Welfare Reform

As I understand the gist of “Welfare Reform Rhetoric Rings Hollow in the Delta” (May 9), welfare reform won’t work in rural areas because welfare recipients aren’t willing to move to where the jobs are. Since when should I, as a U.S. taxpayer, have to pay someone’s living expenses so that she can live near her family? Going where the jobs are is basic fact of employment. Middle-class people frequently relocate to other cities where they can get better jobs, newly graduated college students move to where they have job offers, and many employees of large companies are transferred across the country. Why should the “rules” be different for people on welfare than for the middle class?

ROBIN VALAITIS-HEFLIN

Palmdale

If anything needs reforming in our country it has to be the social welfare system. If figures tell us something, “the system” has led to a major portion of our prison population, a major portion of our drug distribution and abuse, a major portion of our teen-age motherhood, and a major portion of our child abuse caseload. On the “Nightline” show some months ago, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders stated that 82% of men incarcerated in our prisons were products of “the system.” They were fatherless, abused or neglected children, undereducated, poor, and led into a life of crime well before their teen years. If we know these data, is it not time to fix the system that leads to such unwanted results? What industry would continue a product line or service that gave such consistently poor results? None. Yet, the local and federal governments encourage fatherless children, generational poverty, and dependence on “the system” from cradle to the grave. Changes are long overdue. Is there enough commitment at the top to start the process to restore dignity, independence, and hope to an underclass locked into “the system”? I hope so.

SOL TAYLOR

Sherman Oaks