The Charity Squeeze

Report Outline
Meeting America's Needs
Impact of Budget Cuts
Weathering the Changes
Special Focus

Meeting America's Needs

Reagan Program vs. Economics Realities

In the weeks between now and Christmas, Americans will be asked to give a little more of themselves to help others. Community fund-raising drives will be making their final appeals. Charitable and other non-profit institutions will be asking for donations in the spirit of the season. Newspapers will remind people to “remember the neediest.” Salvation Army bell-ringers and sidewalk Santa Clauses will ask passersby for their dimes and quarters.

The willingness of people to pitch in to build a better society has been an American trait since the birth of the nation. But President Reagan has made it part of his administration's domestic agenda. Using the catchall phrase “private sector initiatives,” Reagan has encouraged businesses, churches, voluntary organizations and individuals to become more involved in improving communities and helping individuals.

Reagan and his supporters believe that growing federal involvement in such areas as welfare, community development, health care, education and even the arts has hampered local initiative and innovation, destroyed the willingness of different sectors of society to work together, and left the fate of many communities and individuals in the hands of distant federal bureaucrats. “The truth is we've let government take away many things we once considered were really ours to do voluntarily out of the goodness of our hearts and a sense of community pride and neighborliness,” Reagan said in a nationally televised address Sept. 24, 1981.