IN one of the greatest political and economic success stories of the past decade, the number of families receiving welfare in America has fallen by 60% since claimants were told they had to seek work or ultimately lose their benefits.

The result has been a revolution — not only in welfare, but also in attitudes towards poverty. Single mothers, once considered to be helplessly dependent on the state, have led the way out of welfare into work.

In 1994, 5.1m American families were on welfare. By 2004 the number had plunged to 2m. Teenage births fell from 58 per 1,000 to 41 per 1,000 during the same period, while employment rates for unmarried teenage mothers rose by two-thirds.

“It’s amazing,” said Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank championing reform. “Nobody thought there would be a 60% drop. We’ve seen a resilience among the poor that people didn’t anticipate and it’s been a very good lesson for Americans.”

It was 10 years ago last week that President Bill Clinton — against the wishes of many in his own party and under intense pressure from a newly elected Republican Congress — passed into law a bill requiring people to find a job or lose their benefits after five years.

Critics warned that the 1996 law would be catastrophic for single parents and their children. One Democratic senator predicted that America would look like Brazil, with “children begging for money, children begging for food, and eight and nine-year-old prostitutes”. Another prominent senator said it would lead to “something approaching the Apocalypse”.

The nay-sayers have been confounded. Hymowitz compares the politicians, sociologists and intellectuals of the 1990s who derided welfare reform — the “brightest and best” of their generation — to the Kremlinologists of the 1980s, who failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The poverty rate for the children of single mothers dropped from 50% in 1996 to 42% in 2004. Far from becoming feral street children and hookers, 1.6m fewer children live in poverty today. An expanding economy played its part, particularly in the boom years of the late 1990s. But the trend survived an economic downturn in the economy in 2001; after rising briefly, the number of families on welfare continued to decline.

The most controversial element of the bill was the threat to cut off benefits after five years. In the event few families were thrown onto the scrap heap, particularly as states often stepped in to fill the gap with welfare programmes of their own. But the looming deadline helped to alter people’s expectations.

“It wasn’t that we enforced the time limits so strictly,” said Charles Murray, the theorist of the “underclass” whose ideas provided the seed-corn for reform. “What we did was we changed the rhetoric. For the first time social workers were telling their clients, ‘You’ve got to go and look for a job’.”

Vivian Giddiens, a 48-year-old New Yorker, spent the best part of a decade on welfare while babysitting two young grandchildren and looking after her school-age daughter. She would occasionally find seasonal work but had learnt to live — she can barely remember how — on a government hand-out of $101 (£53.09) a fortnight, supplemented by food stamps. “By the time I got my welfare cheque, I’d have to pay off my debts. It was so frustrating,” she recalled.

Letters warning that she had only so many months left of benefit payments began to arrive. “At the back of my mind, I was always thinking I’d have to find a job,” Giddiens said. “I was on a very low income so it wasn’t a question of losing my ‘wants’ but my ‘needs’.”

From time to time she would turn up at job creation programmes. Most of them “didn’t offer anything, didn’t explain anything, I’d just be sitting there”. Then she was invited to attend America Works, a private, for-profit company set up by welfare entrepreneur Peter Cove that receives government funding to find people work.

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