Transcripts For CSPAN3 Politics Public Policy Today 20150203

Is and we arent addressing it. So you take revenue up and discretionary and mandatory spending are falling as a percent of the economy over the longterm . It is yes. As you know. I think we are finding places on the mandatory side where we are reducing spending and i think i wanted to respond to your earlier point where we are stopping spending, with 4 4 million of reduction in medicare and medicaid and prop insurance and programs. [ overlapping speakers ] and on those entitlement and Social Security and debt you take it from increasing 105 , to increasing 99 over the next ten years. I mean obviously that is the issue. So Discretionary Spending goes down, on both sides, they say this is great. It doesnt have more Discretionary Spending. It has less. It has less. For both defense and nondefense. Health care entitlements do go from 105 to 99 . But it is 7. 8 of gdp now and rises to 8 and it is scary because it is unsustainable so were heading toward record high tax revenues and they go to the highest level of gdp ever. And near record discretionary levels and other mandatories so we are talking about entirely these incredibly important vital programs that we have to save for future generations and if we dont do that, mr. Chairman well let down the people who voted us to represent them. Thank you mr. Chairman. Thank you. That to your relief concludes our questions for this morning. I want to thank you for agreeing to testify this morning. We appreciate your time here with us as long as the work youve done to write a budget resolution for congress by this legal by the legal deadline. And we now get to work on a budget resolution by the legal deadline of april 15th and i look forward to working with my colleagues on that. I want to remind my colleagues they can turn in questions for director donovan but they are due no later than 6 00 today. And they have to be in writing at the Committee Clerks office which is dirk son 624, and then im sure that director donovan will respond within 7 days. So with no further business before the committee, we stand adjourned. Thank you. As this Budget Hearing wraps up, a quick reminder that if you missed any of todays hearing you can see it in the cspan video line at cspan. Org. And youll find the president s budget request and the budget hub includes text of the budget and video from related events that weve covered over the past couple of days and all of that available again at cspan. Org. As this Budget Hearing wraps up a quick reminder if you missed any of todays hearing you can see it at the library. This is the 57th attempt by the house to repeal the Affordable Care act but this is the first time the bill language has called for a replacement. Watch todays debate on our companion network cspan. And the senate is trying to prevent suicide by veterans of those serving in the military. Later they will take a vote on whether to pass with the Homeland Security bill to block the president s order on immigration. Can you see live coverage on cspan 2. And here on cspan3 well be back on capitol hill for a congressional Gold Medal Ceremony honoring the First Special Service Force in world war ii. They were a americancanadian special Operations Unit formed in 1942. Well hear remarks from congressional leaders and two veterans here on cspan3. The Political Landscape has changed with the 114th congress. There are 43 new republicans and 15 new democrats and 12 new republicans and there is 108 new women and the first africanamerican women in the house. Keep track at the congressional chronicle with useful information and voting statistics about each congress. New congress and best access on cspan, cspan 2, cspan radio and cspan. Org. With live coverage of the u. S. House on cspan and the senate on cspan 2. Here on cspan3 we complement that coverage by showing you the most public relevant Affairs Events and on weekends cspan is home to American History tv that tell our nations stories, including the civil wars history, visiting battlefields and key events, american artifacts, touring museums and Historic Sites to tell about our history facts and american bookshelf, the presidency, looking at the policies of our commanders in chief and lectures in history with top College Professors delving in our past and real america, featuring educational films from the 1930s through the 70s. Cspan3 funded by your local cabl e provider. Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. The corporation for Enterprise Development recently hosted an event about the earned] income tax credit or eidc. This senator spoke about the support and similar efforts to provide Economic Relief to lowincome americans. They talked about studying and res ensuring those who qualify. We are led by the Hatcher Group to promote hatchet groups at the federal and state level. Te weve worked with the eitc. Brin the eitc is widely regarded as en theac most powerful antipoverty groups yet one in ten workers p does not claim the credit. The cr and we talk about the vital role n to ensure every eligible worker but is able to receive the credit. In the folders youll find ve information from the eitc and i encourage you to visit our udgen o website, tax credit for eitc. So without further ado i would like to introduce a dear friend for the Hatcher Groups andrea leave leaver. N [ applause ] thank you, lauren. It is such a pleasure to be cohosting this event for tax a pl credits for working family. Im the president for eitc and people said it is my coming out day because i just came back from a major injury and it is myt day theme that this is a day about ba hope and what the eitc has brung to families is core of our h mission. That it iso not just about income but it is also about essence and our whole philosophy is that we want to help people build their future by being able to invest in longterm assets that help them live the american dream. I am especially grateful to my at dear frienhed lisa adams who m. Introduced us to kathy eaton and her book on the eitc. Those who read it can see it is much about how this works as really heartwrenching stories about how people make their lives work under incredibly difficult and challenging circumstances and all of us here are dedicated to Public Policies who make it easier for people to be the productive flourishing people we all want them to be. To be t we are thrilled to be hosting this event because the eitc and the volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program fits so well ho with our mission. Last year cfed took on a la portfoliost of work to advance policy and programs that aim to y provide low and moderate income taxpayers with new taxtime ally a opportunities and im hanny to recognize happy to recognize the new taxpayer opportunity tax work that recognizes organizes that provide tax assistance to gs t low income communities. This work builds on our experience with the assets and Opportunity Network which is a National Network that brings Work Movement oriented policymakers to expand the strategy Building Networks to every community in the United States. So im greatly pleased to bring David Rothstein to introduce senator brown who has been such a cham of both the eitc and vita. David, you may think we picked him just because hes from ohio and fi but that wouldnt be the truth. Even more importantly hes been a tireless advocate for expanding taxtime opportunities be foren low and moderate income americans, particularly as director of Research Development and Public Affairs for the for Neighboring Housing Services of Greater Cleveland and the other great thing about david is hes one of the few people in america ho who make me look shy. G abou so david welcome. [ applause ] following andrea is never an easy opportunity just given the energy that she brings. Leve sore thank you andrea and to lauren for starting our morning with so much energy and on the en point. It is such a t great pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker senator brown who hails sena from the great state of ohio. Ay. My parents are overjoyed that im introducing a senator and my friends are excited that im with the program. And if i can touch on one policy that is not directly part of the policy this morning and it wouldd be to emphasize the importance l and of the growing of eitc and in professor eatons book she talksnd th about if families are paying sh upward of e 500 to get their g up refunds put on debit cards they are losing earned income and to being gouged. Tax preparers must be regulated and should provide good faith tax estimates before and not after the tax return is prepared and so im excited working with the tax Good Faith Foundation we introduced a bill calling for disclosure and including a fee that disclosure box going on with ats credit cards and prepaid debit ca cards. And more on point senator brown is a longtime supporters around lo earned Income Credit and he talks about the third child coverage and the long range coverage for married filing. Senator brown understands that working families need these for Economic Development and for achieving and growing assets. Se senator browns newest bill we are particularly excited about, ieving on target a for advancing eict dollars for families to share money not just at tax time. And if they do not use pay day loans it is particularly i exciting. In anoth when he was represented brown hebout ran a tax site out of his eit lorraine county office. There wasnt an active vita site a so he opened up his office to beeland. One. W for the past few years the senator has helped us with opening taxpayers to secure their eitc. Thank you for coming to talk with us and your staff who is your d alwaysed working on eitc and there is time for questionandanswers after so be ready to prepare those. So thank you. David, thank you, and thank you, andrea. I dont know what the injury was, but you look great. And doctor thank you to your contribution to this debate and to all of you, and chi ching d wong who has been important you talking to the white house and educating them and helping gideon in our office and others to the so thank you for your terrific ping work. This is my real voice. I talk this way. Ank i dont smoke, im not sick, i just talk this way. And this is a true story im voi about to tell you. My wife and i were at an event m in a room about this size but no tables and chairs and people were all sort of crammed together and this three or four of us were speaking for a couple of minutes took the stage and began to talk and this guy standing next to my wife she hadking f never seen before and he turned as i was speaking and he said i h hate thata guys voice. And she said really. Said rea and he said when that guy speaks, it is like fingers on a blackboard. And she rnaisaid i kind of like. And she i really like it when he a wakes me up in the middle of thesays i night and says i love you baby. Very my wife is a great writer. Her name is Connie Schultz so e check it out. And youll laugh at more things than i just told you. Chec and thank you, david. David is such a gem and important in northeast ohio. He has testified a number of t times to subcommittees that ive chaired that deal with financial issues. Hes now at neighborhood Housing Services in cleveland and has just been a terrific advocate for people who frankly dont have a voice no matter what it errifi sounds like and he is so valuable to northeast ohio and e no you can tell your parents that in your and your academic friends, you can tell them that our acad too. Andfr a year ago this month on a cold snowy day i went to a Martin Luther king breakfast and a minister there said something and we all know it is true and he said it better and he said your line expectancy is tha connected to your zip code. And if you grow up in latcha ohio or East Cleveland a very xpe poor inner city suburb if you will, or whether you grow up in Shaker Heights or in an affluent suburb, your Life Expectancy clearly is determined in many ways, quality of health care, here wor whether you get a good y education, social support necessary from the neighborhood y organizations, all of that. Wher obviously it shouldnt be that su way in a country this rich. D my state embarrassingly is 48th in the country in infant ats mortality. 50th for black immortality. Infan we are under invested in Early Childhood education and under invested in the safety net that does give opportunity and so many low income people in our state pay for it every day. It is an economic plight and 48 d that 6 believe the Economic System favors the wealthy. So well over half of americans he thinks the Government Works more more wall street than main t street andh for the elite and wealth in this country than for those who have little etter opportunity. Whene workers wages stagnate and lit they struggle to provide for their families, they have more lies problem. And when people do the best theytake can and when they believe the ponsib economy isil rigged against them we have a political problem and ca when the next generation of workers retires with little or no savings and no defined tires pension benefit any more we have an economic problem. That is why the eitc and the Child Tax Credit are so very, ha very important. You know its history. It is close to 40 years old now. Expanded by every single president. It has been it most importantly rewards work. The eitc expansion of the 90s of led more than half a million of single mothers to move from cash assistance to work and double to mo the resultsve of welfare reform, which i opposed when i was in the house and welfare reform clearly didnt do anything close wh to what it was heralded to do. We know whatever it did do thatdid the earned income tax credit did. Much more. It has lifted more children above the poverty line than any other Government Program n. 2012 alone more than 28 american in households, almost 28 million in my state benefited from the ople in eitc average credit 2800. And it is important that we tell stories around thesekn numbers. Let me do that. We can stand up in front of t people and talk until we are blue in the face about Public Policy but we need to tell stories about whom this effects and the effect on them. One alicia duran told me last nt year she lived paycheck to paycheck but getting the eitc is the one time of the year she canves p pay off her bills. Pril rose alee of toledo works as thefood manager of a fast food staura restaurant and maked 9. 35 and thousands of storyies like this stori have made a huge difference in their lives. Uge in the state of the union of the u address, president obamas best dress one, he laid out tax code by making eitc permanent and helps to save for retirement. If you work and live in this to town and live around these n this buildings, what you hear about town tax reform is almost always nd weve got to lower the corporate re tax rate. That is how the debate has always begun. But we cant let the debate begin that way. The president i thought, for the first time emphatically in his state of the union began to change that debate. Empha we are not going to have tax t we reform until we expand the eitb and make the expansions for ctc and eitc permanent either wise we dont expand the tax reform and not without tax breaks for working families period. O it is something we should work ons wit on. X brea we know in the past eitc and ctb, as my first bills in 2007, signed by president bush and a bipartisan bill. First speech, january 2007, justiparti been elected to senate, n presiding officer was senator barack obama and i stood up and when you stand up in the senate you address the chair and my first words in january 2007 was mr. President , and i think he in th liked the sounde of it. Any way. True story but probably not entirely true. My state of the union guest two or three weeks ago was jason jacobs, a cincinnati resident grew up as a middle working class kid. Got a kid to teach at Ohio University and he cant get a job and now working in the West Claremont School District to the east of Hamilton County and made 16,000 and because he doesnt have children he will miss out on tax credit that will put money in his pocket. My and this would triple the size of workers without children and the wo expand access to Young Workers for and make enhancement of the youn workers that will expire in 2013 expanding the childless eitc is in our legislation that president obama proposed in the state of the union will lift 1. 5oposed i Million People out of poverty and help alleviate the poverty ce for np additional 10 Million People. For jason for even 1 of eitc the credit would mean about 600. So he is taxed further into poverty because hethe gets no help from the earned income tax credit. We know what the earned income tax creditt t means. Similar to the Health Insurances program, im introducing that legislation in simila the next week or so. That has been bipartisan by 20 years. In my state it is 130,000 children benefit from the chip program, the Childrens Health insurance program. And that means not just giving parents the peace of mind knowing their children have insurance and not just giving the parent some peace of mind they can do a few things for their children they couldnt do but it also means better performance in schools they r thei miss fewer school days and when it at school, they are less likely in sch to be sick and less likely to beys an hungry because they have more money and think parents have more money in their pocket. And if we care about not just these families and these more neighbors, but these societies and we raise children so they would have higher test scores and higher Graduation Rates and es Higher College rates and more peopleco getting g. E. D. And going to college and working hours andlege a higher salaries and the cash poor, the 44 of households that have less than three months worth of savings almost half ofess than people in this country have less than three months worth of savings, whatever age and if they are in their 50s, we know atever what that a means for their savings. Mean half of the people in this country depend on social e security for their income. So if we are going to build wealth and older people for earning a more secure retirement, eitc is important. But if we fail to act, 50 million if we fail to renew, 50 million americans could lose eitc and in so many ways that is the worst chyme of class e warfare. Clas when people who dress like me wo and have good salaries and get good pensions and health care good and dont rise to the occasion and dont expand the programs and he and do the Childrens Health Insurance Plan things that are and th bipartisan e things that have been bipartisan in this country for the last 30 years, the mip thin mum wang the minimum wage has less buying power than it did and it is not just teenagers what but it is for people supporting their families. But forget about them. When we talk about lowering the tax rate it is the worst kind tal of tax warfare. That needs to be our mission. And one other bill the refund eitc. David talked about pay day lending. He mentioned it. Ta there are more pay day lending stores in the United States today than there are combined united mcdonalds and s starbucks. And think about that. In upper income neighborhoods there are star bucks and mcdonalds and if you look at arbu the whole ckcountry think about the concentration of pay day lenders in moderate and low income neighborhoods. D mode and so what happens for so many people is while the woman rose from toledo, ohio, she depends on eitc on that check she gets. In member or march or april, she depends on that to pay down her bills to catch up. What if in october rose has some oct unforeseen problem that cost money which poor people are always more likely to have and her car breaks down and she mo cant go to work because her car breaks down so they has to go tond a pay day lender because that is not for four more months and the average person that goes to a pay day lender goes seven times. Son so you get the first pay day ti loan you cant pay it back and so you go again and again and u go you en d up paying 200 and often up to 500 . And if you have to borrow money nst yo because your car is more likely to break down about two years ago, i tutored a man about my he you age who dropped out of high school and i wanted to learn to read so he could get a better job. Job, he was a parking attendant in a hospital and he wanted to be able to read out loud from the bible out of his church and one out of four times we would from meet because i had Young Children and i was a single parent and on sunday nights i ildren couldnt a leave the house on sunday night and i would tutor him. And on sunday nights his car would break down. My car didnt break down and i had a good job and a decent t income and i had a car that was wn. Three years old and he had a car that was 12 years old. C and you know the costs of people it costs money to be poor. So that is the reason for this. And the way this bill works and im hopeful we can get a good job as weve had in the past on the eitc and the ctc is have a 500 if you will, advance on it costing the organization, you will get a 500 advance and when you get your refund it is le out 500 less and with all of that, that it means. So i w as you advocate around here tell your stories. Tories. You are all in this business. Pope francis said a few months ago he extorted his parish priests, go out and smell like the flock. We do Public Policy in this townotatio and we are supposed to understand the lives of a broad do section of people and we dont do that well enough. Lincoln, when he was president , ll eno his advisors wanted him to stay pres in the white house and wip the war and he said no i have to get my Public Opinion bathes and hear the stories of rose and n jason and then pass on to ries o policymakers anf others. And ill close with this. We john lewis, and a number of us including senator tim scott who i think has a representative ing se here today and tim and i are on leading the congressional celebrate to go to selma for the i anniversary and i was able to re take my young daughters there back in 1998 the first time we are took a trip and there were about in 1 six of us that went and jop went with them. And john tells a story when he spoke at emory commencement this year and i want to read the words he said because they are way better than i would have sa said them otherwise. Erwise he said he was born in 1940 e s so theseai stories are in the 1940s. To i saw the sign that said white men, black men and white waiting room and black waiting room. And i came home and asked my parents and grandparents why. Nts and they said that is the way itin 1 is. Dont get in trouble. I met rosa parks and Martin I Luther King and these two individuals inspired me to get age in the way and get in trouble. And so i encourage you to find a way to get in trouble, get in e you he good, necessary trouble. Find a so as you tell stories of people that you fight for, think about always getting in good, necessary trouble and encouraging your friends to do the same. Thanks. [ applause ]. Do you have time for questions . I do have time for one question. Too many stories. For see, the other thing about telling stories, you dont have to take questions. Tom carter from thomas and posey. Im a vita volunteer and tax attorney. [ applause ] ive been in briefings with very good conservative theoristsgs that say eitc is a better solution to helping the poor than the minimum wage. Better we can debate the minimum wage another time. I will say in personal debate experience my inlaws were i. D. Experi fraud and people used this is the issue about eitc fraud they had eight kids, someone invented another two kids, filed and got an eitc refund on a debit card and really im hearing from the inlaws and accountants in the hear district howin do we cut down on the eitc fraud an the debit cardhe distr fraud and if we can cut down d those things on the abuse program, we can provide more eitc to people. Thank you for raising that vide issue. Eople opponents to eitc expansion and permanence will use a 23 or 25 fraud number. That number is misleading in part because unlike tax returns for higher income people there is rarely a challenge to an audit from an eitc beneficiary than there might be to someone iciary whose income is higher. T so the o23 number is dramatically reduced, maybe 28 would if the process for appeal were to pay out. Because in many cases it is the governments mistake, not the eitc filer. Many number two, sometimes the eitc credit or the check that goes to the beneficiary to the taxpayer or the earner, he or she earned this, is actually an underpayment. So that is part of the 23 . Ment. Important to keep that in mind. And also important that i had a conversation with a senator who will be re remain mp nameless who brought up to the 23 and i said well we should 23 . Audit these returns and clean that up. But i said if you put more into eitc enforcement, you democrats this was republican democrats arent going to support more eitc tax or tax enforcement but i said you want to cut Internal Revenue servicep audits. But lets cut this in a way thatthis h is fair. But we dont back away from seem other taxto policies because there is some fraud. There and inis most cases there is only a few dollars. There is not that much money of fraud compared to overpayment against higher income people. I appreciate your comments and we need to answer the question better than i just did with we better facts n and figures and that is not a reason in my mind for doing that. And thank you for being a vita thank volunteer too. Thanks, everybody. [ applause ] thank you senator. Br it is my great honor to introduce professor eaton from ofesso Johns Hop Kins University and she insisted i call her kathy. Er in her book she and her colleagues provide a clear picture of low income lives in this book. It is a good book. It is moving and insightful and prescriptive and great proposalsoving for reform that i hope i can talk about today. And thank you. And please welcome me in introducing kathy so she can talk about it. So i look like one person. Im actually five people. Lisa adams is the best literary agent in the nation. B if unot the best for academics on want to write things people want to read. St for my coauthors sarah laura and read jen started out as my graduate students three graduations, children and marriages later are and now a cast of five up here as a rs in speak. Ime going to start with a story at my former dean and friend kevin alwood. He he gave us the first evidence dur that first welfare recipients, afdc were not longterm, but shortterm recipients and he went around the world and tried to defend welfare and he was e mail vilified and a on oprah and even ught the recipient of a fight and led cr to any insight that any fight to help the poor had to be fully iny real line with american values, especially the prime assy of ially work and the basis of an individual. Based one this insight he came to washington with an idea. He was helped by wendall primus, janice hol stat and mr. Read and under aspy the first eitc was birthed in 1985 but think of this as a flourishing from s adolescence to adulthood and thehing f world changes for poor people. Or i come into the story in the early 90s, i was traveling around the world interviewing low income people and workers about how they paid their bills. So i wrote a book with laura ok wit describing how the struggle of those who are on welfare and those who are trying to hold e down a job and all of the ways basic shortfalls were causing problems bi forl families. So imagine my surprise when in 2007 i returned to the field to talk about poor people who are receiving the modern eitc. Worker what i found was so fundamentally different than what i saw in the early 90s. As it turned out this made in differ america program, we invented this policy prescription right here in this country was not making people feel stigmatized and shamed the way welfare had. When you collected welfare in d the old days and this is still true, it is almost as though you had to trade your citizenship e your card c to be an outcast to collect be an that benefit. Outc in east boston where the research was dwon there is an old Welfare Office with the words over the door overseers of the Public Welfare and with wire mesh covering the windows. Imagine the experience of walking through those doors as compared to the experience of walking through the friendly doors of a vita site or h r ors block to claim your benefits like every other taxpayer. Ts like and so in short that i learned ort wh while welfare, our traditional tr wayad of helping what the eitc seemed to be doing for people was making them sense a feeling of incorporate. H r was using i got people was used again and again as people described the incorporating feeling that the government was rewarding them for doing the escri right thing andbe going out and working and perhaps the most profound thing that was different about the interviews t a were we conducting in the late interv 2000s as opposed to the 1990s 20 was0 the sense of hope. Hope for upward mobility. This was almost absent from the narratives of the folks in the early 1990s, that this big lump sum at tax time 6,000 7,000 almo 8,000, could inspire. This sense of hopefulness to work, the sense of getting that y somethingou like every other taxpayer turns out to share. If you give someone 6,000 or 7,000 at tax time they will 7000 blow it. Me everybody will go on a vacation. Instead what we found is we followed 110 tax filers from the moment they received their fund x file when the eitc was fully d allocated and we found 25 went into debt. Some of the debt was accrued during the year as senator brown alluded to because on alleged reality you cant make it on k your wage alone. And the other half was on a get people wanted to clean up on and t move ahead and acquire assets, ead most centrally a home. Ssets, m another 25 was spent in consumption paying the bills you cant pay every month and paying bil ahead or Car Insurance and the workcr interruptions that almost can be counted on. Nd 40 went to mobility. Rruption so those of you in the asset field can cheer, about 17 of ou in the total was for savings. The rest was for durable goods, or cars and freezers that allowed you to live more cheaply and access to wider labor markets and wider education. And then just a little bit gher extra, about 10 of the refund to invest in your kids. So im going to tell you one bit story. Thisut story was it was really near and dear to my heart. The moms name is deborah mckinney. She lives in boston. They had a fourth grader struggling in school and it turns out the fourth graders birthday was about the time she got her credit. She said if you pass the fourth grade, ill take you to the best Seafood Restaurant in america. So instead sher little girl patted the fourth grade and so the family had to find the best Seafood Restaurant in america. It turns out that, although boston has some great seafood restau restaurants it doesnt have the best sea foot restaurants, but they dont have red lobster. So they hopped in the car and 6 drove to connecticut and the 74 spent on the meal was the best 0 meal of the year. So 70 goes to support the idea th of parenting. Shortc and we know that tannive tonight doing the job and is not 25 per providing the tax net that it used to. And now it is only about 25 of the safety net. To sur a growing proportion of american households are forced to survive on less than 2 per day on cash c income. We need a temporary safety net when the eitc is not enough so when work is not enough. We also need to expand work it opportunity, there are simply too few jobs and too few hours to go around. Nd it is almost for many poor parents supporting children to aling find fulltime work. And we found work can be healing in and of has enough give. And in conclusion i would say in doing this work, in yo collecting these stories, and, by the way, if you read the book, you can have stories of your own even if you havent managed to go back and collect them yourselves. The critical insight we came a away with from doing this work was that everybody longs to it contribute. Part of the reason people felt so proud to claim this credit is na it was like a badge of honor badg that they were members of their mmunit communities. They were citizens. They were taxpayers. They werei playing by the resumes, they wereov making a contribution. Over and over again, families ey fe said i felt like a real american. So i encourage you and your efforts to advance the eitc and thanks for coming. [ applause ] thank you kathy. T thank you for speaking and h pushing the field forward with your research. Ppy to i am really happy to invite the moderator of our panel greg kaufmann, to join us. It occurs to me listening to both senator brown and professor edin that greg is a storyteller. Tol he told stories through his work now as editor of talk poverty. Org, telling stories of people in poverty and fighting poverty. He did the same when he had a eekly weekly column with the nation this week in poverty. Hes been fighting this fight for many years. Hes been described as one of the most consistent voices in d poverty, on poverty in america. I would add to that, ghtful consistently thoughtful and cited consistently on point. So were excited to have him. Please join me in welcoming him and the rest of the panelists. [ applause ] thank you so much. For that kind introduction. I have the pleasure of moderating this distinguished panel. Im goinig to introduce each of them to you. Seated right next to me is laurieanne sayles, laurieanne works with the National Institutes of healths national stitu Human Genome Research institute. And along thnee lines of the importance of telling stories around the numbers laurie will help us with that today. You m so thank youet laurie, for being here. You met dr. Edin, the distinguished bloomberg professor, and the department of univers sociology at Johns Hopkins university. Cant say enough about the book that you and your coauthors have recently published. It is not like im poor. I know youre not going to hawk e it. But i will. I think you should buy it. Seated at the next table is chyeching huang senior tax policy analyst at the d. C. Based think tank center on budget and policy priorities. Welcome, chyeching. At the end of the table there is barb mantegani, past president and current board member of the Community Tax aid, which runs these critical vitia sites throughout the d. C. Area. So lets get right to it. Im going to start with laurie. Ation. A little Background Information about you, laurie, first that you had shared with me that people folks here would be interested in. You face the prospect of being a mot single mother without a high oma, b school utdiploma. O but youn graduated high school on time. You went on to earn a ba in Public Health at university of Maryland College park, go terps. Im a marylander myself. You went on to earn a masters at in Public Administration with honors, i believe, at university of baltimore. Of b all of this while working full time and raising your daughter. Re and last year, not only did you get married, but youre a candidate for delegate to al maryland General Assembly at the same time. Came up a little short, but was l a good run and were rooting for you and after this panel is a over, well talk about your film rights, very interested. You have quite a story. But you said that family and govern various Government Programs weres really essential to your successence wit including, of course particularly your experience could with the eitcy and could you justlp talk about hows that helped both you and your daughter . So i think the senator at touched on it a lot. You know, that time and, you know, over the months waiting for you to file your taxes, you kind of incur you know, a lot of unnecessary or unexpected expenses, whether it is with your car breaking down, or after care, and, you know, when you tim have this opportunity to, you know he, know, have this extra money at a time when it is e unexpected, it puts you in a more comfortable feeling. Being inf poverty and being low income, it is a sense of stressexpect and youre d not really sure of what to expect day to day so it. Kind of gets you back on track. It is a little cushion to help you know along the way, throughout the years. Wo and how would you see that impact your daughter in particular . Well, she got to take l, she advantage of after school activities. I was able to l put her into ballet classes and, you know, being a single parent you kind of want to overcompensate for what you think your child is missing out on. And so being able to do those extra Little Things i think it really made her feel like she he wasnt different from anyone a else, she wasnt missing out on anything. Really helped a in lot. And in terms of obtaining these eitc, dr. Edin and Sherrod Brown mentioned the importance of vita sites. Did can you talk about that did for you and your family . So you know going to those hav sites and, you know having the People Volunteer their time to help you, its a reassuring feeling. It is a comforting feeling. Omeone l you know you dont have the stigma of someone looking down at you, and, you know, youre inp an environment where people are ready to help you and its a comforting feeling to know that those services are available to people in need and, you know, ir learned about the vita because i joined the Montgomery County Community Action agency, because i wanted to be able to advocate for people who were in my position, and really speak to mmunit they issues that would affect nd them. And, you toknow,ing first hand to contribute to the services i wil provided at that tight was a really good feeling. I promise ill get to the rest of the panel, one more ha thing. You actually had an experience with a nonvita site and you can contrast the two. Talk about that. Before becoming acquainted with the vita sites, i didnt go to h r block i went to a private tax preparer that i found in the yellow pages. And i feel like i was taken advantage of. I wasnt too sure about, you know, what deductions i should have, whether i should itemize or take the blanket deduction feel and, you know not being aware out wh of what your options are what your rights are, you kind of you just say, you know, im in need need of money im going to do whatever i can and i did not get what i was supposed to get on my return, and, you know, luckily we have the trusted vita sites that are available so that people arent taken advantage of in those situations. Thank you. And dr. Edin, laurieannes experience both in terms of the vita and nonvita sites and her and her daughters experience with the eitc, is this ith consistent with the experiences of families youve spoken with through your work . So people love the symbolic act of filing our taxes with other taxpayers. B whether it is at a vita site or not, right . But the fees you pay at vita sites are meaningful and the temptation, of course, to get whatever it is called now, cant do a rapid refund but h r block found a way around it, but the temptation paid a heavy price to get your refund early is real, hin especially when you have debt collectors breathing down your back, but the thing that i really heard laurieanne say was, you know the relief of as, parental stress, the ways in in which the eitc can scaffold your efforts to make your child feel like an ordinary american kid yo are very, very consistent. And, again it is not like the is a ballet lessons or one meal at l red lobster a year is an extravagant parental expenditure. But the symbolism of those expenditures is so powerful. Both for a parent and for a nditures child. And what wee really want is for child all people to feel part of like part of america. We want all people to participate in their communities. And what laurieanne was saying what we heard in the field was field that this program, and the way minist that we administer this program really has those benefits. Along those lines, i could be wrong about this, but wasnt ho there some research about eitc sn beneficiaries or participants, ild should say, being more likely toe vote for example . Did i read that in we dont have direct evidence of that. We know from joes work that when you benefits to people in agnity way that respects their dignity ikely and treats them as citizens, theyre more likely to vote. I think there are probably all kinds of spillover effects that fect ares caused from the eitc above and beyond the Health Effects that have been documented, for mented, example. Sopl researchers ought to get out there and look at these sort of citizenship benefits as well as the financial benefits. Yeah thank you. And chyeching, there has been a lot of research on some of the longterm impacts of the erm bene eitc. I think particularly apas they relate to children, if you could speak some to that and some of the other longterm impacts. I think there is a striking body of growing research thatthat the keeps coming. It it is fascinating that is showing that the eitc has benefits across the life cycle. Efinit youre right it is particularly the case for children and fo families that receive the eitc. So for example this links between increased eitcs and nal and improved maternal and infant health. So right at the beginning it is really important. And on to the schooling, there rese is research thatar shows that r higher eitcs are linked to Better School performance in elementary and middle school and now were starting to see the research that shows that there ro is a boost in College Enrollment associated with large eitcs. And the researchers think thats because of the Better Schoolrdab performance all the way through but also because it makes one college more affordable. And, you know, finally, one step further, were starting to see research that children who grow up in families with increased income from the eitcs, when they get to adult hood themselves, mo theyre more likely to actually e work more and earn more. So all the way through were seeing these important impacts. And i think you know going back to the theme about vita pen the impacts cant happen if they people dont claim the credits that theyre owed. And thats why barb is working, all the volunteers work is so tha fantastic. Thats exactly where i wastly going. Se thatar research is pretty astounding. Barbba i want to bring you in here. The Community Tax aid, which y youre on the board of, runs vita sites throughout d. C. Th can you tell me kind of look at the supply and demand of sites in this area and to the extent youre comfortable how that i ha looks nationally as well. Sure. I first, i have to warn you all i am not rational about the eitc th or about vita or the importance of what it is that we do. So my husband warned me not to oo e get too emotional this morning. But i will tell you that there is a lot there are numbers. Data there is data. There is research. And then there are people. Every 25 years i have been helping these people. The and the research and the data r 25 reflects what i have been seeing th for 25 years. And there is not enough of a supply of people. The number of people that the tee ta combined Community Tax aid, the various local counties and ons jurisdictions have their own have r programs they run, aarp has a very big program, which is terrific. But you put all of those gram, programs together, and you do oug not have enough people to be able to do a return for every be Single Person who is entitled tor claim the credit, which means ed that you have people going to going to preparers who charge , or them too much money or worse, that the upside of electronic e filing and of turbo tax and programs like that is that it can make it easier and things can go faster and so forth. Ca the downside of those things is ney that anybody with enough money to buy a copy of turbo tax can go out and say, hey, i can do t your tax return for you. Hing people who dont know anything of what theyre doing. And people who will deliberately create fraudulen t returns that the taxpayer, him or herself r doesnt even know about. Rogram there is a volunteer that is volunteering with our program this year who is in the irs, in the Enforcement Division who is prosecuting criminal fraud. The and one of the very significant prosec things that hes doing is prosecuting cases against retur preparers who basically prepare. Parallel returns so as far as t the taxpayer knows, theyre getting a return, theyre getting the refund theyre due, and then there is this return is that is filed that is all fakie fakie, that has a much bigger refund and that refund goes into the preparers account. As far as the client knows, as theyre filing the right thing. And so anyway their prosecuting these people. But, again as the senator s mentioned, there is not a lot of funding and so forth. The so the demand is huge. The supply is very narrow. And it Congress Really needs to take a better look at how to lso both fund, fund the preparation efforts and also i will throw in here quickly and ill stop irs talking is that the irs tried to who create rules to regulate preparers, to regulate who can qu do it, to require them to go through a particular training, get a certification, and a court knocked that down and said oh sorry, you dont have the authority to do that. And full disclosure i also work at the irs for four years. Orked the point being that since the s irs has been told that they dont have the power to impose ee rules to regulate preparers, r t congress has too do it. Do because somebody has to do it because my clients come in after having been taken advantage of by these people, and they owe now refunds that, okay they t werent entitled to them, but did they didnt know they were to entitled to them, and they keep paying off that debt to the government, and so, again im not rational about it, but theree does need to be some degree of com regulation so that you can go out to the community and say to these people dont have your e return done unless somebody can show you that they have this certification. The taxpayers arent going out there, going oh let me find somebody that is going to like do a fraudulent return. You educate them and theyll do the right thing. Im done. I would love to pick up on pleas that point. Please do, yeah. It relates to part of the conversation we had earlier about era. Oes and the data does back up your irrational feeling. And that the data show that vita sites have the highest accuracy se rate of any type of preparers. And that is partially because vita vita volunteers have to go through certification and show that theyre competent to file these returns. And in contrast unenrolled preparers that dont have to go rolled through any competency certification have the highest error rate. Thats why i think in addressing this error issue this regulation of return preparers is really important. If im hearing correctly, it m doesnt sound like right now ring c though, there is a lot of political will in terms of expanding the supply of vita, the number of vita sites. U i dont know if any of you are be familiar on that or can comment on it. Thet funding for low income tax credits, at best it is my stagnant. Weizat apply for grants every year and in order to fund our operations, and there is just nd t there is just not enough to fund all of the sites. And because you can fund a legal clinic that can help taxpayers a l once they have gotten into h trouble, but truly if you fund the people who aretr actually e doing the returns then theyre right and then the number of times that a taxpayer gets into trouble will be less so you sort of address the problem t there. But the funding, i dont have the numbers. But i can tell you that at best it is stagnant, and it has not kept up with the demand. S s okay, thank you. Kept i want to stay with the politics and for a little. Hile. We have this you know senator brown had mentioned eitc expanded under bipartisan president s both parties. Sort of a feel good story. I think we have a little bit of a potential storm on the horizon. I want to look at chyeching, ifde you can tell us about the eitc and Child Tax Credit expansions that are set to expire in 2017, and why we really need to be paying attention to that. Yeah so and policymakers do act at the end of 2017 three key provisions of the eitc and the ctc will expire. That means that millions of will families will face a loss of al some or are all of the credits and it would push more than 16 Million People and working families includingndthan 8 million children into poverty. This is a big deal. This is something we think is a to th really critical priority for congress. But, again, going back to the stories, what does that mean, if you think about a single mother with two children who is workingtha full time at minimum wage, lltim earning 14,500, she would face a loss of her entire Child Tax Credit, she would lose 1,725 as kathys research, you look atis a the book that is a really important amount for people who are struggling to get by and working and trying to raise children. So making the critical provisions permanent is a really i critical priority for this congress. And we heard news in the house just over the last couple of days that there is an effort to make some other expiring tax to breaks permanent including some tax breaks for corporations, i without getting into the merits t i of those particular tax provisions, we think that if anything gets made permanent, that these critical credits for. Working families have to go along with them. Did anyone have anything to add to that . So anyone who hears that number 14,500 must be thinking 14,5 how can anyone00 live on that . And in sort of meticulous analysis of these families mily bud budgets, youll be surprised to th hear they cant. You know we have made a pledge for a long time as this country y we t that if you work if you play byto the rules you ought to not be poor and you ought to get ahead. The eitc is the way we make good on that promise in america, even so nobody is living high off the hog on the eitc. Theyre barely scraping by. E this surplus that comes through for savings is invested in responsible economic behavior that i think all of us would of applaud, the fact that almost 1d in 5 is put away and saved is quite amazing. Ht so it is easy to lose sight of how tough families economic situations are and how unstable the labor market is. And the eitcs value and not le only making work pay, but in afety building a personal safety net so as to weather what is going on now with low wage employment is critical. Ht and should be, you know people ought to get rewarded for is playing by the rules. This is the way we make that happen here in america. T thank you. Tor br senator brown also alluded to an effort to expand the eitc for childless workers. Wo chyeching, i wonder if you tell could tell us about why that is is critical, who benefits and that at the moment we call them ch childless workers. And that really means childless adults and noncustodial parents. P and filers under age 25 who are not filing and claiming children are completely ineligible for the eitc at the moment. And those who are eligible are eligible for a small amount. Oul and, again someone working full a time at the minimum wage, they f get an eitc of 25 if they were a childless worker. This is very small. And in part because of the ca glaring in the eitc childless workers, low income childless workers of a sole group for which federal income and payroll taxes actually tax that group deeper into poverty. Making more childless workers overty eligible for the eitc and boosting it so it is an amount nt th that is salient for their lives, that holds strong promise of increasing employment, some of the same effects we have seen i for the eitc with the families with children and also reducing l poverty. I think thats a really important policy priority and t going back to your question about congressional interest. This is one where it has been bipartisan interest and i think were encouraged abouth that. Thats great. Did anyone els e have anything to say on that . Just in terms of my clients, my cl it is funny, it is hard for me to explain to my clients why they dont get anything. Them and, you know, you dont want to encourage them to go have are children, but they but it is f hard because theyre working t very hard,m and even if they get the maximum credit it is less than 500, and thats on, i i dont know, income of 5,000 or 6,000. So it is very, very small. And it is hard from a you can say from a policy perspective you do want to make sure that people who have Young Children an need more support, but that eop doesnt mean that if youre childless and working very hard that you yourself dont need support. I have to say when i was right out of law school and making a f very small amount of money, and i was filling out my tax return and saw this earned income this credit thing and i thought at is okay, thats true, i dont make ne that much money and im this and this, and it said you need to have a child. I thought oh i guess i cant get it. Hou i think it is sort of an an underappreciated population. The rub is the hardest for noncustodial parents. F many of whom we need desperately to bring into the labor market. Imagine if we could see the rket. Gains in noncustodial parents formal sector work effort, like we have seen for single mothers. Wo it wouldu really change the livesions of millions of americans children. And then there are those noncustodial parents who are ss working and paying Child Support and they feel the unfairness of the fact that theyre not eli eligible forgi the tax credit quite keenly. , and laurieanne, i wanted to ask you too, through your work with Community Action in Montgomery County if youre seeing with regard to the childless workers noncustodial parents if youre seeing some of c their struggles at the county see level that you can share we de anything about that. We definitely are. O one of our initiatives that we were at the forefront of last year was actually asking for full restoral of the earned a income tax credit for county residents. So we do see a disparity with the people who dont have children. But even residents, in Montgomery County, they match your earned income tax credit atunty l the county level. So it was decreased to 60 . To but now its back to its full restore because of its advocacy efforts at 80 . So you know Montgomery County being one of the wealthiest countyies understands the extra benefit as can help a family along way, goes a long way. Thats a whole other subject, and the state eitc and i wasnt e, familiar with counties working on that as well. P thats great. Professor, were going to give plenty of leave plenty of did time for audience questions. I did in a recent interview you did with tax credits for working families, there was this great gre quote, you said in getting to tting know the families the research and interviews, you said it will really, quote, help you think po more intelligently about policy and the poor whether you are n conservative or liberal. Can you talk some about that . I found that fascinating. T th so likeis many at this table when we conducted this research, all of the authors trained as volunteer tax preparers, can i say the test is hard . Can so i tried a i cullouple of times, ait should bea aa ait should be. It took me a couple of times to pass it. We all manned two vita sites in boston, one in the dorchester neighborhood and one in east boston. And if you want to know, you know, how poor people think, r what their lives are like, there are is no better way than to follow the money. It is a poignant time i think sitting across the desk from ily family or individual filing their taxes. You learn it is an intimate moment where you learn some verya private things about an individual, it is a chance for you to build on that feeling that people so value, that theyre really citizens and taxpayers, so you can give a lot, just even in that ing interaction, but youll come away with an understanding of h the plight of the working poor that i think will transform you and help you, you know when you act, you will have the voices of real people in the back of your mind, which is always better ba than acting without that. N act thank you. At i. F i can just throw one more thing, about the Actual Experience of working with the clients. They have to tell you very personal things because, you they know, you need to know about their children and where theyre kn living and what they have been doing and if they lost their so y job, theyre upset about that. With the you really have to deal with i ha them ind a very personal level. And i had a client years ago and i was at someone elses site so i was doing the return, if i start, like, crying dont get upset, but this woman had been ugh through just a horrendous situation, she had been evicted t. From her apartment because she r chil lost her job, and her she was in a homeless shelter with her children and her sister took in ta the children but wouldnt take her in, she was still at the shelter. She got a job at the cvs working at the one hour photo. Now this is a job that some of to. Us might not value all that much are igtright . This was the most wonderful thing in this womans life she came in for me to do her return and she said how blessed she was, that she had this job and d it wasi great and the people she worked with were fabulous. I did her return and the previous year, whoever the evious person was who did the return had somehow not figured out about the earned Income Credit so i fill out the return i get done, an i tell her shes going to get this refund of like, 3,000 something dollars. And she threw her arms around mething and said, you are giving me my n children back. Okay. And you go oh my god. And because she was going to now was have money that she could then wn the put down a Security Deposit on an apartment. It is not that she couldnt pay the rent from the money she was ot making from the cvs, but didnt ot have the money to get a place to live with her children. And when somebody says to you, ren ba you have given me my children back, you carry that with you forever. And it is that profound an impact that this tax credit can make. It is notn puppies and babies. But it is profound the impact that happens. Not actually i forgot a question i wanted to ask early onr actually, was really actually for you, professor edin and anyone can comment on it. K the eitc functions much more than just an income boosting program. It has an impact on asset building. And i didnt know if we had addressed that as much as maybe you might like to speak to or so as i said, 40 of the oward refund is typically spent towardis mobility purposes, 17 of the total is set aside for savings o and much of the rest goes to d dura humabln Capital Development and especially durable goods. So there are measurable surabl improvements in peoples lives that are labor saving, theyre you know you have a stand alonere refrigerate, you can shop much more efficiently. And buy in bulk. Dule m they make sort of the day to day schedule more doable especially if youre able to buy and maintain a used vehicle. So these are measurable improvements to peoples lives but maybe whats the most yo meaningful isu the sense that you can get ahead that you can be ente Something Different from what you are now that you can enter on the middle class the eitc brings. People not only plan all year for how theyre going to spend eyr their eitce making detailed calculations on the back of envelopes, they have multiyear plans for how theyre going to save, how theyre going to clean fo up their credit, how theyre going to make that down payment ay on a home, how theyre going to fer move to a quieter place with safer streets and better rive t schools. Thesehey narratives drive them all year long. They keep them going so this is not just an income support. This is really not only a Wealth Creation device but a whole an be different idea of what life can be like in the future. Thank you. Before we turn to the audience, this is sort of a freebie. Ore i anything i didnt ask any of you guys about that you would really really hope to speak to. Wow. Thats good. That means i kind of did my job,ce. I guess. All right. Audience. And am i calling on people . Okay. Right here in the front. So the way to think about times in school as teachable. Moments, we think of tax time as the tax moment. And you the final question that greg asked really is how does this moment move beyond just the refund and help build the aspirations that professor edin he talked about are for the future and asset building . One reason that cfcd is so excited to be more deeply part of this movement is because so vo many of the vita volunteers have become adamant asset building advocates. And want to link a whole set of pening other services to what is happening at the sites because th they see the potential. So i would love everybodys idea, starting with laurieanne about how do we leverage this moment, how should we be thinking about the otherse ps services, the other products the other partnerships that we can use at the tax moment . It well one of the things that n y we started doing at our vita sites in Montgomery County is when you come in to signing your name, there is not just a list of, you know your personal formati information, but it is also ks to it links to social services. Do you need help with child care . Do you need help with training or job skills . And it is a whole form that you fill out. And after youre done preparing your taxes theyll say, okay, we will refer you to this organization or refer you to that. So you know providing an atmosphere where you have th partnering organizations there, and you kind of weed out what people want at that time. Kind of helps them with other services that they may now be aware of. And at our site in Community Tax aid tries to do a lot of we partnered with various organizations in virginia for credit counseling. So we will have someone on our at our site and so somebody can either while theyre waiting, the wait to getcre their return done or after it is done they go meet with the credit counselor, can look up their credit score. Many people, again, they want to be able to buy a car or buy a house or whatever and so being able to we tried to marry it with a bunch of things but the credit counseling works really well. And we work in a Human Services office, so were able to refer pretty easily, but thats something that work really re nicely nicely. The outreach team, a couple of them are here today, they run a campaign that helps raise awareness of the credits and vita opportunities. And part of what they work on is doing exactly this sort of thing, linking up the opportunities, including for health coverage, for taking out devote the opportunity to devote some of your income to a savings split refund option, and i think in the packet you have a little flyer that will direct you some information about that and all the opportunities that they try to draw attention to. Great. Im a sorry. So we heard a lot about the tax moment in our interviews. And i want to talk about two things briefly dignity and debt. It is really incumbent upon the vita sites to treat clients withnity as as much dignity as possible. Frankly, youve got a heavy competition from the h r blocks and libertyth taxes because they know how to treat people as customers. They make them feel valuable that they have people and part of the reason people go to h r block rather than a vita site isir. That it feels good to be there. T we need to make sure this is a dignity enhancing moment because incorporation is so profoundly d. Attached to how folks are treated when they come this the door. Second, people really want to clean up their debt so they can move ahead. Ople they dont know how. Hat they have fascinating and maybe even perverse ideas about what should be prioritized. We cover this in gory detail in the book. And so you know, credit erstan counseling and help withdi bt understanding how they should at prioritize debt is what really counts toward a credit score would be really valuable. Great. Yeah, on the side there. Considering political at incorporation, to what degree do the vita sites allow people the e opportunity to vote is that standard protocol or an add on that some communities would do . We dont have any faction with registration to voting in our sites. But it is a fabulous idea. We actually have one of our sites is dedicated to providing opportunities to registered voter, open up accounts. I it is definitely a priority to link that service as well. You know, it is hard for me d to see the whole room. Can somebody help me if im not seeing people in the back or anything like that . Thanks. K this questionat is for professor edin. Does any of your recent research give us any insights about how we can help those low income taxpayers become more aware of free tax preparation either in inc person, like at the vita sites or online like my free taxes. Com . Yeah. So it is really hard to compete with those dancing tax men, right . And tax women onte the corner. Orner. You know it is interesting, in b boston, of course, the there has been a very longterm and ganiza vigorous campaign, the abcd Community Organization which has, you know, offices to our hood friends in almost every Boston Neighborhood is a major provider of the eitc the vita free taxinstitut preparation. It is really hasize institutionalized way there that gets underneath your fingers. You have competition from h r block and all the competitors and the possibility of getting your refund early. If we can attack the debt piece if we can figure out how to make work pay all of the year, i lovef the idea of allowing people to withdraw 500 midyear to avoid a financial cascade. We do need to think more carefully about ways to not let nanci debt be the driver of which door th you enter when those taxes ds b when those tax refunds become available. Right here. There has been a group of organizations that have worked together to pilot and launch an online Preparation Service that allows people to do their taxes ring i online for free. F c i wonder if you can talk about that from an inclusion standpoint since thats the ease i increase in onlinen services is something were seeing from taxpayers at all levels. Well, i think with bb t and a lot of banks started offering ou pretax preparation online, the problem that you run into is if youre not familiar with all of t the tax codes and things that y you can really claim on your so taxes, then you may incur some hurdles and things that you could have, you know, received that you werent aware of. So it is just being familiar and being well versed in the tax preparation. It is free but are you really hing getting everything that you could . Yeah, and to that point too, we have tried at various times, Community Tax aid, to have a our biggest site selfdirected tax return prep but we have people there to sort of help theation, taxpayers, ask questions they help do the returns themselves but they can ask the questions. I would say this is the very population that you really dont want to necessarily make, do it you yourself online tax return preparation available to because th it is it is hard. Btle and there is lots of things that are very subtle and turn on understanding what certain termsersta mean. They a certain meaning innd the hav tax code different from its ch meaning its colloquial meaning. Th t im of two minds. I struggle with that, as a return prep service provider, so were trying out doing something where they can do selfdirected and we can kind of supervise how they do the return and well seehow how that goes. But i do have concerns about the fact that they dont end up g getting the maximum benefit out of that approach. Yeah, right here. Hi. Susan mason from the foundation. A couple of thoughts i wanted to follow up with. Barbara, im a fellow vita eitc nerd. Tears come easily to me as well. A couple of thoughts one thing you mentioned is anyone can buy turbo tax and go out and do it. I encourage if anyone is interested in the whole tax fraud issue, yesterday thereer wases a forum at the newseum sponsoredum by the atlantic and intuit was one of the underwriters for ors. S that. Our ceo was one of the opening pen speakers and his point of view was for all of us that are in or all this tax fraud battle to make put sure that we do not put the solution on the backs of the lowest income. And that they that is not right. Thats not going to get us out and of this problem. Go but i really do encourage you tot i go online and look at that ha discussion. There was some really good discussions there. It was also opened by senator enzi and klobuchar talking about it as well. The second thing when andrea l opened up, she talked about hope. And about this being a hopeful time and one of the things that intuit were most hopeful about ough is how we have been t donating turbo tax through the free file and where we had some of the best success is by partnering it with h vvitas on that, through providing coaches and if anyone was interested in using intuits product, we would be happy to help and my emotions are coming out, for the first time for out any if anybody who is do eligible for our product can actually do both free fed and free state. So thats that is a new development and we would be happy to work with anybody. Ellen evans is our person on that. It is not free fall isnt about intuit. It is about 14 Different Software companies that can help with that. And last thing kathy, thats one of the questions i wanted to ask you is have you looked at the in the same way. My favorite story is from harlem. When we had a taxpayer using turbo tax and our coach, just saw this guy getting more angry and angrier and angrier as he was doing it and he said, sir, you know if you dont like it dont do this. Do he said no, i have had somebody else do my taxes for 20 years, is this all there is to it . El there iss a lot of hope in that. Thats fair. People are afraid to do their own taxes. The idea that you can could get audited, that you could owe the money, that you could break the law is very intimidating to people. And a lot of the reason why they go to the for profit tax preparer is they trust them to get it right which makes ann laurieannes story all the moremu tragic. We need to makkee s sure that those folks are regulated so they do get it right given the fact theyre getting paid quite well a for their services. But fear is very much a factor. A lot of our folks selffiled th as well. And what we saw is that a lot ofx folks went to the one person in their network who mastered turbo tax and theyre paying 30 bucks to that person to help them through the process. So some sort of this informal coaching is going on. Goin and we might as well capitalize on it by coaching the coaches so i that theyre i think there is just having returned from t thehe mississippi delta where od people are offering you know, intuit and other products to ng their neighbors, and engaging in some of the practices that barbara was talking about, the, for you know, the opportunity for exploitation here is really, really ripe among vulnerable t populations. So we need to be alert to it and we need to coach the coaches. Gentlemen, yes, in the red tie. Yeah, this is a question for dr. Edin. In interviewing everyone, you stood w know, for your book, did you get any sense that folks understood where they were in terms of the credit phase in range or phase out range or talk about maybe i earned too much this year i a have lower credit than the year before . Did you get a sense if that affected the desire to marry or not be married . So we devoted considerable time to asking people these estion questions. Inte and itre was very interesting. There is quite a moral discourse about this. First of all, people really dont know how it works. Di they know it is attached to ttache work. They know you to have kids to get it. Ve and they think, and this is true in the phase in range that the more you work, the more youtr get. T and so people dont think, oh i should work less because maybe ill hit the phase out range theyre really you know, the people who are at the sweet spot of the credit generally benefit from working more and they king m really see it as a motivation to work more hours and not less. Y yea they dont know how much theyre going to get every year. Ve they have a sense of what it might be if theyre multiyear, you know, claimants. Them but the surprise kind of cautions them against sort of prespending. I think thats a good thing. So, you know, when christmas comes and there are all of these pressures to buy, youre still gure going to maybe figure out a way your to get what your kids need, but s not going to sort of be as tatio susceptible to, youns know, to temptations to spend because youre not really sure. And that increases the sense that this is a windfall, a dpiftgift from god better than christmas, all over our interviews. Walmart is now using that line, bett you know come in for an experience that is better than christmas. And the sense of surprise built an anticipation and a sense of joy around the event of i collecting, you know your tax refund that most of us dont have. Thats a really nice moment for families, a celebratory moment for families. They understand some thing they the dont understand others. On balance i think they understand the right things that the more are you you know you need to have children and the more you earn, the more you get. Nt the and to the extent that they are then on the downward slope sometimes theyre surprised in not a good way so youll say, okay youre getting 3000, and they say what do you mean . Last year i got 4,000. Y you point out to them that theirhey total amount of money that they bu have in their household is more because but youre able to you got that better job so you earned 3,000 more dollars it really doesnt matter to them whether they got the credit or not. At they get that. Arn they get that idea that it is better for them to be able to m earn more. And so and none of them none of them have the thing theyot can tell oh im going to go on the they dont have that idea. They just they understand that as they earn more, it is less appropriate that people who are earning less should be able to help the way they were helped when they were earning less. Yes, before you talked about the the opportunities for exploitation, and it was also mentioned that you know, the problems with identity theft. And i know that at many vita sites and our own, one of the Biggest Challenges that we have are when parents arent together, and who files first . And i know that our vita team works really hard to help peoplepeople with an injured spouse situation and i wanted perhaps barbara peop you might want to speak about how the vita sites help people right themselves from identity theft. Well, in terms of righting help yourself from identity theft, wean cant help with that other than i if you hadde your identity stolen wil you can go to the irs the irs will assign you a special filing number. And we have had clients come in c with those. So they can file. Valuabl the more valuable service that we provide to our clients is theattemp duelling parental attempt to s filei the child situation where w were able to help the custodial parent who is all worried about having to get this filed becausethe the other parent, they know is going to file the child. And we had situations where we dow had to sit down with them and back in the days when the irs had money to have walkin centers, we would say, bring allnd your paperwork, you can prove this child lives with you but youre going to have to go and th do that. So thats another valuable thing we can give that if youre not in the vita world you may not t get. I think we have time for one or two more questions. Yeah right there. This is a question i would like to direct to chyeching, please. On the question of research you i cited about vita sites having a higher accuracy rate than others, is that others that werendivi certified or others in the private sector or individuals . If you can just expand on it please . Sure. We can follow up. Sort of so the report looked at various different types of preparers and those at vita sites had the highest accuracy rate overall. The lowest accuracy rate overall, the highest error rates was for unenrolled preparers th t that were not sort of associated. With some of the national chains. So there was a special term for those, i cant remember off the top of my head but those are you the really the types were a thinking about when you think an just sort of like somebody that is hanging out there and got a copy and hasnt gone through any internal certification process that some of the bigger chains might have. Research that we can cite . Quest we can follow up. Thank you. Last question gentleman right here. So thank you patrick haine. Great event. Thank you, all, first and foremost. So my question so many things traveling around in my brain right now. I get really excited about tax time and all this other good fo stuff. You know, but for me one thing o that has come out of this is, ortan you know thinking about, wru you know, the importance of talked vita, how paid preparers and their role and some of the fraudulent things you have talked about, but one other thing is just, you know the fee for Service Model and helping the consumers perspective vita clients as i like to call them, help them understand how much it is going to cost them. And seeing that thats cost e o taking away from their overall family budget. You have any of you thought about s showcasing the vita costs that they have, this is zero, for your clients, versus what your competitors are charging . And then secondly, in regards to the research, if there is anything that you could lift up in regards to if you saw any change in behavior as far as vita clients versus others who ar a understood that they were the f getting the full refund . Thank you. The issue of being able to. Point out to them that it that that getting wa walking out the door with your refund means yo youre walking out with 400 less than you would be walking out with a week from now, thats something that we try always to get that message across. Ht it is sometimes difficult because they might very well ver need that money right that nighthe because they need to go pay their payday loan. Ch so it is a very challenging situation for us to be able to make that Value Proposition when theyre really up against it. So what we do is we try and get to m out there and start doing n th returns as early as we possibly can when they have direct ly deposit, they can c get did i sometimes in at week or less but it is a clefrphallenging thing and i would love to figure out a way g to help migrate more people to migrat vita sites but then we need to have the vita sites to migrate lex to. Well, a goods benefit of that is the flexible hours you know. You can come after work. Ork ar andou thats an incentive to working around schedules of someone who may have multiple jobs. Another incentive is direct deposit. So it may not be automatic on a. Debit card but you could get it within 72 hours. So you can buy savings bonds, and so there are definitely incentives of getting the taxes prepared at the vita sites. I think we do a really good job d of advertising those benefits. And we actually do an annual sessio report after each session just to show how much money was the ure average return and things of that nature to really show the o benefits of the program. So it is completely true that the when you get that check from h r block, what you paid h r block is invisible to you. The little plaque they have in the office is inununinterpretable. A great role for the i vita sites would be to make the invisible sa visible, to advertise with great vigor the savings that you can get from a vita. E but you to have to confront the fear of the irs. People often say oh i go to h r block because i have peace of mind this audit protection feature, that some of these tax som preparers offeer is very valuable beca to people because theyre so afraid of getting in trouble with the law. And then i think, third, what the vita sites can do that for ca profitn taxpayers cannot do is marry tax preparation with other services. If the vita site becomes the place to figure out which debt to prioritize, if it becomes the place where youre treated with ays just as much dignity as youre treated with h r block, you can compete in ways that xleerclearly make it beneficial for folks to go to the vita site rather than the for profit. All right, i think thats about our time. I want to thank our great panel. [ applause ] i also want to thank our host, cfed and tax credits for working families for your great work. And thank all of you for coming. I hope you have a really strong sense of how fantastic these the eitc ctc, vita how fantastic they are. How they need to be protected and strengthened and how much hope there is for bipartisan effort on this. I think everybody would love to see some bipartisan effort. So thank you for coming. [ applause ] coming up in just over an hour on cspan3 the house and senate will honor members of the First Special Service Force known as the devils brigade during world war ii. The Commando Unit was an American Canadian Special Operations Unit formed in 1942. Well hear live remarks from congressional leadership and two veterans at the ceremony on capitol hill. Again, well have it live here for you on cspan3, in just over an hour. The Political Landscape has changed with the 114th congress. Not only are there 43 new republicans and 15 new democrats in the house and 12 new republicans and 1 new democrat in the senate, there is also 108 women in congress including the first africanamerican republican in the house, and the first woman veteran in the senate. Keep track of the members of congress using congressional chronicle on cspan. Org. The congressional chronicle page has congressional chronicle page has useful information there including Voting Results and statistics about each new session of congress. Best access on cspan, cspan 2, cspan radio and cspan. Org. Up next, senators rob portman and al franken along with danny davis discuss issues facing the nations criminal Justice System. This event also features the author of orange is the new black which is the basis of netflix Award Winning show. The constitution project is the host of this discussion. And to welcome so many of you this morning, particularly those from house and senate staffs who will be engaged in many of these very same issues over the course of the next few months. It is interesting because this is a city in which the common wisdom is everybody fights with everybody all the time, that democrats and republicans, conservatives and liberals cant get along, dont get along, dont want to get along and more interested in making partisan points than in solving any of the countrys problems. Interestingly, that has not been the case in recent years in the area of criminal Justice Reform. Conservatives and liberals, democrats and republicans alike have come to the conclusion that the system that has developed over the course of the last few decades in this country isnt working, we are spending a lot of money and some states second only to education is the prison budget to incarcrate americans for all manner of crimes some of which didnt exist a few decades ago. As a consequence we have looked at these things and come to the conclusion that we have to work together. In this space, if you will, there are a lot of groups now that didnt exist some years ago. There are groups on the left and groups on the right. I was a founder with pat noland. We were meeting years before that group was found. We were meeting with liberals as well as with conservatives to try to find some way out of the impasse that resulted from partisan bickering and grand standing over the years. One of the problems with dealing with the public on these issues was that it devolved into a fight among straw men. And forgotten in the middle was the society and the victims and the citizens. And as we looked at that we realized that that had to be broken. What we had to do was look at criminal justice questions first from the basis of the reason that we have it. You know, some years ago when Ken Cuccinelli stepped down to argue and was given an apard as a result he said the problem with the criminal Justice System is that too many people forget the middle word in that phrase. And it was our decision and our conclusion that we as people cannot afford to forget that middle word. There needs to be justice for victims. There needs to be justice for society. And there needs to be a just way that people can pay their debts to society and reintegrate into the Civil Society once they paid those debts. And thats what the whole move, the bipartisan move for criminal Justice Reform has been about, to get away from old rhetoric to look at evidence to see what works and what doesnt work, not to lobby for prosecutors and criminals, but to lobby for a system that serves the Civil Society in which we all exist and for which it was set up and to serve the ends of justice rather than the ends of idea logical and partisan making. There are groups on the right. There are groups that van jones is involved with that are somewhere else. And then in the middle there is the constitution project which tries to bring these groups together. This panel today really represents a cross spectrum view of this problem. Ill introduce the Panel Members as we go on, but i have to say that from the beginning our representative here represents a group that has been interested in criminal Justice Reform from the beginning. Family is against mandatory minimums really was started with the assistance and support of the foundation and we appreciate that and all else that you have done. I can say the same if we had some of our very liberal benefactors here because this is something that has attracted support from way different parts of the spectrum. We have a number of folks dropping in so we are going to handle this sort of casually. Congressman danny davis is here. I would like him to say a couple of words. Congressman davis is from illinois. He has served in the Congress Since the 90s. He has taken an interest in these issues before others paid much attention to them. Congressman. [ applause ] thank you. Thank you very much. Let me just say first of all how delighted i am to see so many of us here and how delighted i am to see the diversity of this panel of experts and Interested Individuals and organizations that are involved. All of us are practically aware of the fact that mass incarceration is one of the big issues that face our nation, that we are the most incarcerated nation on the face of the earth. Whether you are talking about proportion of the population or whether you are talking about actual numbers. Even countries whose populations are minor compared to ours and, of course, populations that are major compared i got interested in the reentry question because i think it is one of the most challenging issues that we face today. Fortunately, we were able to put together a group who passed something called the Second Chance act and it involved democrats, republicans, members of the house, members of the senate, grass roots groups, research groups, university groups, every kind of individual and group that we could coalesce. After several years of discussion we managed to pass legislation based upon knowing two or three things concretely. One, that about 700,000 people come home from jail and prison every year. Those who get no help are likely, that is twothirds of them, are likely to do what we call real fen, something to get them back to where they came from. The level and quality of the help that they get will reduce their reincarceration tremendously. The higher the quality, the greater the reduction. The more opportunities that they get, the more help. Moneys have been appropriated, never enough, but we have actually had appropriations each year. There are about 600 agencies, groups, organizations who right now are and have received appropriation from the federal government to work on the issues. Thats pretty significant because they have also generated thousands of other entities who didnt necessarily receive money. Some of the stall warts are on this panel who have been pushing it. I always like to mention senator rob portman who was one of the original, original promoters of the concept and the idea. There are others who joined in. There are other whose have become a part. I am just excited that so many of you view this as an issue that we need to keep working on. I always say that we have only scratched the surface. We can never believe once we get to the basement that we are in the penthouse. So we have much further to go. Its a pleasure to know that this forum is taking place today and we expect great things to happen. Again, i cant help but mention the diversity of the interest gives me real heart that things are going to happen and i thank all of you for being here. Thank you very much. [ applause ] thank you, congressman. As a midwesterner i have to note that congressman davis from illinois mentioned now senator portman from ohio and congressman sensenbrenner is here, as well. Congressman sensenbrenner is from wisconsin as am i. And i think i have known him since he was in high school. And in the years that he served in congress in the Judiciary Committee and elsewhere he has been both tough on crime and sensitive to the need to improve and reform the criminal Justice Reform