摘要：The precipitous decline in cash welfare caseloads since the late 1990s has heightened concern about the adequacy of alternative income sources for former recipients, who continue to experience high levels of poverty. In a project that constructed comparable estimates of economic well- being for welfare participants in New Jersey, Washing-ton, and Wisconsin, for example, we found that, two years later, between half and three-quarters of the fami-lies had incomes below the poverty line. Fairly high lev-els of hardship have also been documented¡ªaround a quarter of families in various studies reported that they sometimes or often did not have enough food, or had housing problems (utility disconnection, eviction, or homelessness).1Moreover, families that no longer re-ceive cash welfare may be receiving a variety of other benefits or services: food stamps, Medicaid, child care assistance, housing subsidies. These families may have left cash welfare, but they continue to rely on government aid
