Public schools and universities like his alma mater UIUC are a pretty clear example of social welfare heavily subsidized by taxpayers, especially in the 80s when you could attend an elite public university for a very low price, and have little to no student debt.
Food stamps and SSI aren't the only forms of public assistance.
The comment I responded to said social welfare, not social safety net. But personally I consider them not so different since education is a basic need like housing and food. But since middle and higher income people rely on the education subsidy, we don't like to use the same descriptors for it that we use for food and housing subsidies.
(less in fact. Government education spending is higher as a % of GDP than ever.)
It is mistaken think that access to high quality subsidized public education has been uniformly or meritocratically accessible across the generations or class or other dimensions.
Just defense of Marc. Talk about missing the forest for a tree. There was nothing but extreme growth to be had when exporting to the world the items needed to re-establish their manufacturing base.
But naaah; the world was rebuilt due to the brilliance of a handful of computer nerds in one nation.
The only quote that explains it for me is: “You took too much, man. You took too much, too much.”