Democrat US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned at the time that the welfare system Democrats were putting in place would destroy the black family. As Moynihan predicted, the "war on poverty" decimated the African-American family and created a self-perpetuating underclass of single mothers and fatherless children.

Moynihan spelled it out for his colleagues:

"A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, that community asks for and gets chaos."

But the welfare bureaucracies set in place were not about to let go of what was valuable to them. Baskerville says the real problem was not waste and "Welfare Queens" living extravagantly at public expense as conservatives complain, but money spent on turning black children into criminals, addicts, dropouts, and rioters, thus creating more problems requiring more government intrusion.

The appearance of radical feminism exacerbated welfare's destruction of the black family by glorifying female independence and single-mother homes. Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, declared that "Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained through marriage and dependence on one man."