Nobody would mind how they spent it if it was actually theirs to start with. When you give out free money it becomes everybody's business.
Also, we don’t “give” money to the poor. We buy social peace by preventing them to get desperate enough. Riots and revolutions is the alternative, which is much costlier.
Also, I haven’t counted posts or anything like that, but something along the lines of “that loophole is legal so how dare you criticise them exploiting it?” is quite common.
I also don't care for the idea that bribing the indigent and poor is what I'm doing. Glad to know that people are decoupling from the idea that welfare helps upward mobility.
Helping people who are in a difficult situation is also the right thing to do from a moral point of view. But I am under no illusion that our governments act on morals alone.
I don’t think welfare necessarily helps with upward mobility. On the other hand, it definitely is useful to prevent downward mobility, for example if someone has an accident and can’t do their job anymore, or their employer goes out of business.
> Fortunately, we don’t need to know what the money is spent on to measure whether or not the program is working.
I could not disagree more- we absolutely do not have adequate measure of how these programs are working. You are trying to solve a problem upstream of a million factors- we aren't anywhere near measuring outcomes of single decisions.
Which would we be more profitable monitoring and enforcing: who we’re paying out to, or who’s supposed to be paying us?
Generally speaking, this assistance doesn't come as a big lump sum payment, they're usually structured as ongoing payments (or other benefits with a cash value).
Because of the nature of this structure, money must be continually appropriated. The appropriation of resources by the government is something that, at least in democracies, the populace expects to have some input on.
If the government gives SpaceX money with no strings attached, just a vague "expand production facilities", then the government would be right to be upset if SpaceX spent it on keggers.