twenty forty eighty two forty seven in the employment and training area one of the difficulties is trying to find what a program is there is not agreement on exactly what a program is  assistance programs vocational training job training programs medical programs energy and utility assistance type programs and then child care programs did you put them in the same broad categories ms dalton we did very broad categories in some cases for example programs sending the wrong message elaborate on that a bit more if you could mister rector all of these programs have an anti marriage effect because they are means tested the way that works is that in a means tested program married husband in the household if you have a married husband in the household his income is automatically counted toward eligibility so each and every one of these programs in almost every circumstance the family will get less money  as a result of being married to an employed man the net result has been that basically these programs have supplanted fathers as bread winners throughout about a third of the u s population good health insurance policy which is quite probable then the cost of the childbirth to that married couple will be borne by the couple on the other hand if they separate then medicaid is almost inevitably going to pick up the full of supporting themselves more effectively in particular we basically displaced marriage in the low income community the single strongest cause of poverty in the united states today is the lack of marriage our society is dividing into two castes in the upper part you have married couples children raised by married couples both of whom have a college education in the bottom forty percent of our population is mothers who are not married and have a high school degree or outcomes and understanding the effect of these programs i think that is so very important because when we talk about these programs it is not an unwillingness on anyones part to provide what we need for the neediest but the issue is this is not our money this is the american peoples money we must be responsible stewards of that money i think we need to understand the impact studies you stated that five out of the forty seven programs have completed an impact study since two thousand and four and that in those five programs any positive effects tended to be small inconclusive or restricted to short term impacts i want to be sure that i understand what you are  g basically for the vast majority of the forty seven employment training programs run by the federal government using eighteen dollars billion of taxpayer money there is little or no information about whether or not these programs actually work all the employment and training programs there is some performance information that is collected the most common measure is entered employment did the person get a job but that information alone really doesn tell you the impact of the program did the person get a job did they retain the job are they making a sustainable wage that is the type of information really gets at impact that requires  pretty thorough study you are also trying to see whether or not the particular program is the causal agent of creating the impact in these areas where you have multiple services you my next question is for all four of the panelists the gaos testimony today states the federal government spent about ninety dollars billion on domestic food and nutrition assistance in fiscal year two thousand and ten  this a result of the financial crisis or do we have reason to believe that these increases in other social welfare programs will continue to increase ms dalton much of the increase is in fact due to an increase in benefit levels that was included in the recovery act my understanding is that increase will end in november two thousand and thirteen a large percentage of that increase is due to the recovery act can get you the exact numbers on that i believe that food stamps goes down slightly a few years from now but overall food assistance i believe grows at more than the rate of inflation for the foreseeable future overall when you look at cash food housing medical care and social services there is no decline in  grow quite rapidly as far out as the president can project it a lot of people regard spending on the poor or welfare spending like it is a roller coaster that in a recession it goes up and in good times it comes back down if you look at the back of my testimony this is the picture of welfare spending adjusted for inflation since one thousand nine hundred and fifty since the korean war you dont see too much coming down there it is more like the alps slope it goes up rapidly or goes up at a moderate pace it never comes down there are only about two years in this entire period where it actually came down the nature is that during a recession this not come down is it also expanded eligibility and many of those expansions of eligibility are proposed in the presidents fiscal year two thousand and eleven and his new fiscal year two thousand and twelve budgets such as it eliminates the three month time limit on benefits for able bodied adults without children e asset tasks and other eligibility requirements that restricted the caseload to the truly needy keep expanding i dont see how you are ever going to get the program to fall just this month a man won four percent since february two thousand and eight it is at an all time record high expenditures are up directly as a relation to the economy and the number of individuals who now find themselves in many cases working but earning wages that dont lift them or their families out of poverty in many cases it has been the long term unemployed many who have been unable despite their best efforts to find employment in their area certainly we are concerned and again this is a supplemental program individuals who are suffering from hunger and food  insecurity dont first turn to the snap program they use five to seven different other coping strategies before they ever ask for help they are selling their personal possessions on ebay craigslist and at yard sales they are sending their children to the homes of friends and neighbors in order to eat the last place they turn is to the public welfare office ms buerkle thank you very much and thank you m a critical role in providing food to families across our state to testify at this hearing the statistics she has provided to this committee are shocking yesterday when i met with her she showed me this map of ohio food i look at our state and i think of all of us who serve it we are representing counties in which thirty to thirty five percent of the population is at or below two hundred percent federal poverty level families are still struggling with hunger even as they rely on current federal food assistance programs and local resources i would like to make a commitment to you today mister chairman to work together to determine how we can best streamline these programs needs either by reducing benefits or cutting eligibility for those who need assistance i am letting you know that i look forward to working with you so that we can ensure that these critical food programs are protected from further budget cuts and from and integrate the systems that manage them i think certainly the frustration and my own frustration in reading the gao report is that we lack data we lack data because we have antiquated systems that were developed on a cobol platform which is more than fifty years old it graduates are not trained in cobol in fact in our state we need to bring people out of retirement to reprogram basic systems i see the chairman smiling he remembers this at the state we need to invest in technology that is available we have  worked on this at the state level we need to mandate that both the federal and the state agencies with jurisdiction over these programs work together ensuring that we are not writing redundant rules and dollars it is very clear to me that is what we are missing we have undertaken independent research on our benefit bank in fact we have been working with the voinovich school at ohio university to evaluate  only the impact of integrating programs and service delivery but also doing longitudinal studies on those who are participating in the programs so we can make informed decisions about where we go to blame the poorest of the program much less need for your food assistance program ms hamler fugitt it has been climbing not as drastically as it has in the past few years as a direct result of the great recession but it has been climbing since the onset of welfare surge in minimum wage jobs being created in the state and over half of the thirty one thousand jobs that were created over the last year came in the retail sector were paying minimum wage or slightly above knew if they reduced the rolls they werent going to lose any of that money whatever savings they had they were required to spend it on a harder to place population that had a lot of the effect and changing the welfare bureaucracies from basically  was time limits for able bodied adults receiving cash assistance we argued at the time and i think we were proven right deadlines influence rector that is the basic point about whether these programs accomplish their goals the problem is that in ninety five percent of these programs the goal is to give people stuff that is the only goal and the government can give away a lot of things it has given away sixteen dollars trillion since the beginning of the war on poverty when you give people free food or free housing they have something they didnt have before the problem is that in doing this we have created a culture of dependency and the more money you give the more dependent people you generate the work ethic goes down and marriage disappears as basically say we want to assist you but we want to assist you in such a way that we encourage the best efforts on your part we are going to require you to prepare for work or take a job we are going to create a welfare system that isnt hostile to marriage by the way we are also going to tell young people that if you dont want to be poor the number one thing you can do in the united states is be married before you have a child it is more effective than we need to create a system that supports but at the same time encourages positive behavior none of these programs have that objective except for tanf perhaps therefore they can succeed but what they succeeding in is giving people assistance and making future generations dependent on welfare the other thing we need to be very careful about is exaggerated statements about need as i have indicated and these figures are correct we are spending of the government but my goodness that would be worse than anything i could possibly imagine the reality is when we look closer at this and i agree that food assistance needed to go up during the recession it gone up but if you look at the usda data which has a survey of food security and hunger it shows during two thousand and nine of all the poor people and the poor children in the united states only four percent of them had any disruption of food intake that might relate to hunger ninety six percent of poor children did not experience that eighty percent of poor adults did not experience any disruption of food intake work we did at the state level as you know with the governors office of faith based and community initiatives around looking at these issues and incentives including around family formation i think to some degree the states have done a good job mister jordan mister  eligible for benefits that arent receiving them and the government ought to do something about it to make sure they receive it when you did into the report they mention you go from fifty seven million eligible families in one thousand nine hundred and ninety five down to fifty three million eligible families nonparticipation is a person found a job on their own the government found them a job before they got on tanf there are people not participating because they can actually make more money in some of the other welfare programs if they dont take the tanf benefits because tanf benefits count towards your eligibility and your level of benefits in other programs like snap finally a lot of the non participants didnt like the hassle of having to prove to the taxpayers that they were deserving of help from the taxpayers mister rector i just want to make sure that i heard you correctly did you say that welfare checks are substitutes for husbands say that welfare not just cash checks but the whole system has served as a substitute for the role of the male breadwinner in the home in fact without that massive level of assistance there is no possible way that we could have gone from a seven percent out of wedlock birth rate in one thousand nine hundred and sixty five to a forty two percent rate today simply because these low dog very traditional goal what has happened is that we have developed a culture where they think it is not important to be married before bringing children into the world that you have children first and then you look to get married that wouldnt work very well mister kucinich what do you propose mister rector what i would propose is that each of these programs as i tried to explain earlier does have a penalty that if you do get married you lose some benefits we ought to try to soften that a bit march twenty one two thousand and eleven the headline says many low wage jobs seen as failing to meet basic needs i am going to read just a few quotes from this hard as it may be to land a job these days getting one may not be nearly enough for basic economic security many of the jobs being added in retail hospitality and home health to name a few categories are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing utilities food health care transportation and in the case of working parents child care it also says a single worker with two young children needs an annual income of fifty seven thousand seven hundred and fifty six dollars just over twenty seven dollars a hour to attain economic stability a family with two working parents and two young children needs to earn sixty seven thousand nine hundred and twenty dollars a year or about sixteen dollars a hour per worker that compares with the national poverty level of twenty two thousand and fifty dollars for a family of four the most recent data from the census bureau found that four point three percent of americans were living below the poverty line in two thousand and nine there is one other quote i want to read the numbers will not come as a surprise to working families who are struggling tara a medical biller who declined to give her last name we have a jobless recovery the wrong kind of behavior we can disagree on what the remedy is but i think the gentleman would agree that when you have incentives in place that dont encourage the pursuit of work maybe encourage more children to be borne out of wedlock wouldnt you agree that we at least need to try to figure out a way to address that mister kucinich i think the purpose of this hearing that deals with attempting to streamline programs i think is a great idea economy i think that is a moral question mister jordan would the gentleman also agree that when you have over one hundred different means tested social welfare programs we cant determine the exact number according to the gao we cant determine how many of those programs are successful and we dont have any idea s if it is too much hassle to do that that you dont want to take tanf the same situation being in food stamps if you are not willing to go through the process to justify the fact that you need help from the taxpayers and your fellow citizens and that is too much of a hassle in my view i dont believe you deserve food stamps to at least go through that process work requirements and other requirements like that whether it is community service or something like that ensures they are not getting free money from the government they are giving something back in ripping food away from people in the middle of a recession i think everything i was talking about here is long term and i think i have been very clear that most of these reforms would have to take place as the recession eases you do find  are giving about seventy five percent of the assistance that goes to children means tested assistance is going to single parent households the welfare state basically exists to support single parenthood  be and it is now affecting basically the whole bottom third of the population you are giving a lot of assistance now to able bodied parents who dont work you can being to make the system more rational by requiring that all able bodied recipients in these programs should work or prepare for work as a condition for getting aid that would greatly rationalize the system you can also provide somewhat greater is pretty unusual in social science because we are not very interested in fathers in this country the reality is if you take these forty percent of births out of wedlock this is the road to poverty in the united states seventy to seventy five in two thirds of the cases the income the father would bring into that home would bring the family completely out of poverty in many cases the mother wouldnt even have to work this is the strongest anti poverty weapon in the united around for a husband i will get married later on we ought to begin to explain that if you want your child to not be poor that set of decision making is probably not the best route for you to go down we ought to explain t or your social values but to actually meet their own personal goals of which marriage is a substantial part not being poor is also another substantial part no where in the welfare system do we ever provide these at risk young people both men and women with this statements that both mister rector and mister mashburn made there are work requirements for both snap and cash assistance let me be crystal clear people who receive these benefits must work off those benefits and in my system thousands of individuals come into a food pantry a soup kitchen or a food bank every day and they work hard for those benefits must strive to eliminate unnecessary duplication and streamline delivery benefits but i hope that the republican idea of duplicative food assistance programs is not breakfast lunch and dinner help us think about this you deal with the school lunch program at all ms hamler fugitt yes sir we work all of the federal nutrition programs through our ohio benefit bank ensuring that people know about the programs and helping to streamline the application process i also want to say that this isnt only just the greatest generation this is the next generation that we are losing their ability to not only for our greatest generation to live out their golden years with a little bit of dignity to be able to feed themselves but we are sacrificing our future to allow hunger and malnutrition to exist at the rates they do in this country mister cummings while rich folks get the tax breaks let me go to something  for seven dollars fifty cents and car fare my father was a laborer we used to get graham crackers and milk every morning they worked hard and they were able to educate on a domestic salary and a laborers salary seven children one of whom is a member of the congress of the united states of america today i think what ms hamler fugitt is trying to say is that we have to make sure that we welfare reform and not only passage of the personal responsibility work and opportunity reconciliation act but the work force investment act these were devolved and a lot of what has happened in the fragmented system is that they were not only devolved to the states but get new skills and upgrade their skills but again there are limited slots available to these programs i would like to speak to one in particular mister cummings while you are talking about that i want you to answer this do all homeless individuals have access to  fact many now find themselves if they are lucky have a family or friend that has taken them in we have seen household demographics increasing substantially because families have lost their homes the shelters are full in the state of ohio we have families who are sleeping in cars at roadside rests in the state of ohio and i suspect it is the same in your state mister cummings in the united states of america access meaningful job training on the job training there are a limited number of slots i can tell you from firsthand experiences we get calls every day from seniors begging to get into this requirements in the program in ohio it is probably because either the state or the county has required it as far as the money spent you keep spending the money unless you start giving people incentives and help them find jobs so they don iscussion here has shown that this is really a policy issue we do talk about the need for good data the need to rationalize the system it is a system that in all the areas i discussed it evolved over time with very good intentions but now we have eighty programs here forty programs there there is a need to look at what do we want to achieve who do we want to serve and what is the best way to achieve that i think those are the three basic rector i do basically for example with job training there are not requirements and when you do have a requirement for example to run a controlled experiment the programs are not very effective i would also say when you do have information in the political system it tends to get disregarded i would reference you all to a report called the two thousand and nine annual homeless assessment report which is prepared by hud for the congress will give you a copy of that it says very different things than you just heard here and happens to be a survey of every homeless shelter in the united states conducted on a scientific basis it shows actually no increase in the use of homeless shelters over the last three years and the average homeless shelter in the united states on any given night has a vacancy rate of ten percent if we are not going to use information like that i suspect we could out these reports  homelessness or just that there is no increase in the use of homeless shelters mister rector the report shows neither increase which i also find surprising but more importantly it basically shows the level of homelessness is relatively low and that the homeless shelters on average on a continuing modernization act that act is requiring improved performance reporting by federal agencies and most importantly it targeting coordinated performance information trying to get information about