David Weldon: “Yes, I just want to briefly add to something you were talking about, however well-intentioned, the programs can…”

“Yes, I just want to briefly add to something you were talking about, however well-intentioned, the programs can undermine family integrity. And I just want to say this in defense of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who in many ways have been defending the status quo in some instances particularly as it relates to welfare reform, and the intentions were good. I do not believe when Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic leadership of the House and the Senate passed some of these Great Society reforms they had any intention to see the kinds of consequences that resulted. They were really trying to help people, and the unfortunate reality is that the amount of poverty increased or stayed the same and a lot of the other social pathologies got much, much worse. I know that the figures in New York where I grew up are astronomical in terms of the impact the Great Society programs had on family breakdown. I think, if you go into some of those inner-city communities, the illegitimacy rate or fatherlessness rate is 70 percent, whereas it was 25 percent. And the academic scores in those communities have gone downhill, whereas you could go into Harlem in the 1940's and the academic scores in Harlem were no different from what they were in the poorer white communities in the Lower East Side. They were about the same. And the thing, it is not a racial thing at all.…”