go uninhibited. So far it can't
drive on its own. It will soon enough. The economy never
will be able to. Capitalism is nothing
more than a system, and it must be predicated
on right morals. It must be. Adam Smith taught me that. Adam Smith, the father of
modern economics -- he wrote "The Wealth of Nations," in
1776 -- 17 years before he wrote "The Theory
of Moral sentiments, " which was a more important
book because it talked about what it meant as a society
to earn the right to have free enterprise, to
have free economics. And it was true then, and
it's still true today. So this is why this
conference is so important. This conversation with the
President of the United States is so important, from
my point of view -- I say with appropriate humility
-- is because we're talking about right morality toward
our brothers and sisters, and built on that, that's
when we can have an open discussion to get our
capitalism right. And then the distribution of
resources is only a tertiary question. (applause) Mr. Dionne: I still want to
know how much infrastructure you're actually willing to
vote for, but I'll take -- Mr. Brooks: $41 billion. Mr. Dionne: All
right, it's a start. We can negotiate. I want to -- this is in a
way for both the President and Bob, because in this
conversation about poverty, there's kind of consensus
on this stage that, yes, you need to care about
family structure, it really matters, but if
you don't worry about the economy, you're not sort
of thinking about why the battering ram is
against the family. And yet, this family
conversation can make a lot of people feel uneasy
because it sounds like either you're not taking
politics seriously, or you're not taking the
real economic pressure seriously. And I just want to share two
things with the President and Bob, and
have you respond. One, as you can imagine, I
asked a lot of smart people what they would ask about if
they were in my position. And one very smart
economist said, look, what we know is when we have
really tight labor markets, unemployment down below --
down to 4 or even lower -- Kennedy, Johnson
years, World War II, at the end of the Clinton
years -- all kinds of good things start happening
to poor people. So maybe, this person said,
even though, he says, yes, family structure matters,
let's stop with the moral lectures and just run a
really tight economic policy, and we could have
some really good things happen to us. And then the other thing I
wanted to share -- and I'm being pointed here,
Mr. President, because you know and I've
heard you talk about this, but not that often publicly,
which is -- you know, I've heard you in those
sessions you do with opinion reporters -- Ta-Nehisi
Coates wrote something back in 2013 about your talk
about what needs to happen inside the African American
community -- I know you remember this: "Taking
full measure of the Obama presidency thus far, it is
hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has
one way of addressing the social ills that afflict
black people and particularly black youth,
and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time
imagining the President telling the women of Barnard
that 'there's no longer room for any excuses' -- as
though they were in the business of making them." I'd love you to address sort
of the particular question about -- maybe it is
primarily about economics because we can't do much
about the other things through government policy,
and also answer Ta-Nehisi's critique, because I know
you hear that a lot. The President: Why
don't we let Bob -- Mr. Dionne: Let Bob -- Mr. Putnam: Well, I'm going
to try to respond to that, and of course, I want to
hear what the President has to say about that. But I wanted to just comment
briefly on that earlier conversation, first of
all, about public goods. I agree very much with the
President's framing of this issue -- that is that we
disinvested in collective assets, collective goods
that would benefit everybody but are more important for
poor people because they can't do it on their own. I want to just give one
example of that that's very vivid, and this is a case
where we've clearly shot ourselves in the foot. For most of the
20th century, all Americans of all walks
of life thought that part of getting a good education was
getting soft skills -- not just reading,
writing, arithmetic, but cooperation and
teamwork, and so on. And part of that was that
everybody in the country got free access to
extracurricular activities -- band and football,
and music and so on. But beginning
about 20 years ago, the view developed
-- which is really, really deeply evil --
that that's just a frill. And so we disinvested, and
we said if you want to take part in football here, or
you want to take part in music, you've got
to pay for it. And of course, what that
means is that poor people can't pay for it. It's a big deal -- $1,600 on
average for two kids in a family. Well, $1,600 to
play football, or play in the band, or
French club or whatever -- it's not a big deal if
your income is $200,000; but if you income
is $16,000, who in their right mind
is going to be paying 10 percent of their
family income? So it seems to me that
that's a case where the allocation that the benefits
of learning teamwork and hard skills -- I mean grit
were only on the individual. But that wasn't true. The whole country was
benefitting from the fact that we had a very
broad-based set of skills that people had. So I'm trying to emphasize
this -- how deep runs this antipathy in some quarters
for the notion that these are all our kids
and, therefore, we've got to invest
in all of them. But I also want to then
come back, if I can, to I think the thing we
maybe haven't spent enough time here, and that is
this is a purple problem. There are those of us who
on the left can see most clearly the economic sources
of this problem and want to do something about it. But then there are people
on the conservative side, especially religious people,
who use a different lens and they can see most clearly
the effects of family disruption among poor
families of all races on the prospects of kids. And in the stories of the
kids that we gathered across America -- I want to return
a little bit not just to the abstract discussion of
poverty, but to real kids. Mary Sue from -- doesn't
have anything the like the same opportunities
as my granddaughter. But part of that is because
Mary Sue's parents behaved in very irresponsible ways. We interviewed a kid from --
a young woman from Duluth who is now on drugs. How did she get on drugs? Because her dad was addicted
to meth and wanted to get high, but didn't want
to get high alone, so her dad taught -- Molly
is her name -- how to smoke -- how to do meth. I don't even know how
you do meth myself. I'll have to check with him. (laughter) And it's systematically --
the fact is we all know this, that it's -- I'm not
making an attack on single moms, who are often doing
terrific jobs in the face of lots of obstacles, but
I am saying it's harder to do that. And therefore, we need
to think, all of us, including those of us -- and
I know the President agrees with me about this -- even
those of us on the more progressive side
have to think, how did we get into a state
in which two-thirds of American kids coming from
what we used to call the working class have
only a single parent, and what can we
do to fix that? I'm not sure this is
government's role. But I do think that if we're
concerned about poverty, we also, all of us, have to
think about this purple side of the problem -- I mean,
this family side of the problem. And we shouldn't -- those of
us -- I'm now speaking to my side of the choir -- we
shouldn't just assume that anybody who talks about
family stability is somehow saying that the
economics don't matter. Of course, the
economics matter. It's both/and;
it's not either/or. (applause) Mr. Dionne: Mr. President? The President: A couple
of things I would say. First of all, just going
back to something Arthur said earlier about how we
characterize the wealthy, and do they take this extra
wealth from the poor, the middle class -- these
are broad economic trends turbocharged by technology
and globalization, a winner-take-all economy
that allows those with even slightly better skills to
massively expand their reach and their markets, and they
make more money and it gets more concentrated, and that
then reinforces itself. But there are values and
decisions that have aided and abetted that process. So, for example, in the era
that Bob was talking about, if you had a company
in that town, that company had a whole
bunch of social restraints on it because the CEO felt
it was a member of that community and the sense of
obligation about paying a certain wage or contributing
to the local high school or what have you was real. And today the average
Fortune 500 company -- some are great corporate
citizens, some are great employers --
but they don't have to be, and that's certainly
not how they're judged. And that may account for the
fact that where a previous CEO of a company might have
made 50 times the average wage of the worker, they
might now make a thousand times or two thousand times. And that's now accepted
practice inside the corporate boardroom. Now, that's not because
they're bad people. It's just that they have
been freed from a certain set of social constraints. And those values
have changed. And sometimes tax policy
has encouraged that, and government policy
has encouraged that. And there's a whole
literature that justifies that as, well, that's what
you'd need to get the best CEO and they're
bringing the most value, and then you do tip into
a little bit of Ayn Rand. Which, Arthur, I think you'd
be the first to acknowledge because I'm in dinners with
some of your buddies and I have conversations
with them. (laughter) And if they're
not on a panel, they'll say, you know what, we created
all this stuff and we made it, and we're creating value
and we should be able to make decisions
about where it goes. So there's less commitment
to those public goods -- even though a good economist
who's read Adam Smith's "Moral Sentiments" would
acknowledge that actually we're under-investing, or
at least we have to have a certain investment. So that's point number one. Point number two, on this
whole family-character values-structure issue. It's true that if I'm giving
a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a
conversation with young black men about taking
responsibility as fathers that I probably will not
have with the women of Barnard. And I make no
apologies for that. And the reason is, is
because I am a black man who grew up without a father and
I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have
the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence,
I think my daughters are better off. (applause) And that is not something
that -- for me to have that conversation does not negate
my conversation about the need for early
childhood education, or the need for
job training, or the need for
greater investment in infrastructure, or jobs in
low-income communities. So I'll talk till you're
blue in the face about hard-nosed, economic
macroeconomic policies, but in the meantime I've got
a bunch of kids right now who are graduating, and I
want to give them some sense that they can have an
impact on their immediate circumstances, and the
joys of fatherhood. And we did something with My
Brother's Keepers -- which emphasizes apprenticeships
and emphasizes corporate responsibility, and we're
gathering resources to give very concrete hooks for
kids to be able to advance. And I'm going very hard at
issues of criminal justice reform and breaking this
school-to-prison pipeline that exists for so many
young African American men. But when I'm sitting there
talking to these kids, and I've got a boy who
says, you know what, how did you get over
being mad at your dad, because I've got a father
who beat my mom and now has left, and has
left the state, and I've never seen him
because he's trying to avoid $83,000 in child
support payments, and I want to love my dad,
but I don't know how to do that -- I'm not going to
have a conversation with him about macroeconomics. (laughter and applause.) I'm going to have a
conversation with him about how I tried to understand
what it is that my father had gone through, and how
issues that were very specific to him created
his difficulties in his relationships and his
children so that I might be able to forgive him, and
that I might then be able to come to terms with that. And I don't apologize
for that conversation. I think -- and so this is
what I mean when -- or this is where I agree very much
with Bob that this is not an either/or conversation. It is a both-and. The reason we get trapped in
the either/or conversation is because all too
often -- not Arthur, but those who have argued
against a safety net, or argued against
government programs, have used the rationale
that character matters, family matters, values
matter as a rationale for the disinvestment in public
goods that took place over the course of
20 to 30 years. If, in fact, the most
important thing is character and parents, then it's okay
if we don't have band and music at school -- that's
the argument that you will hear. It's okay. Look, there are immigrant
kids who are learning in schools that are much worse,
and we're spending huge amounts in the district and
we still get poor outcomes, and so obviously money
is not the issue. And so what you hear is a
logic that is used as an excuse to under-invest
in those public goods. And that's why I think a lot
of people are resistant to it and are skeptical
of that conversation. And I guess what
I'm saying is that, guarding against cynicism,
what we should say is we are going to argue hard for
those public investments. We're going to argue
hard for early childhood education because,
by the way, if a young kid -- three,
four years old -- is hearing a lot of words, the science
tells us that they're going to be more likely to
succeed at school. And if they've got trained
and decently paid teachers in that preschool, then
they're actually going to get -- by the time
they're in third grade, they'll be reading
at grade level. And those all very
concrete policies. But it requires some money. We're going to argue
hard for that stuff. And lo and behold, if
we do those things, the values and the character
that those kids are learning in a loving environment
where they can succeed in school, and they're
being praised, and they can read
at grade level, and they're less
likely to drop out, and it turns out that when
they're succeeding at school and they've got resources,
they're less likely to get pregnant as teens, and less
likely to engage in drugs, and less likely to be
involved in the criminal justice system -- that is a
reinforcement of the values and character that we want. And that's where
we, as a society, have the capacity to
make a real difference. But it will cost
us some money. It will cost us some money. It's not free. You look at a state like
California that used to have, by far, the best
public higher education system in the world,
and there is a direct correlation between
Proposition 13 and the slow disinvestment in the public
university system so that it became very, very expensive. And kids got priced
out of the market, or they started taking
on a whole bunch of debt. Now, that was a
public policy choice, based on folks not wanting
to pay property taxes. And that's true in cities
and counties and states all across the country. And that's really a big part
of our political argument. So I am all for values;
I am all for character. But I also know that that
character and the values that our kids have that
allow them to succeed, and delayed gratification
and discipline and hard work -- that all those things in
part are shaped by what they see, what they see
really early on. And some of those
kids right now, because of no fault
of those kids, and because of history
and some tough going, generationally,
some of those kids, they're not going
to get help at home. They're not going to get
enough help at home. And the question
then becomes, are we committed to
helping them instead? Mr. Dionne: Mr. President,
I want to follow up on that and then invite Arthur
and Bob to reply. Arthur, you clearly got a
plenary indulgence in this session on all
kinds of positions. (laughter) A lot of us, I think, feel
that we made bargains with our friends on the
conservative side that -- I agree with the idea that
you've got to care about what happens in the family
if you're going to care about social justice, and
you got to care about social justice of you care
about the family. Yet when people like you
start talking like this, there doesn't seem to be
much giveback on, "okay, we agree on these values;
where's the investment in these kids?" Similarly, when welfare
reform was passed back in the '90s, there were a lot
of people who said, okay, we're not going to hear
about welfare cheats anymore because all these people
are going to have to work. And yet we get the
same thing back again. It's as if the work
requirement was never put in the welfare bill. How do we change this
conversation so that it becomes an actual bargain
where the other half of the agenda that you talked about
gets recognized and that we do something about it? The President: I'll ask
Arthur for some advice on this -- because, look, the
devil is in the details. I think if you talk to any
of my Republican friends, they will say, number one,
they care about the poor -- and I believe them. Number two, they'll say that
there are some public goods that have to be made --
and I'll believe them. But when it comes to
actually establishing budgets, making
choices, prioritizing, that's when it starts
breaking down. And I actually think that
there will come a time when political pressure
leads to a shift, because more and more
families -- not just inner-city
African-American families, or Hispanic families
in the barrio, but more and more
middle-class or working-class folks are
feeling pinched and squeezed -- that there will be a
greater demand for some core public goods and we'll have
to find a way to pay for them. But ultimately, there are
going to have to be some choices made. When I, for example, make an
argument about closing the carried interest loophole
that exists whereby hedge fund managers are paying
15 percent on the fees and income that they collect,
I've been called Hitler for doing this, or at least this
is like Hitler going into Poland. That's an actual quote from
a hedge fund manager when I made that recommendation. The top 25 hedge fund
managers made more than all the kindergarten
teachers in the country. So when I say that, I'm
not saying that because I dislike hedge fund managers
or I think they're evil. I'm saying that you're
paying a lower rate than a lot of folks who are
making $300,000 a year. You pretty much have more
than you'll ever be able to use and your family will
ever be able to use. There's a fairness
issue involved here. And, by the way, if we were
able to close that loophole, I can now invest in early
childhood education that will make a difference. That's where the
rubber hits the road. That's, Arthur, where the
question of compassion and "I'm my brother's
keeper" comes into play. And if we can't ask from
society's lottery winners to just make that modest
investment, then, really, this conversation
is for show. (applause) And by the way, I'm not
asking to go back to 70 percent marginal rates,
which existed back in the golden days that Bob is
talking about when he was a kid. I'm just saying maybe we can
go up to like -- tax them like ordinary income, which
means that they might have to pay a true rate of around
23, 25 percent which, by historical standards
in postwar era, would still be really low. So that's the kind of issue
where if we can't bridge that gap, then I suspect
we're not going to make as much progress as we need to
-- although we can find some areas of agreement like
the earned income credit, which I give Arthur a lot of
credit for extolling because it encourages work and
it could help actually strengthen families. Mr. Dionne: Arthur raised
capital gains taxes for us here. Mr. Brooks: Yes, sure. Fine. These are show issues. Corporate jets
are show issues. Carried interest
is a show issue. The real issue? Middle-class entitlements --
70 percent of the federal budget. That's where the
real money is. And the truth of the matter
is until we can take that on -- if we want to
make progress, if the left and right want
to make progress politically as they put
together budgets, they're going to have to
make progress on that. Now, if we want to create --
if we want to increase taxes on carried interest, I mean,
that's fine for me -- not that I can speak
for everybody, certainly not everybody
on the Republican side. And by the way, Mitch
McConnell and John Boehner are watching, at
least indirectly, and they're paying attention
to this -- 100 percent sure, because they care
a lot about this. And they care a lot about
both culture and economics, and they care a
lot about poverty. And, again, we have to be
really careful not to impugn their motives, and impugning
motives on the other side is the number-one barrier
against making progress. Ad hominem is something we
should declare war on and defeat because then we can
take on issues on their face, I think. It's really important
morally for us to be able to do that. Who, by the way, were you
having dinner with who was discussing Ayn Rand and
why wasn't I invited? (laughter) So if we want to
make progress, I think let's decide that we
have a preference -- I mean, let's have a rumble over how
much money we're spending on public goods for
poor people, for sure. And Republicans should say,
I want to spend money on programs for the poor,
but I think these ones are counterproductive and
I think these ones are ineffective, and Democrats
should say, no they're not, we've never done them
right and they've always been underfunded. I want to have that
competition of ideas. That's really productive. But we can't even get to
that when politicians on the left and the right
are conspiring to not touch middle-class entitlements,
because we're looking at it in terms of the right
saying all the money is gone on this, and the
left saying all we need is a lot more money on top
of these things -- when most people who are looking at
it realize that this is an unsustainable path. It's an unsustainable
path for lots of things, not just programs
for the poor. We can't adequately
fund our military. I think you and I would
have a tremendous amount of agreement about the
misguided notion of the sequester, for
lots of reasons, because we can't spend
money on purpose. And that's what
we need to do. And when we're on an
automatic path to spend tons of money in entitlements
that are leading us to fiscal unsustainability,
we can't get to these progressive conversations
where conservatives and liberals really disagree
and can work together, potentially, to help poor
people and defend our nation. Mr. Dionne: I just want to
say if the carried interest is a show issue, why can't
we just get it out of the way and move forward? (laughter and applause) The President:
It is real money. It's real money. Mr. Dionne: Here is
what I'd like to do. I think we have about
three minutes left, so I'd like Bob to speak,
and then I have one last question for the President. Mr. Putnam: All of us would
agree about this -- we need to a little bit rise out of
the Washington bubble and the debates about
these things. Of course, they're
important. I understand why
they're important. But, actually, we're
speaking here to an audience of people of faith. We're speaking, more
largely, to America. And I think we ought not
to disempower ordinary Americans. If they care about
these problems, Americans can change the
politics that would, over the next
five to 10 years, make a huge difference. And I'm not talking
about changing Republican-Democrat. I'm talking about making
poverty and the opportunity to escape from poverty
a higher issue on both parties' agendas. (applause) I have some
hope that that will happen. I understand -- this
may not be true, Mr. President -- I
understand that there is going to be an
election next year. (laughter) The President:
That's a true fact. (laughter and applause) Mr. Putnam: And I think
American voters should insist that the highest
domestic priority issue is this issue of the
opportunity gap, the fact that we're
talking about. This is not a
third order issue, it's a really
important issue. And ask candidates, what are
you going to do about it? And then just use
your own common sense. Is that the right
way to go forward? I think that we
need, as a country, not just from the top
down and from Washington, but from across
the grassroots, to focus -- and in
congregations and parishes all across this country,
focus on what we can do to reduce this opportunity
gap in America. Mr. Dionne: Mr. President,
I wanted you to reflect on this religious question. I mean, one of your first
salaries was actually paid for by a group of
Catholic churches, something -- Cardinal
McCarrick knows that, but not a lot of Catholic
bishops notice that -- (laughter) -- that you were
organizing for a group of South Side churches. You know what faith-based
groups can do. And I'd like you to talk
about sort of three things at the same time, which is
the role of the religious community simply in calling
attention to this problem; the issues of how government
can cooperate with these groups; and sort of the
prophetic role of these ideas for you, where your
own reflections on your own faith have led you
on these questions. The President: Well,
first of all, it's true, my first job was funded
through the Campaign for Human Development, which was
the social justice arm of the Catholic Church. (applause) And I think that faith-based
groups across the country and around the world
understand the centrality and the importance of this
issue in a intimate way -- in part because
these faith-based organizations are
interacting with folks who are struggling and know
how good these people are, and know their stories, and
it's not just theological, but it's very concrete. They're embedded in
communities and they're making a difference
in all kinds of ways. So I think that what our
administration has done is really a continuation
of work that had been done previously by the
Bush administration, the Clinton
administration. We've got our office of
faith-based organizations that are working on an
ongoing basis around a whole host of
these issues. My Brother's Keeper is
reaching out to churches and synagogues and mosques and
other faith-based groups consistently to
try to figure out, how do we reach young boys
and young men in a serious way? But the one thing I
guess I want to say, E.J., is that when I think
about my own Christian faith and my obligations, it is
important for me to do what I can myself -- individually
mentoring young people, or making charitable
donations, or in some ways impacting
whatever circles and influence I have. But I also think it's
important to have a voice in the larger debate. And I think it would be
powerful for our faith-based organizations to speak
out on this in a more forceful fashion. This may sound
self-interested because there have been --
these are areas where I agree with the evangelical
community and faith-based groups, and then there are
issues where we have had disagreements around
reproductive issues, or same-sex marriage,
or what have you. And so maybe it appears
advantageous for me to want to focus on
these issues of poverty, and not as much on
these other issues. But I want to
insist, first of all, I will not be part of
the election next year, so this is more just a
broader reflection of somebody who has worked
with churches and worked in communities. There is great caring
and great concern, but when it comes to what
are you really going to the mat for, what's
the defining issue, when you're talking
in your congregations, what's the thing that is
really going to capture the essence of who we are as
Christians, or as Catholics, or what have you, that this
is oftentimes viewed as a "nice to have" relative to
an issue like abortion. That's not across the board,
but there sometimes has been that view, and certainly
that's how it's perceived in our political circles. And I think that there's
more power to be had there, a more transformative voice
that's available around these issues that can
move and touch people. Because the one thing I know
is that -- here's an area where, again, Arthur
and I agree -- I think fundamentally people want
to do the right thing. I think people don't set
out wanting to be selfish. I think people would like
to see a society in which everybody has opportunity. I think that's true up and
down the line and across the board. But they feel as if
it's not possible. And there's noise out there,
and there's arguments, and there's contention. And so people withdraw and
they restrict themselves to, what can I do in my
church, or what can I do in my community? And that's important. But our faith-based groups I
think have the capacity to frame this -- and nobody has
shown that better than Pope Francis, who I think
has been transformative just through the sincerity and
insistence that he's had that this is vital
to who we are. This is vital to following
what Jesus Christ, our Savior, talked about. And that emphasis I think is
why he's had such incredible appeal, including
to young people, all around the world. And I hope that that is
a message that everybody receives when he
comes to visit here. I can't wait to host him
because I think it will help to spark an even broader
conversation of the sort that we're having today. Mr. Dionne: All events are
better with a reference to Pope Francis. Thank you so much,
Mr. President. (applause) I really want to
thank Arthur and Bob. And thank you, Bob, for
writing this book that's moved us all. And thank you,
Mr. President, for being here. And John and Galen and then
so many others for creating this. If I may close by
simultaneously quoting Amos and Dr. King,
"Let justice roll "down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty "stream. "Bless you all." Thank you, Mr. President. The President: Thank you. (applause)
