Roll reversal: the quiet success of welfare reform.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

Now President Patricia Ireland, a Clinton supporter, said her organization "would not lift a finger or raise a penny to help a president who would plunge 1 million more women and children into poverty."

So reported the San Diego Union-Tribune on August 23, 1996 - the day after the president signed a law ending welfare as we knew it (and as NOW preferred it). In the intervening months we have witnessed the depths of NOW's sincere commitment to the women and children who suffer at the hands (and other body parts) of Bill Clinton. But much more interesting is the great commitment to the job market made by poor people forced to move off the welfare rolls.

That we do not hear more about the overwhelming success of welfare reform is evidence that a fine mist of public policy peyote has been sprayed at the CumuloNimbus level. Our political discourse drifts daffily at ground zero. The Urban Institute's projection that 2.6 million poor souls would be delivered into poverty; the outpouring of Democratic Party support during the '96 election for President Clinton as the one man who could fix what he had wrought; the "where are the jobs going to come from?" taunts by welfare advocates - all are now stashed in some forgotten bin with those New Year's predictions by National Enquirer psychics.

Charles Murray set us up for all of this. When pressed to come up with a helpful solution in his 1984 book documenting the failed legacy of welfare, Losing Ground, Murray shrank from the challenge: Simply abolish welfare, he said, cold turkey.

It was irresponsible, cowardly, unthinkable - and exactly right.

Indeed, within a decade, states began playing with the notion in a politically thinkable way. The problem of long-term welfare dependency was seriously addressed when new and improved programs were ditched in favor of time limits, which made work "requirements" credible. The effort quietly starting taking off in the states about 1993, and federal legislation bolstered the trend in 1996. In the past five years, some 1.92 million welfare cases, 41 percent of the total, have been eliminated nationally. Three million remain.

Maryland's system was the subject of a 1998 study analyzing more than 2,000 welfare recipients who had gone off the dole. According to the Baltimore Sun, the study "found that many fears about welfare reform have not come to pass. Foster care has not been overrun with children whose parents left the welfare rolls...and recipients were not thrown...