Word: moynihans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once again, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is sounding the alarm. While other politicians talk moderately of reform, the Democratic Senator from New York wants to scrap the basic federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). That system, established 50 years ago to provide temporary relief for widows, was never meant to address the long-term problem of poor children in broken homes, he argues, and it certainly has proved incapable of coping with the "changed reality" of a country with 3.8 million poor, single-parent families...
...chairman of the Senate subcommittee that deals with welfare, Moynihan has launched hearings on ways to replace the system. The former Harvard professor is an astute analyst of demographic trends, and these days he is frightened by what he sees: the nation's median family income is hovering at the same level it was 17 years ago, the stable two-parent family is becoming the exception rather than the norm, and 12 million children are growing up in poverty and with inadequate training for the job market. If the U.S. does not take drastic action soon, he warns, "then...
...accent has attained a reputation for prescience. Back in 1965, when he was serving as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, he wrote a report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, that provoked a searing controversy. Using the work of Black Sociologists Kenneth Clark and E. Franklin Frazier, Moynihan contended that the growing number of one-parent families living on welfare was preventing blacks from achieving true equality in American society. If the trend did not stop, he charged, the triumphs of the civil rights movement might be dissipated. The Moynihan report became a lightning rod for ideological fury...
...deterioration of family structure among poor blacks worsened through the 1970s, social theorists began to take a second, and more respectful, look at Moynihan's work. In his 1986 book on welfare policy, Family and Nation, the Senator proudly wrote, "At the end of two decades, it was at some level accepted, as if a proposition in science had bested competing hypotheses." Although he has upset liberals with his iconoclastic approach to social programs, Moynihan also opposes conservative theorists like Charles Murray who argue that the Great Society programs of the '60s have worsened poverty in America. Charges Moynihan: "What...
There will be no overnight cures, but New York Senator Moynihan calls the emerging consensus for reform a "rare alignment" that could effect worthwhile change. -- Robert Gates succeeds his ailing mentor William Casey as CIA Director. -- Gary Hart is the Voyager of American politics: lean, / proficient and built for the long haul...