Dan Coats: “in 1962, President Kennedy, in his budget message to Congress, noted: The goals of our public welfare program must be…”

“in 1962, President Kennedy, in his budget message to Congress, noted: The goals of our public welfare program must be positive and constructive. It must contribute to the attack on dependency, juvenile delinquency, family breakdown, illegitimacy, ill health, and disability. It must replace the incidence of these problems, prevent their occurrence and recurrence, and strengthen and protect the vulnerable in a highly competitive world. This statement presents the strong, initial common ground that we share: that Government has a legitimate role in supporting our most helpless and desperate families with dependent children. Certainly, our second ground of agreement is that an appropriate welfare policy should do nothing to harm the family being supported. Families are the foundation of our Nation's values. They teach us the principles of economics, the value of relationships, and the importance of moral truths. They define our view of work, responsibility, and authority. They teach us the meaning of trust, the value of honesty, and are the wellspring of every individual's strength against alienation, failure, and despair. During countless eras when no other organized unit of society even functioned, the family was the institution that made survival of the cultural, political, economic, and social order possible. We should agree on what a welfare policy should protect--the family-- and what it should protect against--dependence on the State.”