Welfare Spending
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Robert Rector (Column Right, July 11) sets out to describe how much the U.S. now spends on aid to the poor. From the numbers, which are designed more to overwhelm than to inform, he comes to the absurd conclusion that these programs are a failure because “they are not ending poverty.”
Does anyone believe that poverty can be ended by assistance to the poor that is set at a fraction of the poverty level? Or, that public aid can ever overcome the impoverishing consequences of too few jobs, a minimum wage below the family poverty level, a grossly underfinanced system of public education, a health care system with limited access to the poor, a non-system of child care?
What we need now is not the fluffy distraction offered in this Op-Ed piece but critical attention to the welfare reform approved by the House of Representatives, and now before the Senate. That reform will increase poverty now, and do absolutely nothing to connect people to the education and to the jobs they must have to escape poverty in the future.
LEONARD SCHNEIDERMAN
Professor Emeritus, UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research
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