IN ENGLAND they call it. "supplementary benefit." America calls it welfare and Nixon has characterized it "a monstrous, consuming outrage." But what's in a name? As long as the voters believed in welfare and most of the needy stayed off the rolls, criticism of the system was minimal despite reports that it wasn't working. The concept of welfare, though, has always run against America's well-ingrained work ethic.

Time and Newsweek last month captured "the mood of the nation" as they presented their version of the state of the "nightmare" that is welfare. The underlying assumption seems to be that people consider welfare more of a nightmare for those not on welfare than for those on it.

Welfare rolls have more than doubled in the past five years. Stories of abuse and of administrative bungling-the man who made $18,000 off the system, the housing of a welfare family in the Waldorf-Astoria-have served to confirm people's suspicions about welfare. As city budgets are pinched by rising costs (of which welfare constitutes an expanding chunk) public officials are getting panicky. And liberals with impeccable credentials are asking What is this tangled mess and what do we do about it now?

Fraud and bureaucratic incompetence do not account for the jump in welfare costs. Why does 8.6 per cent of the population now receive support when in '65 it was 3.9 per cent?

The expansion of people's awareness about what they are entitled to receive under the present welfare system has brought more people onto the rolls. National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), born in 66, works to alert people to their eligibility. Inreased numbers of VISTA volunteers and Community Action workers have been informing people in poverty and urban areas of their rights.

In the general population increase, the ranks of the poor are also growing.

Welfare expenses on every level have risen along with the cost of living.

The economic recession has forced thousands of job layoffs. People are forced to turn to welfare after exhausting their unemployment insurance. Between June and September of last year, the number of unemployed fathers increased by 40 per cent.

State residency requirements have been eliminated. This allows people to collect support where they are living without a minimum duration of residency. In Massachusetts, 65 per cent of recipients have always lived here, and of the 11 per cent who migrated from the South, the majority have been here for years.

Medicaid expenses have soared. Since Medicaid has been extended to include thousands of non-welfare people, it has been eating up a higher percentage of the welfare budget-well over 40 per cent of the total welfare allotment in Massachusetts.

Studies of welfare districts around the country consistently find that the rate of fraud is minute. In Massachusetts, a "quality control" sampling is regularly done and has yet to reveal a deceit level higher than one per cent, a figure too small to warrant further spending on detection.

The welfare bureaucracy-vast though it is-is understaffed. Of a $755 million welfare budget, less than $41 million goes to administrative expenses, which probably explains any errors which occur. There is a shortage of manpower on all levels, such that many social workers have dozens of cases and spend most of their time doing paperwork. Everything is done "by hand" since the age of the computer has not yet hit welfare.

Of the five main categories of assistance-Old Age Assistance (OAA), Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, and General Relief-AFDC has been growing the fastest in recent years. Although there are many families with fathers living at home on AFDC, it is still a splintering force in families. The largest segment of the welfare budget is taken up with Medicaid, AFDC and Old Age Assistance.

Over 6.5 per cent of Cambridge's 100,000 residents receive welfare in some form. The vast majority of recipients in Cambridge are white.

WHAT does it mean to be on welfare in Cambridge? Midnight raids are no longer engineered, but there are still horrors.