I recently had a conversation with my father. Or rather, I was driving my father somewhere and for no apparent reason, he mentioned that a lot of people just live on welfare their whole lives. I brushed it aside, saying that wasn’t true. But he pushed it, no doubt thinking that it was just my liberal way to think that everyone is basically good. He really should know better than to push a political point with me. It would be one thing if it caused me to yell at him. But it’s much worse than that: I use it as an excuse to educate him.

I explained that there was this president named William Jefferson Clinton. And he ended “welfare as we know it.” And as a result, there are great limits on how long any person in the country can get welfare — just a few years. So the idea of some guy getting on welfare out of high school and riding it out for the rest of his life is just not true. It might have been true in the 1970s, but it hasn’t been true for about two decades. The whole thing made me really angry, but I didn’t let it show.

Here’s why it made me so angry: no conservative change in policy ever matters. Clinton savaged welfare in this country. In so doing, he made us a much worse and un-humane country. He made us a far more conservative country. I don’t like any of that. But okay: he did it and America doesn’t seem to care. But conservatives never change. Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act on 22 August 1996. But conservatives made the same complaints in the decades before that as they have after that. But I’m not so much mad at people like my father as I am people like Bill Clinton. Because he really should have known it would turn out like this.

But after I got done with my lecture, I felt a bit bad about it. Even with all the facts on my side, I could tell that he wasn’t buying it. Like conservatives everywhere, he just “knew” what the truth was. This is because for the conservative, the fantasies created inside their minds (think: welfare queen) are far more vivid than anything in the real world. And it isn’t surprising. Most conservatives have no real experience with people on welfare. It’s always easy to vilify people who you don’t know.

One thing I admitted to not knowing much about was disability. My father took this as explaining it all. Obviously, all those lazy welfare recipients have just transferred over to disability! Note to self: never admit ignorance to a conservative because they will assume if something isn’t known, it must prove what they “know.” But Paul Krugman provided some great data on this issue in an article over the weekend, Jeb and the Nation of Takers. It turns out that the number of people on disability are increasing. But there are two reasons for that. First, our population is increasing. Second, our population is aging. The older a worker is, the more likely she is to be disabled. That hasn’t changed. So if you take both of those factors into account, what you find is that the number of people on disability has actually been falling modestly over the last two decades.

But I’m not planning to run to my father with this information. Krugman was exactly right, “But none of this will, of course, make any dent in the right-wing narrative: they just know that the rising number of bums on welfare is a problem, even though there basically isn’t any welfare and there are no more bums than there ever were.” Anyway, my father is well into his 80s now. And I think he was having a bad day.

Matt Bruenig wrote an interesting article, A Basic Welfare Framework. He was arguing against the idea that welfare states have to be “dizzyingly complicated.” He noted that it was actually pretty simple to create a welfare state, and he provided a four part framework for providing one: healthcare for all; education and childcare for all; income for all; and leave for all. This does cover pretty much everything that we think of as the welfare state. But uncommonly for Bruenig, it wasn’t put in the larger context of these discussions.

The question to me is not that welfare is complicated. Rather, it is why it is complicated. And the reason it is complicated is because we choose to make it so. The biggest issue is that we are so concerned that welfare might go to the undeserving. This is why a guaranteed minimum income is such a great idea. Rather than deciding how many children a woman ought to reasonably have, we could (if we were humane) just decide that all people deserve a basic lifestyle. And everything would flow from there. But rather than that, we decide that we must micromanage the poor. And the micromanagement can get bizarre, as it is in many states where ex-felons who did drugs can’t get food stamps, but ex-felons who murdered people can.

Of course, the whole thing is actually a kind of bait and switch that conservatives do. The whole idea that we must pay close attention to the poor so that they don’t bleed us dry is a conservative obsession. What was the whole “Welfare Queen” meme other than a myth told about undeserving people getting welfare, only to be used to stop deserving people from getting it? The idea was never that there are some people who don’t deserve welfare, but that all of them were like the “Welfare Queen” to one extent or another.

But it is more than that. One of the most frustrating conservative attacks on Obamacare has been that it so complicated. “Why does it have to be over 9,000 pages long?” they whine. Leave aside the fact that the length of a law is a completely irrelevant criterion to judge it on. The reason it has to be so complicated is because it’s a neoliberal law. It is a “partnership” between the public and private sectors. It couldn’t be a straight government program like single-payer insurance. As it was, conservatives call it the worst thing that ever emanated from Stalin’s anus — “Socialism! Socialism, I tell you!” We would have had Civil War II otherwise.

The main thing is that conservatives (including many in the Democratic Party) want welfare to be an extremely painful thing. People like Stuart Varney have been complaining for years that poor people own refrigerators. They want to be able to spot the poor people by their lack of shoes and socks — or even better: the presence of government mandated yellow arm bands. They certainly don’t want poor people to have the dignity of being part of the same government programs that everyone else is. I don’t think we save money by making welfare complicated. But I don’t think saving money is the point.