Nancy Folbre is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

What a difference two letters can make.

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) is our country’s only direct cash assistance program — the family welfare program that conservatives most love to hate. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is the cash assistance program for failing banks put in place by the Bush administration and augmented by the Obama administration — a financial welfare program that nobody fully understands.

In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available, TANF spending on cash assistance (not including child care or other subsidies) came to $4.5 billion. Total commitments to TARP since September 2008 come to $700 billion. So one year of TANF spending equals less than 1 percent of TARP. Citibank alone received $25 billion, five times the cash transferred to mothers and children receiving public assistance in 2007.

Here’s a more specific comparison. Top executives of banks bailed out this year — about 600 guys — received an estimated $1.6 billion in bonuses in 2007. That’s a little over a third of what 1.6 million families got in cash from TANF in that year.

TANF isn’t the only form of assistance to the poor that we regularly provide and TARP isn’t the only form of assistance to banks and insurance companies delivered this year. It’s difficult to figure out exactly what should be added up on both sides to compare welfare to rich and poor.

Robert Rector and Katharine Bradley of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, estimate that federal welfare spending amounted to $491 billion in fiscal 2008. (They don’t explain what specific programs they included in this estimate, and I’ll try to unpack it in a future post.) Even their extremely high estimate remains far below estimates of the total of $2.5 trillion spent on financial bailouts this year. The libertarian Cato Institute often emphasizes the issue of corporate welfare, but it’s remained remarkably quiet so far on the topic of bailouts.

The Welfare Indicators Act of 1994 requires annual reports to Congress on the level of welfare dependence. Perhaps we should require similar reports for banks and insurance companies.

In the wake of an earlier round of bank bailouts presided over by George H.W. Bush, I published a short piece in Newsweek entitled “Welfare Bankers” (sadly, the magazine’s digital archives do not extend to October 16-17, 1989). Protesting the moral double standard applied to bankers and to welfare mothers, I argued that the bankers whose institutions were bailed out at a cost of about $156 billion (what a deal compared to today’s bailout!) could perhaps be retrained as child care workers.

In the decade that followed this financial debacle, we could have gotten banking reform. Instead, we got welfare reform. Stricter work requirements and time limits were imposed. The welfare rolls declined sharply. Participation in the TANF program has fallen by half since 1996.

Welfare reform was heralded as a great success because it got so many of our female “troubled assets” off the rolls. But in addition to some unanticipated side effects (which I’ll describe in a future post), it was premised on the assumption that single mothers would be able to find work if they just tried hard enough.

That assumption no longer holds. More than one out of 10 single mothers is out of work. The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics report an unemployment rate for March of 10.8 percent for women who maintain families on their own, significantly higher than the average seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for men (9.5 percent) or women (7.5 percent) the same month. Unemployed single mothers number about a million, compared with two million unemployed married women.

The recent stimulus package passed by Congress offers some supplementary funds to the states for public assistance. Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation lambasted the stimulus package for “abolishing welfare reform.” That, it does not do. But if unemployment rates for single mothers remain over 10 percent, welfare reform may indeed need to be reformed.