National Educational Television and Radio Center Brenner, David Louw, Joseph

Description

Episode Number: 221"None of My Business": Welfare seems to be turning into a major preoccupation of the new Administration. "None of My Business," first part of the Public Broadcast Laboratory episode seen in color on Sunday, April 20, sets out to debunk some widespread notions about life on welfare. There are more than eight million people on welfare rolls in the United States, and the number is growing every day. To some people, this statistic indicates a softening of the moral fiber in large sectors of the population, and an epidemic of sheer laziness. The facts, as PBL producer David Brenner notes, are that of those eight million, half are children too young to work, a third are aged people, too old to work, and some 700,000 are either blind or otherwise disabled, not able to work. Of the remaining 800,000 according to findings reported in the broadcast from a nationwide survey made by the Commission on Income Maintenance set up early last year by President Johnson, less than a quarter million welfare recipients could indeed work - if work was available to them. Last month (March) Brenner went to Fresno, to film hearings of the presidential Commission and to take a look at what life on welfare is like for income less people in the surrounding San Joaquin Valley. One of the world's most prosperous agricultural areas, the Dan Joaquin Valley has registered an increment in area wealth of one million dollars everyday of every year since 1950. Yet...

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American Archive of Public Broadcasting

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Digital Commonwealth