🍽️ Helping those in Need — Press Conference Dec 14 Part 3 — Ronald Reagan 1983 * PITD

🍽️ Helping those in Need — Press Conference Dec 14 Part 3 — #RonaldReagan 1983 * #PITD
Question-and-Answer Session With Reporters on Domestic and Foreign Policy Issues December 14, 1983 Excerpt:
I believe the manner in which that's been treated by a great many of you is totally out of context with the entire interview which he gave. The policy, and my own feeling in this administration, is that if there is one person in this country hungry, that is one too many, and we're going to do what we can to alleviate that situation. And I happen to know that he feels the same way.
Now, one journalist the other night on one of the weekend talk programs said that we should be out on the front steps of the White House cheering those private agencies that are providing meals and providing evening dinners and lunches and so forth to the needy. Well, I may not be out on the front steps shouting, but you bet I'm cheering them. As a matter of fact, this is part of our private initiative program.
We've done everything we can to encourage this. Wherever possible, we have supplied surplus foods to them, because even -- whatever we've done, we're doing more to feed the hungry in this country today than has ever been done by any administration. More money is being spent; more people are getting food stamps. All of these things we're doing. But this private sector aid is essential also, because where government can justify providing the necessities, there is a need also, as there's always been, to help provide some of those things over and above bare necessity that make life worth living, and the private sector is doing that and doing it splendidly -- not only with the meals being served but with food distribution centers, and we're helping there also.
But, that -- and it all ties into the commission that some have said, ``Well, why? Don't we know that people are hungry?'' That wasn't the purpose of the commission, and I'm waiting now for the January report.
We get anecdotes that some of you have reported on, individual cases or something, of people that are hungry. What we want to find out is why. Is it a lack of or a fault in our distribution system at the government level? Or is it that there are people out there who don't know what's available to them or how to find their way to a government program? Or is there -- well, I think I've covered most of what it could be that they don't know how to find this, or that we somehow are bungling, bureaucraticwise, in making -- at a distribution. This is what we want to find out. Is there something we can resolve so that there won't be anyone, either through their own ignorance of what's available, or through falling between the cracks in a bureaucratic process, that we can resolve that and see that there is no one overlooked who's hungry.
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What I think was distorted in the reporting of that –that I think this is where there was something out of context. For example, we know that there are people who are not deserving of welfare who have been getting welfare. And one of our jobs has been -- and not too well understood -- to weed out, because every time someone who has the means and yet is subsisting on the help of their fellow citizens is doing that, they are reducing our ability to care for the truly needy. So, we try to clean up there.
Well, if that's true there, I'm sure that it must be true in these private groups. The difference is that these very worthwhile charitable efforts on the part of churches and community groups, unions, and others that are doing this, they have no way to establish eligibility. They can't set a rule and say, we're going to quiz you and determine whether -- they have to accept that people that come and ask for help must be needful. But on the other hand, if there are people who will cheat with regard in getting welfare, I think it's possible that some might be cheating in this other. But that doesn't mean that you close down the private groups, because I'm quite sure that the vast majority of the people who seek aid there, it is of benefit to them and their families.

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