The point I was trying to make is that the 'benefit' of the program is that it is stopping a subset of the population from ending up homeless or dead due to lack of income. Say you don't care about that, let's imagine all the money dries up overnight, what happens?

Well, all of the disabled who lack families with the means to take care of them, and all of the 70+ year olds with no retirement savings all end up homeless on the streets. Now they are clogging up our physical infrastructure and generally being burdensome.

What do we do now? Arrest them for loitering? Well now your tax money is feeding and housing them anyway. Do we round them up and execute them? Who pays for that? Do we just leave them there? What happens when they are blocking my morning commute or impeding businesses downtown?

This isn't about altruism, this isn't about me wanting to pay for other people's bad luck or bad decision making. This is because one way or another we are going to pay for it. Whether we are going to pay for mass death camps for the homeless, for prison infrastructures, for corpse cleanup when they die off in the winter, or if I am paying for more gasoline because my commute now needs to go around their camps.

It is far less messy to have an organized system to keep them contributing to the economy than disorganized chaos of contributing to homelessness. One way or another, your taxes are going to pay for the people who can't pay for themselves. Even if you are simply paying for the disposal of their corpses.