The real dollar value of food stamps? Fifty cents on the dollar, at least for one L.A. merchant on Skid Row, where scams cashing in on government subsidies are all the rage. And that's not to mention the clinic owner who rounded up homeless people with Medicaid cards in order to bill the government for tests with high reimbursement rates.

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The Wall Street Journal reports on several surprising conclusions from a new study of welfare-to-work programs in Detroit that seems to find that temp jobs can be worse than no job at all:

The results surprised even the researchers. "If anything, we thought that temporary agencies would help welfare workers build skills, connect with potential employers, and so increase their future earnings," says [study co-author] Mr. Autor. "But this is not what we found." … Among workers with similar backgrounds, those placed in temp jobs earned more money at first than those who had been hired directly by an employer for a permanent post. But after a year, the temp workers were earning less money and had less stable employment. They were also more likely to wind up back on welfare than those who had been hired directly by a company into a permanent job.

Even more striking, workers who got jobs through temporary agencies over a two-year period earned about $2,200 less than those who didn't get placement but presumably found work on their own. The researchers' conclusion: Most welfare clients who were encouraged to take temporary help jobs by the Work First program would have done better by finding a job directly with an employer after some time spent searching on their own.