Jude Loses His Temper Jude Wanniski April 3, 1997

Memo To: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U. S. Senator [D-NY]
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: David Frost interview

I watched your March 28 interview with Frost and simply could not believe it when you talked about the disintegration of families in the United States, France, the U.K., and Canada. When Frost asked how it happened, you answered: "We don't know. We do not know." I have to ask, Senator, are you kidding? Or are you in denial, as you have spent the last 30 years as a practicing advocate of the welfare state you once predicted would cause the disintegration of the family? In the poorest countries of the world, family units remain intact because the government is too poor to provide families with free food, clothing, shelter, health care and education — which means there is a role for the man of the house. You've always known that, haven't you? Yet you have chosen to remain a critic only in the abstract. In the business of representing New York in the United States Senate, you have been a faithful supporter of free everything. Now haven't you? And yet you shake your head and tell David Frost: "Here in the city of New York, 55% of all the children born are to single parents. What's that? How'd that happen? Never in history anything like that?"

Give us a break, Pat, oh most farsighted of wise, old Senators, as David Frost introduced you. You should be ashamed of yourself, shedding crocodile tears for all these broken homes and broken families and social pathologies, for which you have voted in every instance. And now you declaim against the welfare bill passed in the last Congress, because it will mean that welfare as we have known it will no longer be allowed to exist: "So about the year 2002, we may see five, six, seven, ten million children just dropping off a cliff." Oh my, we must do something about that, but what?

I'm reminded you are the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Pat. I'm also reminded that you have devoted yourself to raising taxes whenever possible, which of course destroys job opportunities for heads of households. Now, you have become almost fanatical in urging an automatic tax increase every year via an adjustment in the Consumer Price Index. What's that going to do for economic growth? For the inner-city family? How long before you predict 100% of NYC children will be born to single parents?

Please excuse the level of vitriol in this missive. My 30 years of frustration in watching you serve the welfare state, having predicted the social pathologies that would flow from it, finally boiled over when I watched the Frost interview. Beneath the vitriol, though, these are true feelings.