New Welfare System Seen as 'Recession-Proof'

"I can afford to do things with my kids and pay bills on time, and sometimes I have change left," Flowers said.

Some poverty experts stress that success stories like these disguise the dark consequences of welfare reform.

"It's an obvious puzzle: Why didn't welfare rolls grow in a recession?" said Wendell Primus, who quit his job as a welfare policy specialist in the Health and Human Services Department in protest when President Clinton signed the GOP-written reform bill. "A safety net ought to respond to a recession; there is something wrong if it doesn't."

Primus went to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he studied how the poorest 20% of single mothers were doing under reform. In 1993, he found, 18% of this group received neither a welfare check nor a paycheck. By 2001, that slice had grown to 39%, or about 400,000.

"How are they making a go of it? We don't know," said Primus, who has since become an economist for Congress' Joint Economic Committee, a bipartisan House-Senate panel that studies economic issues. "I do think life is a lot harder for that group than it was before 1996."

The goal of Congress' welfare reformers was to end reliance on the dole. Many states made requirements for getting welfare so onerous that some people are making do without benefits rather than deal with them.

The rules drove others into the job market. To get a welfare check under the new federal program -- which Congress pointedly named Temporary Assistance to Needy Families -- recipients have to pursue some activity related to work. Depending on the state, that might mean attending school or a job preparation program, picking up trash on city streets or doing office work for a charity.

Linda Dix, a 42-year-old mother of two, is back on welfare after leaving the dole for a job in the late '90s. But she is determined to make this stay on welfare brief.

"I'm not going to volunteer 30 hours for just $292 a month," she said.

In Cook County, where Chicago is, welfare caseloads dropped by about one-quarter in each of the last two years. Statewide, about 42,000 Illinois families received welfare as of January; in 1996, the caseload was 226,000.

Nationwide, rolls have stabilized at about 2 million families, down from a peak of 5 million in 1994.