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Why did you choose these three, and what do their examples show about welfare?

I finally chose the Bronx as a background to the narrative; if all of the women lived in the same neighborhood, that would at least provide one unifying factor. The Bronx was an important geographic place because there's an extremely entrenched welfare population there. The unemployment rate is always about twice the city's average, and the city's average is usually about twice the national average. The Bronx would be the real testing ground.

I chose people who were willing to stick with me. Brenda, for example, is an African-American single mother of two. Her demographic is statistically common among welfare recipients. She had a high school degree, and yet she didn't have a college degree, which really would have upped her marketable skills.

How much did their educational backgrounds affect what jobs they found?

It had a tremendous effect. To me, one of the biggest failures of welfare reform is that they have really devalued education as a way to lift people out of poverty. It's a time-honored way out of poverty. A college degree lifts a person's wages something like 30 percent.

And the welfare system didn't seem to make it easier for students like Alina.

Exactly. In fact, Alina basically had to skate under the radar in order to get her bachelor's degree. The welfare rules really don't allow recipients to get four-year degrees, and often they make it impossible for them to get two-year degrees as well because the emphasis is on work. They fill up their days with 30-hour WEP, or Work Experience Program, assignments, which are unpaid. It makes it very difficult to study, to go to class or to care for children.

As you wrote in your book, when Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility Act, he said that the money spent on welfare was not the point. Then he indicated that welfare has so much more to do with attitudes. Why haven't we come to terms with welfare?

If you have a large percentage of people in the richest nation of the world who are unable to lift themselves out of poverty, people who are uninformed immediately will say, "It must be something about them; they don't have the work ethic." We were always suspicious of having the federal government hand out money to people -- until the Depression. But compared to other industrialized nations, we've always been notoriously stingy with our social welfare programs. In 1996, we were only spending 1 percent of our national budget on welfare. The result is that we have the second highest rate of child poverty among the 24 Westernized nations.

In the 1960s, the welfare rights movement started heating up in New York City. There was no federal program to make sure that they knew they were eligible. Once programs were set up, the rolls tripled with mostly single black women with children getting welfare. This changed the whole racial complexion of welfare and started sending off alarms in Congress: "What are we doing developing a whole segment of our population who will be dependent on welfare?" The old ambivalence kicked in again: "How can we give people something for nothing? It's going to create indolence and laziness, they'll lose their work ethic and we're doing a disservice to society."

Did you see evidence of that? Did you see that the welfare system had bred laziness?

It's very rare. I expected to see more of it than I did, and I was looking for it. Occasionally, I would hear about a friend of another welfare recipient who everyone was down on for being on the rolls for so long. But none of them was living the queen's life as Reagan liked to portray. There was no one driving around in a Cadillac. These people were really scraping by. Most people have worked their whole lives.

The more common situation is that a mother worked at a minimum wage job. She had no health insurance. So when something happened -- for example, she got sick or pregnant, her child got sick, her teenager needed some help, a custody situation devoured her time -- that mother has to quit her job. The only place she could turn was the government.

With these three women, did you get the impression that they all wanted to work and get off welfare? How did they feel about welfare?

They felt that this was a system that was designed to degrade them. At the same time, they needed the help to eat and pay rent. So they were grateful that it was there. Medicaid was an extremely important benefit. But in order to get welfare and stay on welfare, there was a daily set of indignities that they had to endure, and they often felt that the rules were very counterproductive.

Did you think that the New York system was trying to bounce people off the rolls?

Without question. That was part of the design. The administrators and the lawmakers were often quite candid about that: They believed that welfare is bad. They designed the welfare offices to make sure that they would deter people from welfare rather than sign them up. If there was no other choice, then they would immediately send them into WEP work.

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