America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire -- N… - Ronald Reagan

I grew up in a town where everyone cared about one another because everyone knew one another, not as statistics in a government program but as neighbors in need. Is that nostalgic? I don't think so.

Tuesday, March 3 [Meetings with economist Arthur Burns regarding China, and with President Ford on economy; message from Pope John Paul II expressing general greetings; VFW reception for Senator Laxalt (R-NV); dinner party.] During day I did a 1 hr. interview with Walter Cronkite — his last for CBS. He spent the 1st 20 min’s. on El Salvador. He didn’t throw any slow balls but the reaction was favorable. Because of our dinner we couldn’t watch the show but I was treated to another W.H. service. They taped the program & played it back to us later in the evening.

Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most — the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant — they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born — they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.