Nothing screams dumb like a conservative disliking welfare when half of republicans are on it.

Myth 2: “People who accept government benefits become dependent and don’t want to work.” There are two categories of government assistance in the United States: “welfare” for the poor and “tax breaks” for the more affluent.

“Welfare” includes food stamps, housing vouchers, subsidized daycare and housing, WIC supplemental nutrition, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, SSI and SSDI payments, and unemployment benefits, all of which are available in limited quantities, are hard to qualify for, and are easy to lose.

“Tax breaks” include the Child Tax Credit (which in 2020 benefited parents with incomes up to $150,000 before the benefit was phased out for those with higher incomes), the mortgage interest deduction for first and second homes, government-subsidized retirement benefits, government-guaranteed student loans for higher education, 529 college savings plans, the tax exemption for the value of one’s employer-sponsored health plan, low tax rates on capital gains, and the nonexistent estate and gift taxes, all of which accrue mostly to middle-class and wealthy families and are relatively easy to get and difficult to lose so long as your income and wealth continue.

According to poverty researcher Matthew Desmond, these “tax breaks” cost the government $1.8 trillion in 2021—more than twice what we spent on the military and national defense, and far more than was spent on “welfare”—and about half of these “tax breaks” went to families in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.

[quote]Yet we who get these breaks probably feel entitled to them; we certainly don’t believe that they are causing us to become dependent on government handouts. By their nature, they continue to be available if we keep working into retirement, so we are not tempted to quit.

Similarly, the poor are not becoming dependent on government handouts, nor are they tempted to stop working even when they are technically eligible for retirement. The idea that the poor are lazy is a long-promulgated slander. Since the Industrial Revolution required business owners to find ways to lure “the masses into their mills and slaughterhouses to work for as little pay as the law and market allow,” the word has gone out that the poor are “idle and unmotivated.” But researchers who studied cash welfare payments to young single mothers in the 1980s and 1990s discovered that most recipients gave up the payments within two years, sometimes receiving benefits again “for limited periods of time when between jobs or after a divorce.” The researchers concluded, “The welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune.”

I slept in an abandon mine and rode my bicycle from that mine to work at the resort I worked at. But, I wasn't dependent on the government to take care of me.