"People didn't think we knew how to rehabilitate people. I think they thought we could build our way out of a crime problem." Christy Visher, Chicago Tribune

"We've increased spending and cut taxes, which is politically a very effective strategy. But in the long run, the effect on the economy is a disaster." Leonard Burman, The Washington Post

"The next steps that will make a difference for low-income families are not primarily about welfare, which now serves a very small number of families. They are about supporting working families who left welfare or never went on it."
Olivia Golden, The New York Times

"Cohabitating or not getting married has become the tax shelter for the poor."
C. Eugene Steuerle, The Hill

"The government is going to have a cash-flow crisis
long before the Social Security trust fund is empty."
Rudolph Penner, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"It's a bizarre situation where the pie is growing pretty
dramatically but most people's slices are
getting smaller." Harry Holzer, McClatchy Newspapers

"You can't just put people with the same problems into nicer-looking buildings. You need places for people to live to connect with services, especially after all that has happened to them since Katrina." Susan Popkin, Gambit Weekly

"People are coming out of prisons and going back to a small number of
neighborhoods that are highly disadvantaged." Amy Solomon, The New York Times

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990's was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years." Harry J. Holzer, The New York Times

"If you can get these former prisoners employed, they're less likely to go back to prison so that reduces the cost on the correction budget." Christy Visher, The Associated Press

"Once you get into the juvenile justice system, it can be very hard to get out. And a felony record
really means that your life course is totally altered." John Roman, The Dallas Morning News

"Immigrants pay taxes across the board, just like all the rest of us. They have to pay through their housing, for the real estate taxes, they pay all the sales taxes." Randolph Capps, PBS, Religion & Ethics

"The concern in the past is [that charities] are relatively unaccountable entities with little (government) oversight. But, would we be better off having the money going into the public treasury and having Congress make the decisions? No. On balance our society has been very well served by this arrangement." Elizabeth Boris, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Physicians are making recommendations which increase their income substantially.
It creates a 'medical arms race,' which increases costs." Robert Berenson, MSNBC.com

"The [Cultural Vitality] report should sound some alarms. It should be a catalyst (for conversation) and a wake-up call." Maria Rosario Jackson, The Detroit News

"We would have thought that by now, with the post-2002 economic recovery, that we might have seen a tick downward in poverty. But we don't see wage growth at the bottom for wage earners like we do at the top." Sheila Zedlewski, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette