Tamar: Well, you know, in the '50s the working class, the industrial working class were the
heroes in America and they haven't been the heroes in America for a long, long time and
so they're hurting in a lot of ways.
Robert: Tamar Jacoby, President of Opportunity America.
Thanks for being here.
Tamar: My pleasure, Robert.
Robert: And we're here to talk about a report that you were the driving force behind "Work,
Skills, and Community".
Tamar: And you were a part of, too, and we had a lot of fun doing it.
Robert: We did.
Why did we do it and what is it about?
Tamar: It's about the working class.
And I'm sure everyone remembers the campaign for...in 2016 the working class was all anyone
could talk about, and there were furious sound bites on every side of the campaign, a lot
of journalism but I don't think anyone really got to the bottom of who these people are
and what their issues are.
And when we as a group of scholars started to look beneath all of this sound and fury
and sound bites we found that they're a group still somewhere between the poorest of the
poor and the middle class but having troubles.
They used to look like the middle class in all but the income range and now they're starting
to look like the poorest of the poor in many ways.
And so there's some real issues out there that have been festering for decades that
no one's really paid attention to that the 2016 campaign, for better or worse, at least
ripped the cover off and got us to look, but we wanted to look deeper and see if we could
come up with some solutions and we wanted to do it in a bipartisan way.
Robert: And we found that their anger was justified in some regard.
The economy's not been terrific for them.
What do we think are some good answers?
Tamar: Well, there's...we came up with a range of answers and our...the theme...so we have
three dozen answers in our book and the common denominator is work.
We wanna make it...we wanna make...get more people back into the workforce.
We wanna make work pay.
We wanna give people the education and skills to get work and better work and better jobs
and we wanna strengthen families and communities to support work.
So the solutions range from unions to childcare to college financing but the themes, the big
ideas are all around work and making work...putting the work back in working class.
Robert: So let's talk about skills.
Bachelor's degree, a good idea for everybody?
Tamar: No, and the nation has been trying to sell college successfully,
selling college for all for two or three decades and what that has meant is a lot of kids have
gone to college who weren't really gonna do that well in college and it's not because
they're not as smart.
It's just because they may be different or the jobs they want don't need a four year
college.
So people are now starting to realize across the country that maybe that was the wrong
focus.
I mean, if you can get to college and get through and succeed and have the right major,
four year college is a great investment.
But if you don't get through or you pick the wrong major, a very important choice, or you
go into debt you're...it's...often you're worse off at the end.
So we gave a lot of thought to what could a true alternative to college be for this
group, those in this group who for that, whom that makes sense.
And how are we gonna pay for it.
Because right now the bulk of federal higher ed financing goes to traditional academic
college and very little of it, just 14% of it goes to what I call career education or
occupational education.
And, you know, I don't know exactly what the balance should be, occupational or academic
but it's certainly not 14-86.
And so we gave a lot of thought to how to...to what...how we can do a policy should be during
a time of national experimentation which is a tricky question because the feds can't...shouldn't
just be deciding to throw a billion dollars at this.
They...we have to be encouraging experimentation and creating standards but also...
And also how to get employers involved, that's another big question, but then that final,
you know, harder to wrestle question is where to find the money.
Robert: So this was one of those right and left coming together.
So we had six scholars from the left and six scholars and experts from the right.
What did the right agree to that they might not normally think they would agree to and
what did the left agree to that you don't think they would've normally agreed to?
Tamar: Yeah, so the left agreed to modest work requirements for some government programs.
I mean, everyone in the group more or less agreed that the social...that the agencies
that administer these programs don't do enough to get people into the workforce, that mostly
they give out the benefits and they don't do enough to get people into jobs and everybody
was okay with that, with giving the...a new mandate to the agencies to try harder to get
people into jobs.
Robert: And the programs are like SNAP, food stamps, Medicaid.
Tamar: SNAP, the food stamps, Medicaid, everybody, yes, yes, thank you.
But where we differed and where a few people on the left gave little ground was whether
we should actually require people who get benefits to work or to do some kind of work
activity.
And, you know, 87% of the public I think the number is thinks that that should be but there
are some people in the left who think that if you're talking about Medicaid perhaps or
food stamps you shouldn't have those requirements.
So that was a little movement on the left.
On the right we were willing to get...find a few little tax increases.
We focused on tax increases that were places where people who benefited from the corporate
tax cut, you know, in the upper end of the income scale maybe have benefited, I won't
say disproportionately, but a lot, and we have some modest taxes there.
But a lot of things...and this is...a lot of our proposals we found ways to pay for
by, you know, as we used to call it cutting waste and fraud and misguided spending.
I mean, on the education front that we were just talking about, education skills, we found
in double digit billions by eliminating 529 education savings account, for example, which
go overwhelmingly to the upper middle class.
You know, our thinking about the...the people that we're thinking about is they're kind
of the hole in the donut.
They're a little too well off to benefit from many programs that are for the poor but they
don't earn enough or pay taxes or pay tuition so they don't benefit from any of the programs
for the middle class.
And that ranges, you know...I mean, it's true to some degree the mortgage interest deduction
is less, but certainly education kinda benefits and childcare benefits.
And so we wanna even some of that out and so we've...in a lot of cases we found the
money that we were gonna spend on the working class in other places.
Robert: Subsidies for the well off.
Tamar: For the well off.
Robert: So skills development, a little bit of work requirements in federal programs that
provide assistance without focusing on employment.
What are some of the easy solutions that some politicians talk about that we rejected?
Tamar: Good, a very good question because there are a lot of solutions floating around
out there that sound great and they fit on your bumper sticker and universal basic income,
free college, Medicaid for everybody.
We said no.
We don't like those.
Most of them would be harmful.
Our solutions are more practical.
Often they've been...I mean, you know, so let's take an example.
Universal basic income.
We think that it should be universal basic work, universal work.
We should help everybody get a job, not give everybody a subsidy to stay home and this...and
productive, people like us will work and a lot of other people won't work and won't have
the dignity of work.
And so we rejected these bumper sticker solutions and our solutions, you know, they can sound
wonky.
I'll be the first to admit they don't have...most of them don't fit on a bumper sticker and
they need to be argued through but, you know, we think they're practical.
We think they now have at least bipartisan buy in of some kind.
Many of them have been tested in states or are being tested in states and many of them
have been floating around on Capitol Hill and the one...with some bipartisan support
but the one reason we couldn't...we haven't been able to enact them is because people
couldn't agree where to find the money.
And so for example on the expanding EITC for childless workers Obama has talked about that
and Paul Ryan has talked about that.
What they couldn't agree on was where to find the money.
We came up with a bipartisan solution for where to find the money.
Robert: And one more on what we didn't choose.
We didn't choose protectionism or a global trade war.
Tamar: No, or a wall at the border or...
Robert: Ending immigration.
Tamar: Or ending immigration and, you know, we understand that there's a lot of people
in the working class who feel that...who feel or have been told that immigration is the
source of their problem or have latched on to immigration as the source of their problem.
We don't think it is.
Certainly not the major source and maybe not even a significant source and so we felt we
could come up with our solutions that we think really are real solutions without going near
that very contentious issue.
Robert: So just describe for me...to be clear who are we talking about?
What is the category or...
Tamar: Yeah, exactly.
[inaudible 00:08:32] working class.
Who are they?
So they have at least a high school diploma but not a four year college degree and they
live in a household...the technical description is between the 20th and 50th income percentile.
What that means in practice for a household that has 2 parents and a child I believe is
between $30K and $70K a year.
Robert: And the perception in the past was that someone with a high school degree but
not a college who wanted to work and participate in the economy could do well enough to support
a family and that's not true right now.
Tamar: The globalization and technology and the way the country has shifted, everything
from...everything in policy, I dare say, where we've just talked about a minute ago, middle
class and poor getting benefits, upper middle class, not these people, but also where investment
goes.
Seventy five percent of the venture capital investment goes to three states.
So the...a lot of people in a lot of places have just been left behind and they've been
left behind materially, economically, what have you, but they've also been left behind
politically.
Nobody seriously thought about them and tried to have answers for them or took them seriously
or, you know, gave them the dignity.
I mean, I'm not this old but, you know, in the '50s the working class, and the industrial
working class were the heroes in America and they haven't been the heroes in America for
a long, long time and so they're hurting in a lot of ways.
Robert: So "Work, Skills, Community," we've talked about work, we've talked about skills.
We also ask something of this group as well, don't we?
Tamar: We do and community is the hardest one, right, because what...how much can government
reach the community and how much can, you know, the...any level of government, what
can they do to create new community and how much can government really do to repair marriages
and families?
And those things...
Marriage, I mean, some of our really troubling factual findings, marriage has declined more
in our group than in any other group over the past 20 years.
It was already a bit low for the poor but it's declined there but it's...and it's declined...the
middle class are doing pretty well.
Working class, down, down, down.
And the same way with single parent families and similarly with social, you know, interaction
with people in your community.
So this is...these are...they're not just hurting in that they've had to go from a $25
an hour factory job to a $9 an hour Wendy's job, they're hurting because their communities
are falling apart and the bowling league…
Robert: Things that held them together are frayed.
Tamar: The things that held them together, the churches and the unions and the...and
all of those things are frayed or gone.
And so it's...
And the opioid crisis has preyed on, you know, and filled in the crumbling, you know, rubble.
So, you know, what can government do about that?
We encourage people to follow the success sequence to get a certain amount of education
and get a job and get married before you have children.
You know, we can't make anybody do that and the government can't...you know, we can't
punish people who don't but we...
Robert: We also call on employers to do more, don't we?
Tamar: We call on employers to do more in that realm.
We call on employers to do more in a lot of realms, both that realm, childcare, also in
getting involved in career education.
You can't really teach...prepare somebody for a job without knowing what job you're
preparing them for and talking to the employer about it.
So we go...
Robert: Often the best training takes place inside employers.
Tamar: Absolutely.
Or with employers cooperating with the training provider of some kind.
But so...and we also...so we struggled with how to strengthen the communities.
Employers, working class men and women themselves, families, we're kind of excited about the
potential of opportunity zones, new provision in the 2017 Tax Act that will presumably send
some more money out into these places but will only, investment capital, but will only
work, we think, if these places get their act together to solve some of the other problems
around the...
I mean, my example is, you know, that City X is gonna become the 3D innovation hub in
America.
Well, that would be great if they could get some investment to build that but it won't
work if they're not training people to be 3D innovation technicians.
Robert: So you led us, our group, the six from the left and the six from the right,
on some traveling out into the country and we went to West Michigan and that was a pretty
good role model.
What did you see?
Tamar: We saw amazing civic leadership in West Michigan.
We went to Grand Rapids and what has happened in Grand Rapids over the last 20 years is
that basically the business leaders with the government, you know, in cahoots and social
services as well has come together to say, "We're gonna make this city work and we're
not gonna wait for the federal government.
We're not gonna go begging Congress.
We're gonna put our money where we need to, and mostly I think important, we're gonna
coordinate and plan together and come up with a plan that we then all follow."
And, you know, we saw a city that was just remarkable in how...what...how well things
seem to be working.
And we didn't...you know, we were there two days so I'm sure there's some potholes...
Robert: Yeah, it was clear to us that that is part of the solution as well.
Tamar: Absolutely.
And that's part of what we hope...our thinking about opportunity zones will generate because
we're seeing some of that in some other places, come together and make a plan, execute it
together and that, you know, and attract some money while you're doing it.
Robert: It was remarkable.
Community, employers, educational institutions working together to help people get the skills
they need to have higher wages.
That's the key, right?
Tamar: I think that's the key and I think what might happen...this hard part that we're
trying to address which is families coming back together and communities forming could
happen in that environment.
Robert: Thank you.
Tamar: My pleasure.
Robert: Hey, everyone.
That's the end of our discussion with Tamar Jacoby.
Thanks for watching and as always let us know what other topics you'd like AEI Scholars
to cover on Viewpoint.
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