Jake, all these essays collapse once readers realize that most of the "welfare" is for Medicaid, meaning healthcare for the poor. It may be expensive, but there's *plenty* of evidence to show that it costs far MORE to manage the epidemics and poverty diseases that are inevitable if you have large concentrated underclasses without healthcare, both in direct and indirect costs. Once they appear, plagues and other sweeping illnesses have no respect for employment status. Strike down Medicaid and only the wealthy hermits will be safe from every sort of infectious disease including TB and even Polio if you're not careful, since most of the Polio survivors in iron lungs are no longer here to remind us and it's fashionable for affluent city folk to declare that vaccination is no longer needed. That sort of thinking is only safe if you have herd immunity and FWIW it's far cheaper for Americans to fund global Polio eradication programs to widen the herd than to manage it once it reaches your shores and cheerfully infects the middle classes and scions of the rich.