"The Work Welfare Trade-Off: An Analysis of the Total Level of Welfare Benefits by the State" by Michael Tanner, Stephen Moore, and David Hartman, September, 1995. It's at <http://www.cato.org/research/pr-nd-st.html>.
actual report is at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-240.html offhand, I don't have a basis for grokking the numbers, because I've never been an unwed mother with two children under 5yrs old. if they had done numbers for a single male with no children, I'd have a better chance of knowing how attractive welfare would be over random lowpaying jobs I used to have. I find it very odd that the study does an elaborate benefits calculation for a mother without a job, but doesn't do a similar calculation for a mother with an entry-level job. this would be a directly meaningful comparison. instead, it tries to convert welfare benefits to "pretax wage equivalent", which is just silly. people with a pretax income of $30k/yr probably have a health plan paid for by their employer, which invalidates the comparison being made. something else that's iffy is inclusion of median housing assistance paid out by agencies, rather than median received by the sample population. this means the model individual is a nonworking unwed mother of two infants who gets housing assistance, rather than just any nonworking unwed mother of two infants on welfare. report rejected: meaningless numbers thesis not supported by the evidence --