Orange County Welfare Study

Regarding the Aug. 20 article about Orange County’s investigation into welfare fraud, it should be recognized that the audit is not an attack on the downtrodden but rather an attempt to apply similar standards to welfare recipients that the rest of us live with daily. Virtually no one accepts anyone’s qualifications for anything without substantiation. One must provide proof of citizenship to get a passport, and proof of income and assets to obtain a loan. The IRS matches W2s and 1099s, and conducts audits as they see fit. Colleges examine transcripts, references and SAT results. Even newspapers have editors and fact-checkers.

Those who believe welfare recipients merit less scrutiny than the rest of us must be taking the term “entitlement” literally.

ANNE ELLIOTT

Los Angeles

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* The Wilson Administration has contracted with the Hoover Institution to design a $1.2 million study of welfare fraud. What will such a study be able to tell us when it is finished?

We will learn that individuals on welfare cheat, sometimes in creative and hard-to-detect ways. Cheating costs taxpayers money which they should not have to pay. Cheating robs other welfare recipients of needed benefits. Cheating is bad, illegal, immoral. It must be stopped! (I will not pause here to consider the relative payoff in dollars saved from a study of the randomly selected income tax returns of 450 of the richest Americans).

What won’t this study tell us? It won’t tell us whether welfare does anything of value for those it serves, and whether or not it is worth the dollars expended. Ten million children in the United States receive welfare assistance each month. Does the assistance allow children to escape hunger? To be adequately housed? To receive needed health care? To attend school? To graduate from high school? To enter college? To find jobs? An in-depth study like this, which spends $1.2 million to gather information about how welfare families actually live, could offer useful answers to such questions.

Keeping the focus on fraud and cheating, and maintaining a “know-nothing” approach to anything positive about welfare, Gov. Pete Wilson can continue to rant and rave against the evils of the program and its recipients undeterred by any knowledge of the potential destructiveness of his actions.

LEONARD SCHNEIDERMAN Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research