Your Opinion: Consequences of federal welfare

Dear Editor:

I agree with the advice of a recent columnist who recommended that we need to check the facts before optioning on a subject. I checked the Tax Foundation web site and couldn't find the list of states he mentioned so I did some research on my own.

Anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/04/per-capita-federal-welfare-expenditures.html has a list of showing the per capita welfare states receive from the federal government. The list is headed not by a state, but by the District of Columbia. Seven of the top 10 states were states that voted for Obama. New York and California are at the top of the list. I expected D.C. to be at the top of the list but I found it difficult to believe that New York and California were at the top of the list.

At www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/12statab/stlocgov.pdf I found the dollar amounts of federal aid given to state and local governments for these items; food and nutrition service, public housing programs and administration for children and families. I added up the amounts for just those three areas, to verify the list mentioned earlier. It is worth noting that I could not find a specific dollar figure for the amount of Medicaid money each state receives. Based on my numbers the District of Columbia, New York and California were again at the top of the list.

Ohio and Illinois also made my top 10 list of the per capita welfare received the federal government. Not only do these four Democratic states mentioned get high amounts of welfare per capita, they also have the some of the largest populations.

Robert Rector, a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, recently studied means-tested welfare spending. One of his conclusions was that if all means-tested welfare was converted to cash and distributed to low income households it would raise their incomes to above twice the poverty level. Since the beginning of the War on Poverty we have spent almost $20 trillion on means-tested welfare. The cost of all the wars we have ever fought is less than $7 trillion. After over 40 years of ever increasing benefits we now have record numbers of people in poverty. Is anyone shocked that we have gotten more of the behavior we have rewarded?