Original sentence: Atkinson, Incomes and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press 1995).The figures below show welfare expenditure as a percentage of GDP.Within developed economies, however, there is no association between economic performance and welfare expenditure (see A
Edited sentence: (See A.A first response might be that the purpose of state-provided welfare is to respond to social needs, not necessarily to be cheaper overall.A second criticism of the welfare state is that it results in high taxes.Atkinson, Incomes and the Welfare State, Cambridge University Press 1995) Similarly, there is no evidence for the contention that welfare state impedes progressive social development.Goodin et al, in The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2000), show that on major economic and social indicators, the USA performs worse than the Netherlands, which has a high commitment to welfare provision.However, these countries also have high wage economies and high GNPs; high taxes do not imply poor economic performance.In a welfare state, the poor and lower-middle classes receive certain services free of charge, whereas in non-welfare states they would have to pay for those services, and could possibly not afford them.In addition, they have a strong system of progressive taxation, which ensures that less burden falls on the poor and middle classes.Ironically, the idea of a welfare state receives the most criticism in the country with the least amount of welfare services in the developed world - namely the United States.Lowering taxes would not necessarily result in more spending money for the average citizen (since a lot of free services would no longer be free).More fundamentally, although private provision can reduce unit costs, it often does so through adverse selection, or exclusion of disproportionately expensive cases.Most of this American criticism revolves around the idea that a welfare state would make citizens lazy and less inclined to work.National health care systems, for example, tend to be cheaper than equivalent provision through private care.Newt Gingrich (see "welfare reform").That is unsupported by the economic evidence; there is no association between economic performance and welfare expenditure in developed countries.The assumption that public provision is more costly overall is mistaken.Third, there is criticism that welfare services provided by the state are supposedly more expensive and less efficient than the same services provided by private businesses.This is sometimes true, as evidenced by places like Denmark (tax level at 50.4% of GDP in 2002) and Sweden (tax level at 50.3% of GDP in 2002)