They invented the welfare state back with the original Queen Elizabeth!
Actually, the Elizabethan poor laws were on a different model from the U.S. welfare system completely.
At the turn of the century there were three competing social-welfarist models. I forget what the Catholic model was, but the Protestant/Elizabethan model was the poorhouse or workhouse where housing and work were under the same roof, all administered under contract by a private party (which Dickens attacked for its parsimoniousness and brutality to the internees).
The Jewish model, that the U.S. settled on (because of the Jewish influence in urban-ethnic machine politics on the East Coast), was direct cash subsidies to a widow. That worked fine in the Jewish community because the widow was enmeshed in a strong social and moral structure. The general population was not, with the result that numerous abuses that we all know grew up around the U.S. social-welfare model.