>BE can't count.
Barbara Ehrenreich has a PhD in biology, so I think she can probably count. You can rightly point to the relatively small decline in the "income security" lines of the federal budget, but on the other hand you know what happened to the real value of the typical AFDC check in the last 20-25 years of that program's life.
I suspect Ehrenreich's main political point, her numeracy aside, was the end of welfare as an entitlement and its replacement by an even more moralizing, intrusive, and chintzier program than its predecessor. TANF is still young, and the economic cycle has been kind. We have no idea how the states will behave in a recession, nor how recipients and former recipients will fare over time. We do know that the people kicked off General Assistance in Michigan did quite badly, and we can assume that lots of the people that Rudy has kicked off welfare in NYC have done badly (of course we'll never know for sure since he's not collecting numbers and won't let anyone else in on the secret either, though everyone awaits the work that Heather Boushey & her colleagues that the New York City Housing Authority will be doing on workfare).
Doug