FIRST YEAR AS GOVERNOR 661

are going to stabilize the costs to solve the welfare problem. Most
people don't recognize that it's not an easily solvable situation, that
most of the money is paid to dependent children and to mothers who
have to support dependent children and that the typical and tradi-
tional attitude toward welfare — that very hale and hardy men are
lying around taking advantage of this — really doesn't exist. That's a
very small part of the burden. Mixed in the solutions to supporting
dependent children and to providing for these mothers are many at-
titudes that must be crystallized as far as the country is concerned.
Some of them cross and intrude upon preconceived religious lines.
Some of them intrude upon social lines, some of them get in the way
of politics. It's not going to be easy. This summer I intend to ask
some of our college students to form task forces, not to solve the
mechanics of administering welfare, which I think we're able to do,
but to rethink the problem socially and to decide what we should be
doing, where our national, our social, obligations lie and how do you
get at the root causes of these problems.

Q. I was glad to see the President appoint a commission on welfare,
but I have long been an exponent of a Hoover Commission on wel-
fare and bring in state officials and local officials so that once you have
some recommendations you can sell them to the country.

A. This is an important thing and the thing that I'm thinking
through right now, as far as the administration of welfare is concerned
in this State, is to bring in an outsider to look at it, to make these
judgments. Not only in the social areas that I've just mentioned, but
in the business areas of how do you efficiently administer a program.

Q. Of course, no matter what you do, if the District doesn't go along
with your lead and the other states that bound you, are on your
boundaries, then you're not really meeting the problem, are you?

A. Here's the problem we have very simply put, in the State of Mis-
sissippi a certain class of welfare recipient gets something like $9. 00
a month, in the State of New York the same class of recipient receives
about |53. 00 a month. Now what better magnet or incentive do you
have to add to the problems of New York City than this, to start these
people moving toward the place that takes the most cognizance of the
problem. And it's not just welfare, its educational opportunity, job
opportunities and the general alleviation of the problems of the im-
poverished.

Q. It seems to me from the bleachers that the great problem that's
facing your state and most states today, and will for a long time, is