Your Opinion: Fair Tax could create jobs, cut AFDC

Dear Editor:

As I have intimated previously, I personally am not confident that all legislation enacted in the past is either good or necessary. I do in fact believe that some of it should be phased out or eliminated completely. Here is one example.

As part of the Social Security Act of 1935 came the Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC).

A lot of people in 1935 believed it was a good idea for the government to give help to single parents of dependent children. One such unintended result of the Social Security Acts' Aid to Families of Dependent Children was the illegitimacy explosion of the 1960s and 1970s.

Women learned that you could get enough free government money to live on by having illegitimate children. The more children you had, the more money you could receive. Men learned they did not have to be responsible for the rearing of the children they fathered. These elements combined to be very destructive to the American family unit.

As you can imagine, the AFDC became a huge drain of money from Social Security by people who paid little if any into the system. Unintended indeed. AFDC was seriously curtailed in 1995 as part of the welfare reform bill, but it is still alive and well today.

I submit to you that the United States and especially the American family would have fared much better had there never been and AFDC.

Charity, if necessary, is better administered by individuals and the Church. Franklin D. Roosevelt himself told us that welfare was "a narcotic, subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

Aid to Families of Dependent Children should be further curtailed or possibly even eliminated.

But before we do that, to be fair to the people receiving that aid, there must be offered a more attractive alternative. That alternative is education and jobs. I am sure you know that alternative is already being offered, but we need more jobs available.

Passage of the Fair Tax will create multiple millions of new jobs in the United States.