No News is Good News

Here's some qualified good news. Before the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill, opponents made some fairly dire predictions—a million more children thrown into poverty, that kind of thing. When that didn't happen, plenty of folks (not wholly unreasonably) suggested that the economic boom had cushioned the blow, but that it was only delaying the inevitable—just wait. This Urban Institute survey of employment and wage data finds that the recession (unsurprisingly) hit working single mothers hard, but didn't erase the gains of the previous years.