Welfare on the wane?

• Author: Schnepper, Jeff A.

Forget about being liberal or conservative. Forget about being Republican or Democrat. Pretend we are nothing but rational human beings who have a choice to make about public spending. What if the President and local and Congressional leaders had gotten together in 1965 with a crystal ball and offered not t spend a single dime on welfare for the next 30 years? Instead, three decades later, they would take the money that would have been spent and buy every Fortune 500 company and every piece of farmland in America. Then, they would deed those companies and farms over to the poor.

That is exactly what our elected representatives could have done with the money--about $3.5 trillion--they have spent on welfare since 1965. If they had, what would the poverty problem or the definition of poverty be today? Would there still be tens of thousands of Americans qualifying as members of a permanent underclass? Clearly, the welfare bureaucracy would be smaller--and that may be the real problem.

Could there be an inverse relationship between the amount spent on the poor and the number of poor? Despite the more than $5 trillion--in constant 1994 dollars--in combined government spending to combat poverty over the last 30 years, the poverty problem seems to be getting worse, not better.

In the fall of 1994, the Census Bureau reported that 39,300,000 people lived below the poverty threshold in 1993. This was up from 36,900,000 in 1992 and 31,500,000 in 1989, a four-year increase of almost 25%.

As a result, according to the Census Bureau, the percentage of people living in a household below the poverty line ($14,763 for a family of four in 1993, up from the 1992 level of $14,335) rose from 12.8% in 1989 to 15.1% in 1993. After falling by more than half since World War II, it has remained generally in the 11-15% range since 1966.

Many of the poor would not be so classified if noncash welfare benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, and housing subsidies were included as income. Today's "poor" are less than destitute. According to the Census Bureau's biennial American Housing Survey, nearly 60% of all "poor" households live in dwellings with air conditioning, and Energy Department studies reveal that about 90% owned at least one color television set.

I am not saying that the poor should go without air conditioning or color TV. What I am saying is that I don't feel that it is my responsibility to pay for them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual...