Poverty and Spending Priorities

Robert Scheer’s Feb. 23 Column Left (“End of Welfare Isn’t the End of Poor People”) correctly points out that 20% of the U.S. population is still poor even though welfare rolls are dropping. Poverty has been at roughly that level ever since the late 1960s. Before this, prosperous times helped poverty levels steadily decline from about 50% during the Great Depression to 20% in the 1960s.

What stopped this steady improvement? The federal government dramatically reduced incentives for poor people to work. Under the presumption that poverty was “structural” and that individuals were not responsible for their plight, the federal government worked diligently to remove the stigma associated with being on public assistance and to make it easier to obtain.

After those who are now leaving the welfare rolls acquire skills that make them more valuable, many of them will escape poverty. The end of welfare isn’t the end of poor people, but it might be a start to reducing their numbers.

JIM MLADENIK

Irvine

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Kudos to Scheer for dispelling the myths about welfare “reform.” Of course, his column is not unrelated to Dale Bumpers’ Feb. 22 commentary about the wasteful U.S. initiative to chase the Grail of “missile defense” in the name of U.S. security.

The reality is that both our major political parties have agreed there will always be plenty of money for “weapons welfare”--in the form of throwing tax dollars at wasteful and destabilizing missile and space weapon systems--but none for human welfare, even if it means breaking up families simply to keep impoverished parents trapped in substandard jobs and willingly shutting our eyes and ears when poor children go hungry. “Family values,” anyone?

MARK L. WILLIAMS

North Hollywood

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Bumpers and the Center for Defense Information are right. To give the Pentagon money for another try at shooting down “bullets in space” would be a total waste. Instead, let’s buy Russia’s nuclear weapons and junk them, along with ours.

HAROLD WATERHOUSE

Pacific Palisades