It really is wonderful to hear of single parents who are able to work their way out of poverty. There is a tremendous amount of potential among the recent and not-so-recent poor.

Unfortunately, positive outcomes are rare. It is very easy to close "X" number of welfare cases per month. Lifetime limits on aid make this all the easier. But all those doors that once enabled some 80 percent of welfare recipients to work their way out of poverty within five years have been slammed shut.

We might not do very well with foreign wars any more, but we still know how to get tough on the poor and powerless -- and how to keep them that way.

Welfare should only be for the disabled. I know two middle class, 26-year-old, healthy, energetic white women who work in my hair salon. They both have an illegitimate kid and live with their parents in a middle-class suburb. I keep asking them why they don't get money from the kids' fathers instead of taxpayers. This mentality has to stop. People give these girls $20 tips - two haircuts each hour - not counting the bill. And these girls are on welfare.

"Sit on the couch all day." This line from your article again displays that most therapists, social workers, and government officials just don't get it. The work system is very specific. It has nothing to do with "being willing to work," as your myths have it. In fact, I was willing to work for decades, the problem is that, at the low end, most jobs, in spite of laws and rules and stated policies, can't honestly accommodate a disabled person.

These accommodations are an illusion. Most low-end jobs are in industries where the profit margin is thin and the competition brutal. The first employer to really start accommodating chronically sickly people immediately loses out to the competition. In industry after industry I tried, it just came out that accommodating weak people, slow people, people in pain, allergic people, mentally ill folks -- was just all but a crazy proposition if one were to remain profitable and prevail against competitors.

Oh yeah, all employers make a grand public effort to show they are hiring the disabled, but those hirings are all for show. The back side is that those employees don't last and end up drifting from employer to employer before finally, exhausted and demoralized, sinking into severe clinical depression. Your article basically presumes a certain level of physical health.

For every miracle story you can produce, I can show you ten who could only hold up a while under the stress of the real world. The average person needing welfare, don't make me laugh . . . they'll do their Walmart job for a year before they're crushed by workplace demands. They'll get sick several times and be labeled "uncooperative" when in fact they're weak and sick, and get tossed to the street. And you won't cover that side of the story.

Welfare Reform is a mirage in virtually all of the forms I've seen it. I know what I'm talking about. I've lived the whole system inside and out. You just don't get it.