Any welfare scheme is political third rail in the view of their recipients.
What really matters is how the public reacts to video of bums lying under newspapers & poor children with flies in their noses on the nightly news.
We haven't been able to get rid of a single scheme yet.
You've swerved into the real solution of the problem - control of the flow of information.
We have, however, been able to seriously cut some schemes.
Once a transfer payment is no longer an “entitlement,” and means-tested, we can set other conditions upon receipt of the money as well, just as we do for other welfare transfer payments.
The GOP got rid of FDR’s Depression-era farm welfare scheme... only to replace it with something more expensive because too many in the GOP are too stupid to hold the line and allow dependence upon government payments to die out.
We now are in a situation where the entitlement schemes will cause the financial downfall of the US, and within 10 years. Bond rating agencies are already warning of downgrades to the US AAA status. Once we start down that road, the cost of rolling the national debt starts to go up - rapidly. Thanks to the profligacy of the last 10 years and especially the last two, we’re now compressing the debt maturity horizon ever-closer, so when our cost of borrowing does go up, the interest cost on the national debt is set to explode upwards in a very short period of time.