> You can't genuinely tell me someone on food stamps is/should be more worried about being caught in a poverty trap than ensuring they have their next meal.

Absolutely they should, because the poverty trap is the reason they're in such dire straits.

You have someone who works but doesn't make a lot of money, so is eligible for all of these programs. They don't have the capacity to become "rich" in any feasible way, but there are ways they could make $10,000 or $20,000 more than they do now, with some trade offs like accepting a job with higher commuting costs or moving to an area with a higher cost of living etc.

But if they take the higher paying job, they lose their benefits. The other job paid $15,000 more and required them to increase their costs by $5000/year, but that would have left them $10,000 ahead, until making more money causes them to lose $12,000/year to benefits phase outs and higher taxes.

Now suppose you remove the benefits and give them the money back in the form of lower taxes. It wouldn't even have to be all of it -- there is a $10,000 surplus to be had by getting rid of the poverty trap. If they lose $12,000 in benefits but got even a $3000 tax cut they'd be $1000 ahead of the status quo, because then they could take the better job.

Meanwhile in terms of the government budget, revenue neutral would be to give them a $12,000 tax cut even against the income from the higher paying job, and then they would be $10,000 ahead of the status quo because you removed the poverty trap.

> Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer.

"Low ball offer" implies an offer below market. Someone would take this offer, why? There is more than one employer. Below market by definition means the other employers are offering more. Unless that employer is offering some countervailing benefit, there is no reason to take it instead of going across the street. Even if you need money right now, there are many jobs that will hire anyone with a pulse with no expectation that you stay there any longer than it takes to find a better job. How is any employer supposed to force you to take their job for below-market pay in the absence of a cartel?

> Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way.

You don't actually go bankrupt from filing a claim in small claims court. And then you stop using that bank and leave bad reviews so that other people stop using that bank.

But that isn't even most of what CFPB was doing. It was often things like banning aggressive collections practices even when the bank was going after someone legitimately in default. Obviously nobody likes debt collectors, but if more people borrow money and don't pay it back then the banks either have to charge higher interest rates or stop making those loans. Pretending you can ban those practices without any trade off is screwing the people who need those loans and don't default.

> And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale?

Then someone is still putting their finger on the scale while pretending they're not, and you should be trying to stop them from doing that rather than using it to rationalize further corruption.

Bias doesn't balance. If Republicans are diverting money to affluent retirees, you can't counteract that by having Democrats divert money to healthcare companies, you're just taking even more from the people the money is coming from, which is ultimately the working class.

> You speak from a viewpoint of privilege.

This is an appeal to emotion, not an argument. There are a wide variety of policies that are intuitively attractive because their first order effects seem good until you consider their ultimate consequences. Many of those policies get enacted because they don't work, or even do the opposite of what they're claimed to do (e.g. rent control), when the people who benefit from the problem have a more sophisticated understanding than the people being impacted by it.

Assistance programs also tend to be implemented in ways that satisfy a politician's checkbox to claim they did something without actually doing something. For example, if you have no dependents, do you know what the maximum income is before you're ineligible for the earned income tax credit? It's equivalent to working full time for less than $9/hour. That's less than the minimum wage in two thirds of the states. So if you make even minimum wage you get zero and the maximum you could possibly get without dependents is only a few hundred dollars a year. EITC is potentially one of the strongest, most efficient methods of transferring wealth to the working class and we've set it up so that hardly anybody receives it. Less than 10% of the population is eligible for it at all (and those mostly as a result of having dependents) and most of them only get a pittance because they're almost but not quite making enough for it to to be fully phased out, despite still not making very much. It exists because every single economist on both sides thinks it's a good idea and then the phase outs are set to neutralize the benefit because politicians don't want something that allocates money to actually helping people when they could be allocating that money to their cronies.

Meanwhile money gets allocated to things like government housing projects which seem almost purposely designed to shovel money into the pockets of connected contractors while making no dent in the housing affordability problem and concentrating poverty into areas that then become slums controlled by gangs. People are finally starting to realize that these programs are net negative after decades of evidence that they're a disaster, but even now, when they try to remove their funding, we get articles like this, interviewing people who are obviously sympathetic as if the existence of people who need help is a way to justify a program that doesn't work:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/affordable-housing-thr...

Taking money from programs like that and giving it to people as actual money is a good thing whether in the form of lower taxes or otherwise. The way to solve the housing availability crisis is by building more market rate housing.