All well and good, but as Devil's advocate, welfare would have to be replaced by charity. How much of charity is due to the tax advantages of giving? Let's consider all the unintended consequences before jumping aboard.
For people whose mortgage is paid off, the Standard Deduction exceeds the amount they would save by itemizing deductions. For such people (and I'm one of them), charitable giving has zero tax benefits. Yet I still give.
Also, much of what passes as "charitable giving" to organizations gets consumed in overhead. Better to directly help out friends and relatives in trouble. There have been several occasions where I've let old friends come live with me then they experienced bad times.
What would help, for real, would be if churches and other organizations paired off middle-class members with poor families, with the middle-class people giving advice (and "tough love") on how to get out of poverty. Sure as hell, the current "War on Poverty" is not working.