Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Gore and His Mother Naturally, I enjoyed your piece on Vidal (April 1978) but then, I'm a captive audience. What is most depressing is the light he reflects on the time. It is only...
...The transgenerational welfare families stay on welfare longer (many an entire lifetime, unlike the transitional AFDC poor who "turn over" every year or so), they have more children from different fathers, they are reported to drop out of school earlier, and their children are reported to be more involved in delinquent activity than are those of the transitional poor...
...RET Proxmire Kidnapped I suggest that in order to build circulation you stay with the high standards of courage and honesty in The American Spectator, but start using banner headlines on the cover that ask provocative questions, e.g., HAVE CUBAN TROOPS LANDED IN BAJA CALIFORNIA...
...Gore Vidal for publishing another dreary and nigh unto idiotic novel at precisely that moment that I decided to review his ouvre and-that Elliott Bonfield decided with his cover drawing to reveal Mr...
...What is even more horrendous is that the new parents of this population are coming into welfare as "cases on their own" at a younger age...
...PLEASE PRINT The American Spectator P.O...
...When these facts are tied to the statistics of transgenerational poverty they become much more than a footnote to the discussion...
...I confess to shaking my head at times...
...That this is a growing problem has been revealed in such figures as were recently released by Los Angeles County, a typical urban welfare area, where one out of every five new AFDC mothers is a product of an AFDC family...
...This growing proportion of dependent, "welfare-as- a-way-of-life" families can be expected to reach forty percent in the 1980s...
...Edward 0. Wilson Cambridge, Massachusetts The Welfare Way of Life Professor Frank Levy's article, "Poverty by the Numbers" (May 1978), was a contribution to public clarification of the statistics cif poverty...
...Vidal's likeness to Bambi...
...are totalled...
...Carter's current welfare proposal would provide a minimum guaranteed income to all such families without providing adequate incentives for work role models in families with young children...
...To order your reprints, please write us at the address below...
...Ralph Segalman Professor of Sociology California State University, Northridge SPECTATOltREMINTS William Simon on National Health Insurance Due to popular demand, we continue to offer reprints of William Simon's highly acclaimed article, "Preventing Medicine," which originally appeared in our April 1978 issue...
...No harm done...
...The fact is that a decade ago transgenerational poverty represented only ten percent of AFDC recipients, and two decades ago, less than five percent...
...The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has been encouraged, time after time, to study this "population-at-risk," and so have many foundations—but all shy away from theproblem because it is a "time bomb" with serious political implications...
...It is only in the seventies, old plastic, polluted seventies, that a writer as alien to the grace of pure thought as Vidal should be so successful...
...Norman Mailer New York, New York Bambi's Novel I should like to take space, so graciously provided by the management, to thank Mr...
...Welfare pays more than unskilled work, especially in view of the minimum wage, transportation costs, wage taxes deducted at the source, and day-care costs for children...
...Nobody took him seriously in the fifties and sixties, and he just hasn't gotten that much better...
...Enclosed is my check for $ Name Address City State 119 Zip 40 The American Spectator August/ September 1978...
...By this literary effort you sold for us a great many magazines, Gore...
...Well, there's this to be said for America: it is a mother country, it kisses you more and more just for growing up and getting older...
...The implications of the problem are grave when we realize that this twenty percent represents sixty percent of AFDC and related costs...
...Inside, it can be tersely reported that there is no truth to these rumors...
...The problem of the "welfarized" population isthat it has, in the main, no work-related role models by which children can know about a life in the "mainstream," an attenuated and "bleached out" family structure, little or no contact with the mainstream values by which the society functions, early teenage pregnancy, little or no understanding of•the importance of education as a way "up and out" of poverty, and a general impulse-oriented pattern of behavior which shows no understanding of the quid pro quo realities of the economic marketplace or of the political mechanisms for social order...
...or WAS PROXMIRE KIDNAPPED BY UFO'S...
...Pilot studies of the Minimum Guaranteed Income in Seattle and Denver reveal that it serves to increase the rate of family breakup among the previously "working poor," and thus probably provides new recruits for the welfare-oriented poor...
...Levy quotes the University of Michigan study to indicate that only twenty percent of those on AFDC are the products of transgenerational poverty...
...Box 877 Bloomington, IN 47401 Please rush me reprints of William Simon's article, "Preventing Medicine...
...There are, however, serious omissions in the story which leave the reader with a skewed view of the problem of poverty, past and future...
...This reduced-format reprint is ideal for doctors, congressmen, students, public affairs specialists, and others interested in this vital issue...
...That this population can be expected to grow is an easy prediction...
...Even more costly is the loss of human resources and life chances for a child produced in such an atmosphere...
...1 for $.50, 3 for $1, 10 for $3, 25 for $7, and 100 for $20...
...The costs of welfare are beginning to be the major expense of government when the direct and indirect charges (such as the special costs of welfare area schools, ghetto police and fire services, untaxable properties created by landlords who give up on welfare apartment houses, etc...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
