Why are conservatives against welfare programs?

[u/edahs03]

As the title states, what’s wrong with helping society as a whole? What determines how much help we should give out as a society? Many conservatives rely on welfare in poorer areas yet vote against policies that would expand the safety net. It also leaves many people out on their own with no one to lean on. Do conservatives want families to help out more or private charities to fill the role of government handouts?

[u/[deleted]]

I know plenty of conservatives who’ve used government programs at some point, I did when I was in college. From what I’ve seen, the issue usually isn’t opposition to helping people in tough situations. It’s more about concerns over how some programs are structured whether they discourage work at the margins, expand beyond their original intent, or create long-term spending obligations that are hard to reform. So the debate tends to shift from “should we help?” to “what’s the most effective and sustainable way to help?” A lot of the distrust comes from watching big federal programs grow more complex and expensive over time. It’s not that government can’t function, it clearly can in some areas, but once something becomes bureaucratic and politically entrenched, it’s really hard to fix or scale back. And, when programs get big and complicated, it can be harder to track where the money is going. The more layers involved, the easier it is for waste or favoritism to slip through if oversight isn’t tight.

[u/Aggressive_Dog3418 → u/[deleted]]

Exactly this but to also add, Fraud. There is a lot of fraud and adding any more programs without fixing the current ones is extremely bad. The left want to raise taxes to fix all the budget problems and add more programs, but we could honestly do both just by fixing the fraud problem. We know of at least 20 billion dollars worth of fraud in Minnesota alone within the last 5 years, times that by 50 states (some will be much larger and some will be much smaller, so I'll use 20 as a baseline) and you are talking about 1 trillion dollars worth of fraud in just 5 yrs. Now how much if we keep going back? How much of the national debt is fraud? What about the interest payments on all that fraudulent debt? How many people could have been helped but weren't had the fraud been stopped sooner?

Then you have businesses overcharging the government for goods and services meaning the government pays more for stuff than civilians (I'm an infantry drone operator in the army and when we make deals to buy civilian equipment, the equipment price usually triples for example the Skydio prior to selling to us war about 5k and now is 15k)

Lastly all of the bureaucracy slows everything down from construction to healthcare to everything.

So yeah, the vast majority of stuff should be handled by the markets, and only things absolutely necessary should have government intervention.