How could our society be so callous to children as to make them the link to welfare payments? Do people know what it feels like to grow up in a relationally chaotic home? //

Democrats are announcing defeat in their half-century “War on Poverty.” They’re just too good at propaganda to put it that way. Instead, they’re taking to mouthpiece outlets like The Atlantic to gush over the latest expansion of the United States’ social welfare state: monthly checks to parents taken through federal deficits straight from their kids’ futures. //

The Atlantic article exists to amplify naive excitement about this program, but it is in reality an announcement of despair. Democrats are admitting their socialist welfare state doesn’t work and they have no effective ideas for addressing the fact that Americans have spent more than $28 trillion on welfare since 1965, yet at least the same proportion of Americans is considered poor today as when the “war” started.

“[T]he War on Poverty has cost the taxpayers nearly three and a half times the combined cost of all military wars in U.S. history,” notes a different Heritage analysis. Not only can Washington not win real wars anymore, Washington can’t win pretend wars, either. So the party of unlimited entitlement is just openly admitting their new plan is… throwing taxpayer money out the window.

Economist Veronique de Rugy notes that the last time the United States promoted mass welfare detached from work, it made children the worst off: Before 1996, “we also had welfare payments with no work requirement. The result was that nearly 9 in 10 families on welfare were workless, unwed births rose significantly, and most of these families were stuck in long-term poverty, creating a trend in intergenerational child poverty. That cycle was broken with the 1996 reforms requiring welfare recipients to work or prepare for work. The great news is that this led to a historic reduction of child poverty.”

She further writes that if Biden’s “guaranteed income for kids” is extended, “we’re at risk of repeating the mistakes of the past by increasing the number of single-parent families in which no one is employed and reversing the gains the nation has made since the welfare reforms of the 1990s—all at great cost to taxpayers.”

It is imperative to understand that programs like this are perhaps the single greatest cause of misery to American children, because they unequivocally increase family chaos. Social welfare programs effectively subsidize family separation. Democrats have been silent about their policies working to separate American children from their parents for more than a century.

Paying people to pop out children with no attention to the circumstances such children will be born into will cause living nightmares for the weakest among us.