Almost all of these calculations work out extremely in favor of just giving the poor money. It's expensive to be poor, and not just for them. They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems. Literally just giving all the homeless cheap housing for free is by far the better option if you actually pay attention to the numbers. The same is abundantly clear for free education. But we can't, because we like the suffering. That's it: Americans like it when other people are suffering. We like it so much that we're willing to suffer ourselves just so that those other people can suffer even more.

To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?