My experience living in Michigan is that the state Dept. of Welfare promoted the hell out of this program at every chance they got.
They came to my workplace and hung a poster urging people to sign up. When I read it and realized that once my second child was born I was gonna qualify, I went and got another job.
When I worked at the state unemployment office the Income Maintenance Workers (aka “social workers”) were being paid a commission for every sign-up.
Yes, they promote it everywhere, even the school hallways, and in multiple languages.
My State Rep a few years ago (before he was term limited) came to a tea party meeting and told us that his office had gotten a phone call from the Grand Valley State University Womens soccer coach, asking how to get EBT cards for every girl on the team. It seems the logic they use is that every college student is poor, so we should just feed them all. It was worth $300/month per student
The manufacturing economy was replaced by the service economy; as that has been taken over by foreign workers we now have a thriving “poverty industry”.
Too many people would lose their jobs if people started taking care of themselves.