In 1994, the New York Times magazine ran a big colour picture of a Chicago woman called Mary Ann Moore on its cover. She was dressed in an apron and a cook's hat, the very image of a working woman. She was being used as a heroine of welfare reform, living proof that the "dependency culture" can be broken by force.
After 14 years on social welfare, she had been shunted into the job market. She had been at work for over a year. She was standing her own two feet and doing fine.
Her picture on the cover said what many people want to hear - that cutting welfare payments is being cruel to be kind. It said the way to end poverty is to take away the safety net and force the poor to walk the wire of market forces. It's a message that obviously impressed Tony Blair. And it's one that will undoubtedly be coming to a chat show near you any day now.
The story of Mary Ann Moore was so uplifting, indeed, that the magazine more or less repeated it three years later. Last August, to mark the first anniversary of Bill Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it", it put another single mother, a Milwaukee woman called Opal Caples, on its cover. She was there, again, to illustrate a success story. She had been thrown off welfare, found a job, and was doing better than before.
These are powerful morality tales. But they don't have happy endings. Mary Ann Moore is now depressed and out of work. So is Opal Caples. And their return to unemployment is not untypical. The state of Tennessee did a survey of 205 welfare recipients who had found jobs. After just three months, 25 per cent of them were again unemployed and only 48 per cent were in fulltime work.
Altogether, the US has taken about 1.4 million people off welfare since 1994. Clinton's 1996 welfare changes essentially restrict any one individual to five years of welfare benefits in a lifetime and require individual states to get 30 per cent of their welfare recipients into work by the end of this year and 50 per cent by 2002.
Many states have gone further than this, restricting welfare to just two years. Idaho's "reforms" were so severe that in a single day they took all benefits from half of those who had been receiving them.
The full human cost of all of this will not be clear until the five-year limit is reached. But already there are some strong reasons to think twice before jumping on the welfare-to-work bandwagon.
Firstly, in spite of all the talk of moving people from welfare to work, only about half of those being shifted out of welfare in the US have found jobs. Secondly, many of those who do find jobs remain in poverty. Thirdly, and most bizarrely of all, the new welfare laws have actually led to a $3 billion increase in federal spending on welfare in order to provide services like childcare for working mothers and job placement.
There are many reasons why the practice doesn't match the theory, but the most important is probably a refusal to pay attention to the actual lives of people on social welfare. Two things tend to be ignored in the rhetoric. One is that in countries like Ireland, Britain and America, it's generally impossible to live on welfare alone. As a result, most people also depend on some kind of unofficial income - nixers, secret jobs, gifts from friends and family.
In a study published recently in the American Sociological Review, two research scientists looked at the actual income and expenditure of 379 single mothers on welfare in four cities. In Chicago, for instance, the women needed over $1,000 a month to keep their families going. They got $600 in welfare and made up the rest from secret jobs and family networks.
And the second critical point is that this extra income is usually cut off when the women are forced into jobs. The result is these women are typically worse off when they move from welfare to work.
The problem is that those who use welfare-to-work as a slogan tend to focus on the first part of the phrase and to neglect the second - work. Bill Clinton, selling his welfare reforms, spoke of the "structure, purpose, meaning and dignity that work gives". Tony Blair uses the same kind of rhetoric.
Both ignore the brutal truth that the kind of work most people currently on welfare can move into is desperately short of purpose, meaning and dignity. And of cash. The Tennessee study found even the minority of those kicked out of welfare who actually found full-time jobs was still living in poverty. With the poverty line at $12,500 for a family of three, they were earning on average just $9,987.
But there, perhaps, is the rub. For the real agenda of this kind of "welfare reform" has nothing much to with attacking poverty and everything to do with attacking the poor. It is, in particular, an attempt to punish poor women for having children out of wedlock.
But even on this crude and cruel level, it doesn't actually work. If cutting welfare was the solution to single motherhood, the number of babies born to single mothers in the US would have declined sharply since 1972, when the average welfare payment was 40 per cent higher than it is now. Instead, it rose by 140 per cent.
In New Jersey, when the state instituted a cap on payments for single mothers who had more children while on welfare, it made no appreciable difference to the rate of such births. None of this means that the idea of moving people from welfare to work is a bad one. It should, in general, be a goal of any political system. But it does mean that the idea of using force to achieve this worthy aim is not just cruel but inefficient. Market forces alone cannot tackle poverty.
As James Carville - Clinton's great electoral strategist - pointed out, the three things that would really help to break the cycle of dependency are old-fashioned social democratic interventions by the state: universal health care which would ensure that people moving from welfare to work would not lose crucial benefits; an end to poverty wages in the private sector; and largescale investment in education and training for the long-term unemployed.
Ireland, because of the influence of the trade unions and the left-wing parties in government over recent years, has tended to look in this direction for ways of getting people off benefits and into work. We've begun to develop quite sophisticated ways of bridging the gap between dependency and independence.
They are as yet inadequate and tentative and there is an urgent need for a real debate on radical alternatives like a basic income strategy. But let's not be deflected from pursuing them by the half-truths that make for good magazine covers and bad politics.