Word: townsends
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Left to breast the tidal wave publicly have been journalists. Minute is the editorial writer's audience, compared with the multitudes whom Townsend propagandists reach by word of mouth, pamphlets, speeches, club meetings. But last week three of the best & best-read columnists in the land jabbed at the rosily glittering Townsend bubble...
...Reasoning with the Townsend Plan advocates does no good. Showing them that the plan would consume $24,000,000,000 a year, while the total national income is only $48,000,000,000, does no good. The thing is not in the world of reasoning or of statistics. It is in the world of mysticism...
...tradition that people of 60 years and up are uniformly wise and sweet and kind, and also pathetic. There is a conspiracy to write off all the laziness, incompetence, wastefulness and all-around uselessness of which they may have been guilty . . . while they were putting in their time. The Townsend Plan makes no discrimination. It would pension, at the rate of $200 a month, a vast number of itchy old loafers who never were willing to pack their own weight and earn their room on earth at any time in their lives. . . . For a President to admit, however, that such...
...scheme is adopted there should be one important amendment in the interests of another class of citizens also generally held to be pathetic. These are the unfortunate orphans. The term poor orphan is generally held to mean only juvenile orphans, but the Townsend Plan would work a serious injustice to many poor orphans of mature years...
...Under the Townsend Plan a diligent shirker with a living mother and father, both 60 years old or more, would be able to retire permanently and support his own rising brood of government guests on the monthly income of his old parents, which would amount to $100 a week. His wife, too, might have living parents also receiving their $400, and on $800 a month the old people would be able to do very well for themselves, their children and their grandchildren...