Social Welfare And Taxation Policies

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share of government benefits tend to go to the middle and upper classes rather than to the poor. In the U.S., for instance, more than half the transfer payments and tax benefits dispensed by the federal government in 1991 went to households with incomes over $30,000, which is more than double the poverty cutoff for a family of four (Kenworthy 1999). In most other industrialized nations social-welfare programs are even more universal in nature, i.e., less targeted toward the poor than they are in the U.S. (Kenworthy 1999). However there is still enough money that reaches the poor which, in the absence of any detrimental effects of social- welfare programs, which has some poverty-reducing impact.
Some critics assert that social-welfare policies undercut economic growth and thus fail to reduce the number of poor in the long run, even if they do provide some temporary near-term assistance. Known as the equality-efficiency trade-off, the idea is that higher rates of progressive ...

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have a smaller share of its citizens with posttax/posttransfer incomes below 40% of its median. Nevertheless since the median itself would now be higher in country B, many of those on the lower end of B's income distribution might be better off than their counterparts in A in an absolute sense (Kenworthy 1999).
Comparisons between countries of tax and welfare policies can be informative if you keep in mind that there are variables that cannot be controlled for in each country. The relative cost of living, how each country sets its poverty line, would be just a couple of the variables. In his study on social welfare policies effectiveness in reducing poverty Lane Kenworthy presents some ...

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