Word: murray
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...charge often leveled at Reaganomics is that it has hurt the poor by cutting back social programs, including welfare and food stamps. In Losing Ground (Basic Books; $23.95), Murray unabashedly asserts that slashing social spending is the greatest favor the Government can bestow upon the poor. Federal welfare programs, he concludes, perpetuate poverty rather than cure...
Conservatives have made that argument before, but no one has documented it as thoroughly as Murray does. During the 1970s, he points out, annual social welfare spending by the U.S. Government nearly doubled, after adjustment for inflation, to about $300 billion. Yet all that money had virtually no impact on poverty. In fact, the percentage of the population living below the poverty line, currently set at an income of $10,178 for a family of four, rose from 12.6% in 1970 to 13% by 1980. Murray contends that this lack of progress cannot be blamed on a sluggish economy...
Losing Ground makes the case that welfare programs hurt the poor by undermining their incentive to work and thus climb out of poverty. People will be reluctant to accept low-paying jobs, Murray maintains, if they can survive almost as well on Government handouts. "We tried to provide more for the poor," he writes, "and produced more poor instead...
...Murray contends that the impact of federal largesse is especially devastating to blacks. A revealing statistic, he says, is the percentage of young adults who hold jobs or are looking for work-their so-called labor-force participation rate. For black and other minority-group males ages 20 to 24, the participation rate dropped from 83.5% in 1970 to 78.9% in 1980. In contrast, the level for white males in that age group rose from 83.3% to 87.1%. Part of the explanation for the difference, Murray argues, is that welfare payments dulled blacks' motivation to work. Others, who consider...
...president of a Long Island firm that deals with such occasions. "The same people who wed in blue jeans and flower garlands back in the '60s and '70s are remarrying in tuxedos and long white dresses in the '80s." Says Paul Lichtner, manager of the Arthur Murray dance studio in Boston: "We have a two-week waiting list for wedding couples who want to learn how to waltz." Letitia Baldrige, author of the revised and expanded Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, concludes that "the flower generation tore tradition to shreds, but in the 1980s some magic...