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I have a great many objections to the way that you've framed this presentation, but this in particular really stood out to me:
Why do you take "government food assistance" for granted, here? Any conservative worthy of the name is going to hold that no poor people "deserve" government food assistance. For one thing, "government food assistance" is just a fancy way of saying "confiscating some people's property for the benefit of other people." Indolent people do not deserve food, even if it is morally praiseworthy to provide them with some.
Some people warrant charity, particularly when they have contributed, do contribute, or can reasonably be expected to contribute to society. But to insist upon the charity of others is quite morally objectionable; the only appropriate response is gratitude. The entitlement that many indolent people clearly feel toward my labor is absolutely appalling, quite regardless of whether they are afforded a life of luxury or relative privation. The strangeness that you are tracking in your post is not a problem with conservatism, it is a problem with conservatives trying to meet you halfway. They recognize that for various systemic reasons it would probably be a bad idea to just abolish food assistance entirely, so they fuss over details (like donuts) in vague and dissatisfying compromise. Then, having been given an inch, you reach for the mile.
The economics of food and government subsidies is--I'm sure you well know--complex. Farm subsidies here, food subsidies there, "cui bono" becomes an impossible labyrinth of special interests, not all of them neatly aligned to the red/blue grid. But another principle of conservatism is that you can't just decide to burn the system to the ground and start over. You must live in the real world, not the world of splendid ideas. So you try to at least put reasonable limits on the ways in which the government steals from the productive to benefit (or at least mollify) the unproductive.
I infer from this that you have surprisingly little life experience with conservatives. I haven't seen the inside of a church in a goodly while, but as a child I was treated to many sermons on both the evils of government assistance, and the obligation to help the poor. I understand that Trumpism has introduced a lot of confusion into political discourse on the right (as well as the left), but here you just seem to be indulging a maximally uncharitable stereotype of your outgroup.
It's pretty Lindy. Ancient Rome rather notoriously relied on poor relief ("Bread and Circuses") to maintain social stability. In medieval England, poor relief was the responsibility of the Church, which was effectively part of the government and used both spiritual coercion ("pay your tithe or go to hell" is coercive to people who actually believe in hell) and temporal coercion ("pay your tithe or we can legally seize your land") to collect revenue. This system broke down after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and was replaced in 1601 with a national Poor Law based on elected local government with the ability to collect revenue coercively after it became clear that the practical consequences of not having a functioning system of poor relief were unacceptable.
The 1601 Poor Law was in force in colonial America, and replaced by broadly similar poor relief schemes (legislated at state level and implemented locally) after independence.
The balance between poor relief in the form of support for the deserving poor and poor relief in the form of coercive institutions to punish the workshy (while feeding and housing them) shifts over the following centuries in broadly similar ways in the UK and the US, with the same issues cropping up, including the eternal truth that people who are too old and/or infirm for coercing them into work to be worthwhile are the largest group of paupers, and widows/orphans/babymamas/bastards are the second largest, and the unfortunate truth that trying to "improve" the workshy costs more than just giving them a dole, while almost always failing.
In the US, the New Deal federalises the problem of the elderly poor and LBJ's Fair Deal federalises the problem of families with children but no male earner. But neither created a system of poor relief where none previously existed.
The cost of poor relief has increased a lot faster than the economy in the last century or so. The main reason is that we decided that aged paupers should be able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle.
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