Al Gore's Tender Ministrations.

In the Senate and as Vice President, I fought for welfare reform. Over and over again, I talked to folks who told me how they were trapped in the old welfare system.... So I fought to end welfare as we then knew it, to help those in trouble, but to insist on work and responsibility. And we have cut the welfare rolls in half and moved millions into good jobs.

--Al Gore, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, August 18, 2000

Who knew that the inventor of the Internet also invented welfare fare reform? Gore traveled around, listening to the pleas of welfare recipients who begged him to free them from the "trap," then he fought to turn them into "working families" just like everyone else. Odd that they didn't just walk away from welfare on their own, as millions did all the time even in the heyday of welfare-as-we-knew-it, creating a constant high level of turnover in and out of the "trap." Odd, too, that he's never thought to free Tipper from her miserable state of dependency or propose that W. do the same for longtime freeloader Laura.

But never mind that. Welfare reform is a success--isn't it?--one of those many innovations, including NAFTA and Star Wars, that candidates of either party can proudly claim as their own. The evidence? Well, as more than one welfare reform booster has put it: You don't see millions of people dying in the streets, now do you?

The truth is no one knows for sure how the six million former welfare recipients are doing in the wake of Al Gore's tender ministrations. When they designed the 1996 "Personal Responsibility" bill, the welfare reformers cleverly covered their tracks by making no provision to find out what became of former recipients after they were booted off welfare. The further truth is that no one is likely to find out, because at least some of the information we get on the impact of welfare reform is of the kind that deserves the prefix "dis." For example, surveys of former welfare recipients have often been conducted by phone--a procedure guaranteed to leave out the most desperate cases.

The most flagrant deception comes from Minnesota, the state that's so famously "nice." In June, a study found that Minnesota's welfare reform, which is called the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), was a brilliant success: Participating families saw a 23 percent increase in their earnings, causing 68 percent of them to rise above the poverty line. There was also a 51 percent increase in the number of married recipients (though why this counts as part of the "success" was a bit unclear to this hardened divorcee). Jesse Ventura trumpeted the happy results. Time magazine hailed Minnesota's program a "winner." Even former critics of welfare reform grudgingly conceded, yes, it's working in Minnesota.

One small fact went almost entirely unnoticed. The program that produced the brilliant results wasn't Minnesota's welfare reform program. It was a pilot project that operated in only seven counties between 1994 and 1997 and provided far more generous transitional benefits than the real thing. Participants in the pilot project received child care subsidies and Medicaid, for example, to ease the transition to work, and were subjected to far less stringent work requirements than most states, including Minnesota, impose in "reforming" their welfare recipients. So why didn't anyone notice? Because the pilot project had the same name as Minnesota's welfare reform program--MFIP.

No one, as far as I know, leaped to point out the "mistake," if that's what it deserves to be called. This is in line with the general tendency to brightside the results of welfare reform, and let the obstreperous little facts be damned. Loyal Democrats don't want to rain on Gore's parade by dwelling on the nasty side of the supposedly Democrat-engineered boom. Republicans don't care. Economically sophisticated liberals believe that economic utopia has been achieved in the form of full, or nearly full, employment--so what's to complain?

The boosters are right about one thing: A woman should do better, cash-wise at least, in a job than on the welfare rolls. A $7-an-hour job, which is the level at which most former recipients enter the workforce, will get you $1,120 a month before taxes, compared to the $400 or so average monthly welfare cash allowance. Trouble is, the welfare recipient also had Medicaid, for which most working people are ineligible, and food stamps, which millions have lost as they've been kicked off the rolls--illegally, in many cases, just because the states have been a bit overeager about cutting people loose. Then, too, a job brings its own expenses--for child care and transportation to work.

What does the average post-welfare family of a woman and two children need to live on? The Economic Policy Institute recently issued a study finding that, to live at a minimal level of safety and comfort, such a family needs about $30,000 a year. That money must cover rent, food, clothing, child care, transportation, health insurance, phone, and utilities. It does not include such middle class staples as restaurant meals, video rentals, Internet access providers, or vacation trips. Yet this bare-bones budget requires almost three times as much income as typical entry-level workers earn. And a shortfall of that size has to hurt.

The signs of pain are all around, though you have to be pretty diligent to find them in mainstream sources. In a quick-and-dirty search of the news from December 1999 to the present, I found accounts of maxed-out food banks and shelters from California to Massachusetts, Wisconsin to Georgia. There is a trend afoot, "a torrent of need which we cannot meet," according to Deborah Leff of the hunger relief organization Americas Second Harvest. And local charitable providers are blaming the rising demand for their services, in part, on welfare reform. Nationwide, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of adults requesting emergency food aid are employed, meaning that if they were ever on welfare, they have since been "reformed."

Here's the saddest note of all: Statistics released in May show that Milwaukee's infant mortality rate rose 17.6 percent from 1997 to 1998--37 percent for African Americans. Milwaukee is the veritable capital of welfare reform, and Wisconsin's highly "successful" welfare reform program (called W2, meaning "Wisconsin Works") has attracted a steady flow of admiring press attention. The best guess is that the sudden spike in infant deaths represents the fallout from welfare reform, including less access to prenatal care, infant health care, or food. As Dr. Patricia McManus of the state's African American Infant Mortality Task Force puts it, "Milwaukee took a major hit with the implementation of W2."

It's true that the victims of welfare reform aren't "dying in the streets." They're dying much more discreetly indoors. But Al Gore wants the credit, so lay those little dead babies at his feet.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive.