The attitude that poor people need "tough love" is extremely condescending, so yes, it's difficult to distinguish tough love from no love.
> many people simply don’t think welfare is going to actually help.
The article argues that this belief is not based on the empirical evidence.
I suspect that this belief is actually the result of a condescending attitude toward poor people rather than the cause of so-called "tough love" policies.
If you make money you’re doing well. That idea can be extended to imply that being poor means you’ve done something wrong.
To me it echoes feudalist ideas like divine rule. The king deserved to be king, otherwise God would not have allowed him to be king. Therefore the king must be good.
In my opinion this way of thinking is formed by looking at existing hierarchies and retroactively defining morality based on those hierarchies. Which then leads to the idea that poor people must be poor because of something they did, how could the hierarchy exist otherwise?
This line of thinking also leads to the opinion that rich people do better, which does not consider that poor people might be doing the best they can under their circumstances, even if it is not the optimal strategy.