WELFARE REFORM WAS ushered into law six years ago based on a simple equation: If people are self-sufficient, they stop being poor. If they aren't poor, they don't need welfare. If they don't need welfare, taxes go down and everybody goes home happy.

But as policy makers around the country soon learned, it isn't quite that easy. Study after study has shown that while pushing people into jobs (through time limits and work requirements) results in fewer people on welfare, it does little to end poverty.

As Cassi Feldman reports on page 13, the depressed economy is quickly reversing many of the much-hailed benefits of welfare reform. Across the country, welfare rolls are growing as people lose their jobs and return to government aid or apply for welfare for the first time.

Meanwhile, in a recent study, nonprofit research group Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. found that between 1996 and 2000, families in Connecticut's Jobs First welfare-reform program did only marginally better than those in the traditional system. Thanks to a strong economy, a majority of both groups were able to find jobs.

So what happens when the economy isn't as strong? Aren't those newly placed workers likely to be first to get laid off? San Francisco's Department of Human Services can't, or won't, answer those questions.

When we asked how many of the 1,500 San Franciscans who left welfare for jobs in 1999-2000 were still employed today, a DHS spokesperson told us the agency didn't keep track. The director, Trent Rhorer, later told us the DHS did keep track – but he instructed his staff not to compile those numbers for reporters.