Government determines the distribution of wealth. That's not charity, it's governance.
Social insurance is not charity. Social programs make a civilization work.
Prosperity gospel right-wing Christians who rail against programs for "the poor" have got things backwards and all messed up, and nobody should buy into this screwy idea or promote it. Because we just shouldn't buy into right-wing Christian nationalist framing.
Tuesday's Senate Bible Lesson: God Opposes Government Helping the Poor A Republican Bible study in the Senate Tuesday morning includes arguments against aiding the poor Jonathan Larsen Jun 30, 2025 This week’s is entitled, “God’s Design for a Societal1 Safety Net.” It makes the case that the New Testament never talks about governments helping people. Helping the truly needy, Drollinger will teach to his Senate students Tuesday morning, is for individuals. And then families. And then the church. But not government.
This is horrendous and inappropriate on many levels, of course. It just sounds like they want some religious people and the rich to determine which poor people survive or which of their neighbors are allowed to recover from misfortunes. But the frame is extremely right-wing in fundamentals.
The argument should not be around "Should the government do charity?" at all, because that's not the issue at all. Social insurance is not charity. Social insurance makes society work. Government doesn't do charity. Government does wealth distribution. The government distributes the wealth via regulations, laws, programs, taxes, tax credits, and social insurance.
And that's always the case, everywhere, and all throughout human history; there have been leaders who have either been granted the power, and or grabbed power and sustained it, and determined how things get distributed among the community over which they wield the power to regulate society. This is an effect of organizing to pool resources as a community. Isn't that obvious?
The recipients of Medicaid and Medicare aren't the only benefactors of Medicaid and Medicare. All of society, including private pay patients, are subsidized by Medicaid and Medicare. Most people can't afford Long Term Care for example, because the average cost for a year in a nursing home in Pennsylvania is over $120,000 per year and the average income of an able-bodied working age employee in Pennsylvania is less than $52,000 per year. Medicare funds most doctor residency programs that are required training in order to practice medicine in the U.S. A lot of people who get Medicaid because they're poor get it for a short period of time while unemployed and unable to afford their former employer's COBRA payments while they're between jobs after something like a layoff. Most people on a program like Medicaid aren't just experiencing some misfortune, it's about suffering in a system that has otherwise distributed all the money away from people, and the healthcare system; and Medicaid is a program that attempts to correct that flaw in the system so that society can function. That's not charity. Charity is merely the act of giving someone something because they need it and don't have it. You can't reduce the role of government to even be compared to that. So it's a lie if anyone claims, or even innuendos, that charity could ever take the place of government programs in society.
If you don't want to have the government involved in charity, if you want to get the government out of the business of mandating charity, then stop giving rich people tax breaks for "charitable donations" and stop incentivizing that. Because that's the only way government intervenes in the realm of charity. We all know that wealthy people game the system this way, so again, even with tax favour for charitable donations, it's a way that people with power can redistribute money the way they want to. So is that even charity at that point if it's government subsidized?
But the bottom line is that what the government is doing with social services and programs ostensibly "for the poor" is not charity at all. It's monetary distribution to correct for the fact that our healthcare system, our food system, and basically every life sustaining aspect of society has been warped to redistribute money to a small number of people who are very rich, and the bulk of the people who do the work of society are dependent upon these corrections we call welfare programs. To even compare it to charity misleads people about what government actually does, and how government will govern whether you like it or not, it's just a matter of who's in charge making what decisions.
It’s one of the obvious truths of the world that somehow get hidden by people with political agendas that benefit from obscuring how reality actually works.