Why . Guest we were running around covering humanitarian crises and then we would periodically go back to my beloved hometown of yamhill where my mom is still on the family farm. We saw a humanitarian crisis unfolding there. A quarter of the kids who were on my old Number Six School bus are now gone from drugs and alcohol and suicide. Sheryl and i tried to process that. The kids got on the bus right after me were the napa kids. Smart, talented kids. One died of drug and alcohol abuse. Another died in a house fire was passed out drunk. Another blew himself up cooking meth. Regina died from hepatitis from drug use. Once by because seeds in the Oregon State Penitentiary 13 years. For a while we wander is a something about my bus, about yamhill . We realized this is a National Problem that we have death and despair. The Life Expectancy is falling or was falling for three years in a row in america, and that yamhill, michael bus, kind of a microcosm to see that pain across america. Host you saw this through the lens of returning home. It couldve been titled cool bus number six. Silbury stories are drawn from the french had growing up and expanding from there. Sheryl, you grew up in manhattan, Upper West Side and thats a whole different world. Im really, early in your relationship you got to see yamhill and just not unfolding over these last couple decades. How did the lens through which you saw differ from what nick was seeing . Guest first of all i dont think you can get farther from yamhill than manhattan. I grew up on the Upper West Side. Its smack in the middle of the urban world. When i first approached yamhill i was a little bit what are these people like . Guest sheryl locked the car door the first time she came on the farm. Guest we think of tale of two americas. On the top deck of the vote there is the party going on. On the bottom deck is where the, its all happening and spirit are struggling to figure out what to do and how to stay afloat. I think manhattan in many ways the people of manhattan, many of them are in that party and they just dont know whats going on in the lower deck. So for me it took a while. Once i started learning these people and beating them and learning about their backgrounds talking to them i realized they are very complicated human beings. The stories that we learned about their household, about their backgrounds and journeys they took really were so alarming and so touching and heartbreaking, that we just couldnt help but say weve got to tell the rest of the world. Host you use the analogy of the ship of the upper deck and lower deck and whats going on below. Your book uses another analogy in the title, tight rope. In some a by speeches and in congress i talk about trying to pave a a wide solid path for families to thrive, and here is not just a narrow path that a tight rope. What are you conveying by that . Guest the whole point is for those of us who are in the upper middle class and above four very well educated, at least graduate from high school, from college, we have a path a fairly wide path ahead of us and so if we follow we can pick ourselves up. But maybe if these people in yamhill and small towns around american in the rural areas around america, people are walking on a tight rope. One missed in the fall. Theres a safety net. Host . Their falling into it cast before describing about involving drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, suicide. Its a pretty oblique picture and theres a dynamic that you wrestle with about this is personal responsibility . To the just need to walk that tightrope better or is it their fault . Personal responsibility versus collective responsibility. What have you concluded . Guest look, personal responsibility is real. I think we can make the case that progressives like myself sometimes dont fully appreciate that personal responsibility is real. When hesiod agency to people but i think over the last 50 years we have vastly overdone and we become obsessed with his personal responsibility narrative, playing with the people who fall off the tightrope for the catastrophes that follow. At this point you can predict with some accuracy the outcomes of a newborn infant and when you can do that its not because that infant is making bad choices are showing their responsibility. Look, by all means lets have a personal responsibility conversation. If we do that with also have the conversation about our collective responsibility to try to help the people who are on my number six bus. There are so many ways we can help that benefit them at a benefit society. Host paul ryan who you quote in the book says in our country the conditions of your birth do not determine the outcome of your life. But in the book you introduce this term or you shared this term Adverse Childhood Experience and which are basically saying if you have collected several adverse childhood expenses your odds of succeeding drop dramatically which you portray as the odds of being in poverty increased substantially. Explain this come how these childhood adversities really impact your personalized. Guest its prewar document by document by scientists with an lysis situations so many of us have an Adverse Childhood Experience. Hence get divorced, is a big move from one state to the next that is dramatic for a little child but when you start piling up seven, eight, even three before that could have a really dramatic experience. Partly depending on the age of the child specifically if the child is up to five, thats when the brain is developing at its most rapid pace for the rest of that persons life. Thats when our brain develops quickly. Inc. Of children is really resilient but you know something theyre not as result as we think. In fact, when there were stressed and house, violence, yelling and abuse and chaos in the house that creates stress in the baby and that means hormones are coursing through that brain and as that brain is growing, this will impact the development of the brain architecture for this little baby. If this is not corrected that babies brain is not going to develop really properly. If we can address these issues early on and there are treatments, ways of using therapy, counseling, we can put that young child onto a better course so that we dont see them two decades later in poverty or in drugs are dropping out of college. High school even. Its not just that its also not just a psychological trauma and troubles. Its also help. In fact, people who have stacked up aces are much more likely itn in life unless there corrected to have heart disease, to a chronic diseases like diabetes. Thats a huge cross on society as well. Guest one way thinking about the personal responsibility narrative is theres the success sequence that conservatives sometimes mention. Its true if somebody does three things, they largely avoid poverty. If the graduate from high school, if they get a fulltie job, and then if they have kids only after marrying. In only 2 live in poverty. If they do none of those three things, 79 live in poverty. Clearly those involve an element of bad choices and personal responsibility, but they also reflect what we as a society do. One reason, so American Kids have sex at the same rate as european kids but have babies as teenagers three times as often because we as a society dont make Sex Education available until make Birth Control so available. Our High School Graduation rates are substantially lower than those in many other oecd countries because we dont place the same premium on it. There are ways we can shift this. Its not because American Kids are dumber than others or less diligent. I think this obsession has neglected the public side of the equation, the policy side of the equation. Host so the odds are stacked against folks who are raised with these various stressors in childhood. I wanted to go back for a moment, sheryl, to your about how the brain is rewired. In what ways is that rewiring compromised one success in adult it . Guest a lot of it has to do with involvement of the brain architecture. The cortisol, the stressor hormone, most of us as adults it happens for for a little bit at goes away, flows right to us but because the baby spring is evolving so rapidly at the time and also its so young, babies brain much more fragile, it can stunt or impair the development. Host doesnt make those children more susceptible to addiction, less able to have come if you will, a committed relationship or just multiple effects . Guest multiple effects and additional later on that all of these things you talk about also more likely to not graduate from high school, more likely to have suffered from things like adhd, a number of ailments that just make it harder for the child growing up to actually succeed. Thats why pediatricians are so focused on trying to address aces and certainly in california a new Surgeon General there, that is one of her missions. Host from the universe of organ all this and cortisol the thing it does is it prepares children for a violent, turbulent, dangerous environment and it puts them therefore on a hair trigger fight or flight response. One consequence is that it makes it hard to concentrate on the blackboard because they are being trained to look for potential threats behind them. That seems to be one pathway in which this cortisol impairs education and concentration. Host i believe in the book you note that Warren Buffett referred to something i think the ovarian lottery, and ive heard him speak about how it had been born under certain circumstances he would be a multibillionaire, both because of infrastructure that others established but also because of the circumstances of his birth set the path for him to do well. Its disturbing that in so many ways the United States as the developed country seems to be doing a poor job and other democracies, other republics, that could have similar problems. Problems. You note we are 30 night on clean Drinking Water and 40th on child locality, and 61st on high school enrollment. And that we suffer more stress than the average person in venezuela and that our Life Expectancy is dropping. Heres the United States with our congress, so brickyard is issues, state legislatures are working on these issues, county commissions. How is it we are having such horrific outcomes . Guest on the one hand, weve got all all the Economic Statistics that are showing that gdp is doing well. Stock market is rocket high. We look at these measures, inflation is low, we say were doing really, really well. Then if you peel behind the statistics and also look at other broader statistics you can see thats not the full picture. A lot of man, for instance, have dropped out of the workforce. They wont even be counted and these men may be selfmedicating. A bit out of a job for a while. They dont have the confidence to jump back in. We interviewed a number of them in yamhill so we know thats what is happening. They are not even looking so it wouldnt be counted as looking. If you look at the Life Expectancy statistics as nick mentioned, that is another broader measure by which its because of these depths of despair which are three types of depths of despair the recharacterize by economists at princeton, and they looked at the census data and the south the depths of despair were really religious alcoholism, thats related to Drug Overdose and deaths from suicide. We are at record high suicide rates since world war two. Yes, they dropped a little bit Drug Overdose deaths toppled in 20 quinta thats a good sign but it still 67,000, 60,000 people who 2000 people who died from Drug Overdoses. Thats not a small figure. That weighs on the entire nations average Life Expectancy. Its pretty dramatic. Guest wincing every dramatic failure if you will to pay the good road here in the during those outcomes. Why is the United States not doing a better job in getting people off the tight rope, getting people onto a solid paved road . Guest i think that this is really a 50 year erodes cores that the u. S. It took. I think it has something to do with nixons southern strategy in 1968, and a tendency to stigmatize investment in Human Capital and in benefit programs on the basis that it would be africanamericans who disproportionally benefit. I think that leads into an underinvestment in Human Capital and in benefits across the u. S. It also relates to president reagans narrative where government can do no good and is invariably part of the problem. And its a glorification of business taking of power from labor unions to corporations, coupled with the war on drugs, mass incarceration. A few of these trends came together, and so until the 1970s the u. S. Was essentially in line with other oecd countries. Our Life Expectancy was higher than the oecd median, and then since the 1970s the other oecd countries have surpassed us. I think the root cause is an underinvestment in american Human Capital and american citizens. Host oecd countries many developed countries similar to our own, and so let me throughout a little bit of a thought here because i i see ts through the lens of tried to change policy in government. What i am seeing that our institutions have been changing in ways that create power for the powerful. You do touch on this indie book. You note where you have high wealth divisions, the wealthy and have disproportionate political power which leads to rules that benefit the wealthy. If we think about America Today and the inequality that we are seeing between the rich and the poor, we are at a very, very high ratio compared to these other countries. Is it possible our inequality and wealth is influencing the medical system in ways that is preventing us if you will from investing the resources on the fundamentals that paved the path for success for ordinary families . Guest i think thats another prison to which to look and youre right, you create this inequality that can self perpetuates through the mechanism of economic power turning into political power. Its similar to what happened in the gilded age in american history. And and i also because of course then aggressive is and followed. Host but it took a a great depression. It took a world war. Thats a little scary that it took that type of intervention to put us back on a path were really for the three decades after world war ii we had an investment in programs that really did lift up the middle class. Not everyone here discriminations were still rampant in some sectors but we made some progress in that realm as well. In order to implement the various policy proposals in the book that we will get to in a moment, do we do to change the structure of political power in this country . Guest i do think that we need more enlightenment when it comes to this segment of society at a fake that they are being totally ignored partly because everybody can point to the high gdp and is 90 to change anything. Because on average everything is going well but if the jeff bezos walks into a room of when are people on average everybody will have a higher level of wealth. It does make any difference to the people who are not, not jeff bezos. Thats a problem is recognizing that there is this need to lift up all americans. Also its important maybe it helps policymakers to know that if you want to compete against rest of the world. China and india with 1,000,000,000 people power, we dont have the people power especially with much less if we dont try to lift up all americans and have as Many Americans as possible reach their full potential be productive, innovative and really bring america back to number one. Host i know my parents really talked about the sense of unity coming out of world war ii. And they relayed how in their lifetime experience this great leap forward. My mother came from extraordinary level of poverty. Our mother with her first three children, loss of those three children to the count in the middle of the great depression. She lives in a boxcar. Who could imagine my grandmother realizing that a grandson might serve in the u. S. Senate . Extraordinary change from both sides of the family. But you describe in this book how the community of yamhill so much of this impact of moving forward during those years and how in roughly the mid70s started to stall out and then to decline. What happened in the mid\70{l1}s{l0}\70{l1}s{l0} that started to drive this reversal . Guest first of all, i think many people in yamhill and probably in your hometown of myrtle creek what a tree with their past success to rugged individualism, and theres a lot of that. But, frankly, historically it was also a certain amount of brilliant government plans. The reason people came to places like yamhill was a homestead programs then Rural Electrification transform places like yamhill. The g. I. Bill of rights likewise. I think those programs to invest in people and community certainly helped. And then when things, i think essentially the root cause of things going downhill was good jobs going away because local employer in the greater yamhill area was a glove factory. It closed down. There were some new jobs they came in but the people who would work at the glove factory were not able to get those new jobs. Men in particular felt the loss of jobs not only in monetary sense but psychologically as well. Local institutions like churches were not able to handle the trauma. People self medicated. They got criminal records which made them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed quite quickly and the social fabric which had been very tightknit unraveled quickly. Host you had light manufacturing, gloves. You had the consequences picky making g. I. Bill of rights, a big portion of that was a Mortgage Program for veterans returning being able to buy house, have equity, savings. I think youre right about jobs being critical to the strength of the family. It does give structure. It gives dignity and against resources. When you are unemployed, bad things start to happen. Weve seen this in towns across oregon when for example, lumber town loses its sawmill, use some people move out right away. You see others who dwell in domestic violence, alcoholism, drug use increase. Jobs are critical. Guest i think in yamhill and probably a lot of White Community in the u. S. Back in the 1990s there were a lot of pejorative comments made about africanamerican communities that were struggling and does a lot of sanctimonious talk about how the problem with black culture which was a byword for what were called deadbeat dads for people making bad choices, et cetera. Meanwhile, the great harvard sociologist said no, its about jobs leaving. He was right because when jobs left white communities, when you left main, when they left parts of ohio, the same unfolded. This was about culture. This was about jobs. Guest in the u. S. We are not as resilient a country when comes to job losses. You can see that easily with a comparison to what happens in canada. After the National Crisis happen when automakers laid off a lot of autoworkers and delete them off in detroit and in windsor, ontario, canada often by the same company and you could see the difference. For instance, in years partly because it was this financial crisis extended Unemployment Benefits of people, money but they lost their job and they also lost her health care which is a huge stressor on the family. In canada what happened was they lost their job but he it didnt lose her health care because canada has universal healthcare. The government intervene and looked around for the demand was of the types of jobs and they found out nursing had a demand. They arranged for Training Programs for autoworkers to retrain to go into the nursing field and yes, its not their dream job but they were able to get i should back into the work world and use later they are not selfmedicating, not depressed or isolated the way people in the u. S. Were. I want to go over the loss of jobs and this is an area where we all might have different opinions. I thought be interesting to throw it out there. Because when what i is happenig in the mid70s was the start of the opening of our market to basically chinese production and chinese benefited from competing with americans with lower wages, lower it by middle stint, lower labor standards so they can often make things more cheaply. You had a glove factory and that glove factory might have said we cant compete with the chinese making gloves, or maybe we can now but lets move our factory to china because we will benefit and our costs will be less well or sale price will be roughly the same, we will make more money. We had seen a lot of factories go overseas. Some of those feel we made a mistake about being so quick to open our market in the way we did helping to drive this job loss. Guest i think on the one hand, globalization couldve been a force that we couldnt compete, we couldnt prevent from happening because individual factors according make the decisions based on what is going to yield the best return. If theyre going to coast to ricoh are other in latin america or in asia fentanyl make the decision on the own unless theres law the says you cant go overseas. I think they wouldve to bring competition from other countries going overseas so its a foresight, may have been slower but nonetheless we didnt adjust very well. Overall it kept inflation because costs were lower or goods that americans used. Thats good news, the benefits were spread among 320 million americans rather than just the workers losing their job was felt much more intensely by a small group of people. As a country, other countries also have globalization, although im automation. They havent suffered to the same degree that the u. S. Has partly because of the policies the u. S. Has taken. We dont adapt quickly to job losses. We dont as as a society try ad help with nudges of the people who have been laid off. Youve got to find your own job now. Other countries, they also universal healthcare, the other peer countries, and they give much better at job retraining and helping laidoff workers retrain for other types of jobs. Host did you want to touch on that . Guest i think a lot of us didnt appreciate how, we talked about creative destruction. Well, its great in a textbook, but what i think we have not appreciated was those people lost their jobs in the Old Industries like self medicate and might cook meth in their families might break down and that it became, while the trade might benefit the size of the u. S. As a whole, it became all the more important to make sure that we supported those who as part of that greater destruction might lose their jobs and invest in their education so that they could adapt to new jobs. We blew it. The winner should not compensate the losers at all. Host i remember very well as i was studying economics, the argument was if you have trade deficit, the Exchange Rates will adjust over time. And so the trade deficit will adjust and, therefore, do not have a net loss of jobs. That turned out to be wrong for a different conversation, but one we were slow to respond to. In a situation that youre describing with universal healthcare, you mentioned in the book as one of the remedies. I often talk about the foundations for family to thrive. I picture a house and your foresight of the foundation and you have healthcare and housing and your education and you have good paying jobs. In your final chapter of the book you start to address various issues. They pretty much fall into those four categories and maybe starting with health, universal healthcare, and eliminating unwanted pregnancies. Which goes back to having access to health care and family planning, and why is the United States doing so poorly on pregnancies versus other countries . And, of course, you have noted already that that is one of the three factors that has a a huge impact on success for the next generation about having children outside of a structure of the family having to early in life. Guest i want to stress is to vote with make progress. For instance, on teen pregnancy the peak was in the 1990s. There was so much teen pregnancy and then we sort of recognize this problem and we have addressed it a lot. It has come down a lot which shows when we put our might to something we actually can do it. Host policy makes the difference. Guest it actually does. Weve made progress on things including homelessness. We reduce veteran homelessness by nearly half in six years and is continuing to go down under the current administration. When we want to make changes we really can do it very well. Its a matter of having the political will. I do agree with all those foundations. They are critical and i think healthcare is very important and i just hope that policymakers will remember that it should be available to everybody if we want to lift all americans so they can help america compete against the rest of the world. Healthcare is really pretty important. Host as i travel around rural oregon ive heard a lot of people note the expansion of medicaid has greatly help in rural areas. For one thing it doesnt have a deductible that shuts pay thousands in the beginning so, therefore, you avoid going to the doctor. And because people can pay bills to medicate that means the local clinic has often expand in size and taken on things like a drug addiction or Mental Health. And i wondered if any of this strengthening of rural healthcare might have been something that affected or improved healthcare in yamhill . Guest absolutely. We havent talked to a lot of people in yamhill who say that they are so grateful that their health care is paid for, including one of her friends who ended up dying but he died in hospital. He was in hospital several times before he passed away, and so his family sound is very gratet he could at least have more time with the family. Host some of those families who saw strode with these they been able to get help with addictions, Mental Health and so forth . Guest absolutely. Im not sure they make the connection the okay, oregon expand medicaid and, therefore, the cut it. I dont think they make those connections. Host im starting to see a bit of keep your government hands off my healthcare reaction, and certainly the premises of the exchange which means you can get a policy at the same price even if you have a preexisting condition, have become highly valued factors. Guest and we turned the tables and ask your question we make the case in tight rope that the politics on some of these issues may be changing but youre in the front lines, youre the ones who have to get votes from these folks but we argue that as some of the social problems have become associated in the public mind not with africanamericans but with workingclass whites, it is because the framing of them has made it easier politically to address in a way that is hypocritical but perhaps more compassion as well. And that on issues like medicaid, for example, that the politics may now be, a lifting the minimum wage, the White Working Class is socially conservative but economically may be more liberal. Do you buy that . Host certainly on healthcare absolutely. People used to come to my town halls and say im just trying to get the 65 and stay alive so i can get on medicare. I do not hear that anymore. And in the poorest and most world parts of oregon those are the places where the expansion of medicaid called the Oregon Health plan has had the biggest impact. And i think you would have a hard time prying them out of their hands. It really has been a very positive impact. And for the committee for jobs. Particularly healthcare jobs, its a significant contribution to a commute as well. The things i hear about now are, well, why and the getting gouged from the high cost of drugs . And why is it a situation where healthcare if youre not on Oregon Health plan is so stressful . I changed jobs. I change healthcare. How do i get healthcare in the middle of the year . My spouse has healthcare but im not on the plan or i was on the plan but then i was struck. How do i get healthcare . How about my kids . So the complexity of our system, and i hear people saying the other challenge, i hear this throughout rural oregon, is why drive to fight with the Insurance Company . So at the very time you are sick, maybe youre struggling with cancer or some other major disease, you are studying these bills try to figure out can you pay the deductible, and then shouldnt this be covered . You having to be in a fight with your Insurance Company. This causes stress. Healthcare is one piece. That gouging of americans on drugs, 80 of americans are ready to say we should get the same fair price any other developed country gets but congress cant get it done and thats another sign of the damage to our institutions, that the lobby can exercise political power, the wealthy through both the super majority in the senate and to the level of lobbying and Campaign Donations that mean of fundamental problem affecting people across the spectrum. Were not addressing it. Its troubling. Lets go from healthcare to education. Early childhood education and trying to seek universal High School Graduation. How can we do better on education . Guest right. The u. S. Pioneered mass education and we used to be number one in high school education. It was the pride of the country and thats how we became number one in terms of the economy. We have split over the years to number 61 in one year and we might be improving. They actually use different data so it might be up to like number 30 but we are still very far from number one. What can we do . Right now only one in six students graduate from high school. Thats kind of appalling. We could, some states do this, require kids to stay in school until 18. Hopefully they will graduate my high school then, or we could tell them if you want a drivers license you have to be enrolled in high school. You could do things like that. Its sort of like theres no one silver bullet. Theres a lot of different silver buckshot that you have to incrementally get out in minute giveaways and dislike the way we improved car driving safety. We first implemented seatbelts. I remember when my parents first got the car, we didnt use seatbelts at all. But that was very dangerous so to improve safety we started adding seatbelts. We added airbags. We had padded dashboards. But this personal responsibility, this narrative is basically the equivalent of saint okay, put darts or needles inside the dashboard so when you get yourself its going to teach you a lesson. I think what we need to do instead is an feasible Safety Measures to keep nudging these kids to stay in school. Host you mentioned the structure of children and we learned a lot about that. You all touch on how Early Education can have a huge multiplier effect, some studies seven times the return of investment. Ive actually seen studies that were in or magnitude, like 42 times because reduced prison cost and more taxes are paid and so forth. Less crimes are committed. When you see it laid out like that, as youll have laid shouldnt we all just rushed and say were going to invest a lot more on Early Childhood . Guest absolutely. That is the highest return of investment available in the u. S. Just about every other country is able to provide it. They can afford Early Childhood improvements programs, and i would argue a big reason to do it is the benefits to the children but theres also huge benefits to the parents, especially Single Parents in terms of providing an ability to work. Host i must say when we were raising our kids and there were two of us and we could barely figure out how to drop the kids off and pick them up, i thought how does a a single pat do it . Its incredibly hard. Then you mention High School Graduation, keeping kids in high school. It took me back to when i was in high school and our high school it was expelling students who smoked. So i went to the administration and i said, is this really the right thing to do . These kids are not going to get high school education. Should it be Something Different . There are some high schools in the area, i told the administrators, and have decided to go the other way, have a smoking room for students. Figuring it was better to keep them in school and graduating and they were not going to stop the smoking habit. It was interesting thing. I went around a bunch of high schools but thats a point youre making here, sheryl, is find a way to help keep kids engaged in school. Theres something you didnt mention at all. When i was in my bluecollar school growing up, i didnt have to pay any fees for the sports, crosscountry, tennis, speech team, chest team. I was on the chest team but the others. Now my kids are gradually from the same school and everything has fees attached which really reduces student engagement. If i could wave a magic what i would get rid of those fees to of students stay in school. Guest i think thats a real issue. I think that administrators are sort of cut between okay, we know these of the kids want to keep in school. On the other hand, we need to make ends meet at if a kid is disrupting the teacher entirely so she cannot teach 20 other kids, is that good as well . Its the a tight rope that the school administers have to navigate. It we dont charge, that however going to going to pay for these other afterschool teachers to come into some of these things . We need to pay them for their time. Host lets quickly touch on two of the errors you talk about in the book, eliminating homelessness for children, housing factor, and jobs, a right to work. Had we improve in those areas . Guest homelessness, we know the cost of homelessness especially for children are enormous. Impact because of these cases we talked about earlier. Homelessness, as sheryl mentioned, we were able to reduce veteran homelessness by half between 20102016 because we found unconscionable veterans were out in the streets. It we found unconscionable that in America Today we have on any given night more than 100,000 kids are homeless, then we could reduce that i have. Maybe we could eliminate it. We could dramatically reduce it through some combination of vouchers, shelters, priority, et cetera. So again it comes down to political will and instead the president s budget proposes cutting housing programs. Host what you say to those who say raise my taxes which isnt going to help me to somebody else out, why cant they figure it out for themselves . Guest so it easier to make the argument about adults. In the case of these kids though, those kids have not made any bad choices. They have been irresponsible. They are homeless because of that ovarian lottery that you make it early. We also know that indicates of those Homeless Children that if we dont pay at the front it will end up paying at the back in many times over. If they want to save tax dollars its in their interest to invest in getting these people homes. Guest its important when it maybe have the mortgage deduction so youre getting a bit of subsidy, or maybe the case of the Hedge Fund Mogul who paid 238 million for a Million Dollars for a condo in the heart of new york city and pays property taxes based on as if the condo were 9. 8 million. They are getting a subsidy. Theres a lot of unevenness in our tax code and loopholes that you can drive a truck through. Host absolute, you are so right that tax code is all kinds of subsidies to the very well off. Back when i was working at habitat for humanity and i saw the impact of a home for a child, i knew what you were saying about the need for children to have homes is absolute right. A stable home changes like for the child. The first time, like ive been able to invite a friend over a child sit because he he never had a place, they been living in the car with their parents or in a basement with her parents and then those children started doing better in school. Those children are going to get to be more in taxes of the more productive citizens. So lets make that happen. Theres one last set of ideas you put forward that doesnt fall neatly into these four pairs of education, health, housing and jobs, and that is a monthly child allowance. How should we look at that . Guest britain was able to reduce Child Poverty in half under tony blair began in 1999. One of the key elements was child allowance, basically a monthly payment, it could also be done in the us theres a lot of discussion about doing this through a tax credit. Michael bennet has cosponsored a bill that we do something along those lines. Just about every other industrialized country does it. The National Academies suggested that and some other strategies would reduce poverty i have videos and cost about 100 billion a year. We can for a 2 trillion tax cut over cant afford to reduce Child Poverty by half . Host it reverberates in their ability to do maybe keep some in the house. Maybe it enables them to have a child participate in sport or who knows what attractive we know the outcomes are better. The baby bonds, actually congress pioneered in. Often called individual Development Accounts and they involve a payment to a child and would be in a savings account, often matched and it could only be used if the sabres were put in at a only be used for buying housing or starting a business, its like this. Host you all probably dont know this but i started a program in oregon, first one west of the mississippi for thank you for highlighting that in your book. It came about because my work at habitat for you meant what i saw ownership made a difference and then i developed rental affordable housing. I said how can people get some stake in this . I had an Intern Research the idea of matching grants to buy homes. She discovered the start of the idea program and so i started an Investment Program which became regionalized and i became a state legislator and organize the biggest subsidy for i. D. E. A. Programs in the country. We need by personnel to reauthorize a new i. D. E. A. Bill some hoping youll publicize that a lot because it was a bipartisan hand up to the three pathways, that being education, small business, and home ownership. So i so much appreciate you all engaging in this conversation and exploring the challenges we have in america through the lens of a struggling rural community. What happens next i fear there might be a film coming out associate with this book. Guest thats right. Theres a film version that we hope will be on tv in the fall. So stay tuned. Host sheryl, what things have missed that we should make sure he was know about the experience that uhaul have gone through examining the challenges . Guest your focus on jobs is really important because i do think that jobs are at the heart of so much pain and suffering that the falls household. Certainly the ones we interviewed in yamhill, and also rather rest rest of the country. It seems to be a common theme. Whatever job creation is really key and so everybody has to contribute to that. Policymakers can be very influential when it comes to job creation. Host i think your examination of these issues through School Bus Number six answer yamhill and the broader challenges facing america reminded me very much in a way of Robert Kennedy going to appalachia and saying look what i am seeing. Here in america such poverty and such stresses, and then realizing that these situations were on a par with countries that we think of as so much for then the United States of america. Can we do better . That examination helped launch a lot of thinking towards making our country work better for all americans. So thank you for exploring this. Its been a pleasure to converse with you about it. Its timely in the sense that were in the middle of a policy discussion that always accompanies a president ial campaign year. Well done. Guest thank you very much. Tonight on after words first new times magazine contributor Peggy Orenstein examines sexual culture in young male masculinity. Please enjoy booktv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan2