When the pandemic hit early last year, the US government did something it had never done before: sent out money to nearly every person in the country, including the poorest of the poor. Last month they did it again. Together, these two sets of checks provided a typical family of four with $5,800 of direct cash benefits.

Despite what we’ve been told over the last few decades, issuing these checks did not generate an anti-welfare backlash. Instead, public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of sending out more of these checks, with even the majority of Republicans telling pollsters that they’d like to see another $1,400 per person ($5,600 for a family of four) included in another coronavirus bill.

The success of these checks clearly refutes the prevailing Democratic approach to building the US welfare system. According to this approach, cash benefits should be opaquely provided through the tax code to make them seem less like handouts and should be designed to exclude the very poor and the rich in order to avoid triggering middle-class resentments. These checks broke every single one of these rules: they were blunt, clearly handouts, and available to the “shiftless poor” as well as many rich families. Yet the masses loved them.