Tom Wolfe on Charles Murray

Tom Wolfe credits Charles Murray with being the intellectual force behind the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill passed under president Bill Clinton. Charles Murray wrote the book Losing Ground. April 2006

"And when you think of what Manhattan Institute scholars have done simply by reading the documents, that was Charles Murray in Losing Ground; he would read these documents that came out of the poverty program under Lyndon Johnson, studies of how the program was doing and they always had an abstract, it was the only thing that people ever read, and the abstract was always rather hazy but optimistic. Charles Murray had the ability to go through all the statistics in these long rather formidable documents and he realized that in fact none of the programs was working, they were all driving the poor deeper and deeper into poverty and that became the basis of Bill Clinton's reforms of the--and Bill Clinton, this was Bill Clinton that took over, that paid attention to Charles Murray because in the final analysis what the Manhattan Institute does is to lock in facts so tightly that there is no more argument. "

Full Text here:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ah_2006.htm

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Tom
• Wolfe
• Charles
• Murray
• Bill
• William
• Clinton
• welfare
• reform
• losing
• Ground
• Manhattan
• Institute

[ion010101]

No. Poverty is caused by borrowing money.

[eirefrance]

Haha!! Nice one. I'll think of this next time I'm in a boring meeting or trying to care about the ramblings of some idiot at a conference and have a chuckle. Everything in perspective, right?

[Nudiford]

Thanks for posting. It would be nice to see more of this speech.

[eirefrance]

I've seen statistics that show that poverty dropped following the creation of welfare and have risen in the years since welfare reform. Certainly there are other causes for poverty, but I'm just saying, is all.

[jjs1776]

Great comments, just wish there was more here