Funds Lament Didn’t Paint Whole Picture

Robert A. Rosenblatt’s “When It Comes to Uncle Sam’s Coffers, California Is Cash Loser” (June 25) implies that California has regularly been getting back less money from the federal government than its citizens pay to the federal government. However, the only figures given in support of that statement are the ones for 1994. Yet the article talks of “dramatic erosion” of federal dollars coming to the state between 1986 and 1994. Since the figures that Rosenblatt gives indicate that California got 99.4 cents back for each dollar sent to Washington (not 96 cents, as the article claims) in 1994, the obvious conclusion would be that we were never a donor state until 1994.

The article implies that the decline in federal revenues received since the end of the Cold War will continue, but it gave no data to support that implication. Unless there is such evidence, how do we know that 1994 is not just a blip below the mid-line in a fluctuating graph that has never dipped below it before and may never do so again?

DONALD SCHWARTZ

Santa Ana