orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER) (11/11/85)
> From David Olson: > Figure it out for yourself. If you take the $366 billion spent (at the > federal level alone) in 1982 on social welfare and simply divided it > among all the poor in the US, they would have received about $12,000 > each. A family of four would then have received about $48,000 ($78,000 > if you include state and local) PLUS whatever income they had before. > That leaves only two choices: either the needy are not needy, or the > vast majority of the social welfare spending is *not getting* to those > people that need help. > Mr. Olson: just try to take away retired citizens Social Security pension to give to the poor and see how far you get! You will have thousands and thousands of senior citizens who worked all their lives and paid into the Social Security fund up in arms and demonstrating. With good cause: they have paid into the Social Security fund and they have the right to the pension they have paid for. Whether they should get the current level of benefits which amounts to more than they ever paid into the system is another question. But in deciding this question one also has to calculate what their payments into the system are now worth accounting for the interest rate. Thanks in part to increases in Social Security payments, along with increased Medicare and other aid to older citizens, the proportion of old people in poverty has drastically declined in the last 10 years. I think this is a major accomplishment worth preserving. If you take away the several hundred billion of your $366 billion figure for "Income Security", that actually goes to Social Security that leaves quite a few billions left in various programs. I agree that simply spending more money on the current system will not solve the problem of poverty efficiently. However merely taking an ax to the system and summarily raising benefit levels or cutting out programs altogether with no substitute is the *worst* approach. Unfortunately, it has been the approach of the Reagan administration which has hurt the *working poor* the worst- because they already have some income outside of welfare or if they increase their income outside of welfare programs, they then come above the threshold cutoffs and lose *all* their benefits. The net result is that they are actually *worse off* if they begin working. That is why I think that Milton Friedman and others idea is much better- replace programs which are primarily for income maintenance with a negative income tax. This can be structured in such a way that the more income people get from their job, the more income they will actually get including benefits. I know that many conservatives will not believe it but there are a number of poor people who take crummy, subsistence jobs because they want to feel productive even tho it actually means *less income* than on welfare. I know some of them myself. They are trying to pull their lives together and make something of themselves despite incredible obstacles. We should give them every encouragement in that effort and provide incentives for them to do so by keeping income they earn. tim sevener whuxn!orb