Dowling on Cost of Welfare to Taxpayers

Re “The Devalued Family,” Commentary, June 19:

Katherine Dowling alleges that welfare payments are placing a huge burden on American taxpayers, particularly those in working-class and lower-middle-income backgrounds. This is simply false. AFDC, what most of us think of as “welfare,” and the example Dowling purports to use, comprises only 1.1% of the federal budget. According to the Harper’s Index, the average American taxpayer turns over all of $26 a year to the federal government to pay for AFDC. Even when we add the food stamp program, it only comes to about 2% of the federal budget.

She suggests that the federal government is devouring working people’s incomes in taxes. Thanks largely to Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, which expanded the earned-income tax credit for working people, many American families making less than $26,000 pay no income taxes. Now, Dowling’s Republicans are doing their best to repeal the EITC and raise taxes on the working class. How is this the fault of welfare recipients and liberal social engineers?

Dowling is right that Social Security taxes take a big chunk out of working people’s salaries--that’s why we should make these taxes progressive so that the wealthy can no longer avoid paying their fair share. But Social Security has nothing to do with welfare--it is a middle-class entitlement.

JONATHAN ZASLOFF

Public Counsel

North Hollywood

* Dowling’s opinion on the “evils” of government funding of social programs was full of so many oversimplifications that it might make even Rush Limbaugh wince. Are we to believe that the only reason government-funded school lunches are needed is simply because parents are too lazy to get up early to make lunches? That fathers abandon their children only because they know the government will step in to care for them?

Government assistance is only necessary because private charities and families have failed to provide support for many people. I suggest this doctor just consider herself lucky that the U.S. already has among the lowest tax rates of any major industrialized nation, and that we don’t have socialized (horrors!) medicine.

ALISTAIR CULLUM

Laguna Beach