○  a time for choosing (aka the speech)  ○

years of it -- shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? the reduction in the need for public housing?

but the reverse is true. each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. we were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. well that was probably true. they were all on a diet. but now we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the depression. we're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. now do a little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. it would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.

now -- so now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a bobby baker." now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have -- and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs -- do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? well, in all fairness i should explain there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. this is the youth feature. we're now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old ccc camps [civilian conservation corps], and we're going to put our young people in these camps. but again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we're going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a ye

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]  ... 下一页  >>