Are you a homeowner paying a mortgage?
The ’96 welfare reforms, creating TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) placed work requirements on beneficiaries. So, it is a social policy attempting to incentivize behavior, in this case work. The mortgage interest deduction is a social policy incentivizing behavior — home ownership. These policies are more similar conceptually than you are willing to admit. I’m not sure how TANF causes laziness, as you are suggesting. The ’96 reforms also gave states much more authority (through the use of block grants) in determining who gets TANF benefits. One result being that many states reduced benefits, as block grants tend to impose more financial constraint on their distribution. So, the idea that people make a good living on TANF is simply incorrect. The data simply does not support the statement.
None of this is to argue that welfare state policies always work or even that most work well, it is just to point out that we probably need to broaden our thinking about what social welfare policy is….not just something for low income folks.
As far as violent crime in our inner cities — that’s more of an effective rhetorical political strategy in use than an empirical fact. American inner cities, for a few decades now, have mostly been improving when it comes to crime and private investment. I understand that in the last few years, in some cities, the violent crime rate has ticked up, but it remains nowhere near where it was 30 years ago.
