With welfare caseloads down an average of 45 percent since states started implementing welfare reforms in 1994, analysts are asking what has happened to ex-beneficiaries. Are they working, do they have more income, and have they escaped poverty?

They report that the law is working better than anyone dared to hope.

• Basing its estimates on state studies, the General Accounting Office says that about 60 percent of former welfare mothers are employed -- and 80 percent have held a job at some time since they left the rolls.

• Although there is no reliable national data on the income of ex-welfare mothers, the annual income of the bottom 20 percent of all mothers -- those making about $6,500 in 1997 -- increased nearly $500 from 1993 to 1997, according to the Census Bureau.

• But over the same period, those mothers with average incomes of $13,500 gained nearly $3,000 in earnings and the earned income tax credit.

• Overall poverty and child poverty declined in 1995, 1996 and 1997 -- while poverty among black children declined more in 1997 than in any previous year.

This year the U.S. will spend at least $80 billion providing low- income working families with cash income supplements through tax credits and other benefits such as child care. According to the Congressional Budget Office, some $45 billion of this amount is directly attributable to legislation enacted since the mid-1980s.

Welfare reform advocates point out that his new work-support system means that mothers who take minimum-wage jobs are far better off than mothers on welfare.

Source: Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn., chairman, Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Ways and Means Committee), "The Results Are In: Welfare Reform Works," Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1999.