'Welfare to the Wealthy'

Editor:

I agree with Devon Gray’s well written piece (“False Narratives Fuel California’s Failure to Address Poverty,” Oct. 26) and add that there is an imbalance in our political/economic system that sends much more money to the wealthy elites than the government spends on poverty programs. For instance, the RAND Corporation put out a study a couple of years ago stating that taxpayers transfer more than $1 trillion a year for the last 40 years or more to the wealthy elites; who, by the way, fund our political candidates.

When you compare that $50 trillion to our $33 trillion debt you can see that we should be able to have a more equitable system simply by stopping this transfer to the wealthy elites. If we look at the tax system for all incomes and all taxes in the U.S., we find that everyone pays roughly around a 30 to 36 percent rate, while the wealthy elites pay roughly half of that. So stopping welfare to the wealthy would alleviate many of the serious problems we have in this country and stop squeezing so many Americans below the poverty level.

Dennis Whitcomb, Blue Lake