I supported welfare reform because initially it seemed to be working. Liberal predictions of children sleeping on grates did not come to pass, and on the contrary, there was a burst of employment for low-income single mothers as people moved from welfare to work.

But the employment bump stalled, and the replacement program for welfare, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, has pretty much collapsed, especially in Republican states like Oklahoma. There are now more postage stamp collectors in America than there are families collecting cash welfare, and so kids like Hailey grow up in chaotic households in which there is simply no money.

“Welfare is dead,” declares an important book, “$2 a Day,” an exposé of extreme poverty by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. It is their research that finds that roughly three million American children live in households earning less than $2 per person per day.

Yet it’s also true that the old welfare system was a wreck, creating dependency and cycles of poverty, as the real experts on poverty sometimes acknowledge.