FAMILY NEEDS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4402, 8 June 1933, Page 8

FAMILY NEEDS

MILLIONS ON RELIEF. AMERICA’S UNEMPLOYED. In a country with 12,000,000 unemployed, spending this year £250,000,000 in relief, the care of the needy presents multiple problems. As in the case of Canada, a uniform system has at last emerged as a result of a conference of all the States, with duplication and waste measurably reduced. The national effort this year centres on relieving individual cases by means of gifts of food and clothing. Neither the United States nor Canada have yet adopted public works programmes as relief measures, owing to Budget emergencies and the difficulty of finnancing them. In other words, both countries are obliged to be content, at the moment, if their relief policies prevent actual starvation. This, in greater relative measure in the United States than in Canada, because the ratio of unemployment to population is approximately twice as great. The soup kitchen and bread line, which were a feature of the era following the last bank crisis in 1907, have not been developed during the present crisis. In the generation that intervened, the standard of living has been raised to the point that such means of charity are now considered humiliating, both to society and the individual sufferer. Relief is now so organised that it goes to the home, on the theory that the family is not an empty stomach but a social unit, to be conserved.

The Measure of Relief.

There is now a nation-wide application of the family budget yardstick of relief; that is, based, not on stark necessity, but on what a family should have, according to its size and the age of its members, in order to maintain its health and morale, and enjoy a minimum of decent living in a certain environment. For a type A family there is allotted a type A budget of relief; for a type B family, a type B budget, and so on.

This system evolved from the failure of the public relief bureau sys.tem, manned by inexperienced “white collar” workers, taken from the ranks of the unemployed. For instance, in this city, 69 public bureaux sprang into being practically overnight, distributing 3,000,000 dollars a week. It was soon found that those benefiting most were the "chronically-indigent; there was no proof that this openpurse policy was reaching truly deserving cases. The leaders of the trained social welfare agencies were called in, and the family budget plan was adoptd. Last year, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, operating under Federal authority, loaned 300,000 dollars to municipalities for relief purposes. A Bill now before Congress involves a direct Federal appropriation of 500,000,000 dollars. There is yet strong opposition to direct Federal relief, believing that the situation should be handled by the States and municipalities. In Canada, from the outset, the Federal Government shouldered its share of relief cost, believing the problem could be more easily solved by an equal distribution between the three authorities.