across the country were underfunded by $1.4 trillion in 2010. and nine states have set less than 60%. so here s the question with all this finger pointing. who will end up paying for this mess? will it be retirees who lose their benefits that they have worked for and earn? or taxpayers who will pay more to cover those shortfalls? joining me now, the senior fellow at the center for budget and policy priorities and bloomberg view columnist megan mccardle. thank you for joining me. so i want to start with you. and i want to sort out this anti-labor rhetoric from the fiscal reality of, we have cities that are making promises it can t keep. then they re blaming labor. there are annul of cities. there s a great deal of variation between the states and the cities. i was looking at some numbers
a kind of preschool environment. they pay for it. and they get great results. megan, i know you have sort of libertarian inclinations. it seems to me that s the big difference between the united states and northern europe, where by 6 or 7 years old, if you re a poor kid in america, you ve kind of had a very tough time between the nutritional issues, day care and early childhood education. we now know that the brain is almost permanently disadvantaged. well, i think that there s been some really promising research on early childhood education. mr. chetty has done some of it. but it s difficult. it s a tough issue. when you look at these projects, things like the project that had great results in terms of long-term improvements and the life outcomes of kids they worked with, but this costs tens of thousands of dollars in today s dollars. it required intensive home visits, full-day preschool and the results were more in line of moving people a little bit farther into the working class
in fact one thing that both right and left agree on is that social and economic mobility, bowing able to make it no matter where you start from, is at the heart of the american dream. in recent years the most depressing statistics about this country have been that that mobility has declined, particularly compared with other countries, despite the anecdotes and celebrated examples, most americans appear to be stuck in the economic strata into which they were born. last week the most detailed study on this topic was released. it provides lots of fascinating clues about the causes of our problem, breaking american mobility down by geography. for example, if you were born in a detroit family in the bottom fifth of the income levels, you would have a 5% chance of making it to the top fifth. but if you were born in san diego, your chances are twice as good. why? we re going to get to the bottom of this. raj chetty is one of the authors of the study. he is an economist at harvard and won the
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sort of a left-right issue is you have a fair degree of social stability because it s homogeneous, even though you don t have the same family structure, it s ethnically homogeneous but a very large public investment in education, particularly early childhood education. they have what s called social democracy. they pay a lot of taxes. almost half of their national income, whereas in the united states it s about 30%, not 50%. and they use that to support families, for example, exactly to address the kind of problem that megan mentioned. the families falling apart under the pressures of poverty. they support early childhood development, day care for poor families so that the mother can go to work and have the child in a safe environment that also is