I don’t completely disagree, though the argument bears the advantage of hindsight. My suspicion is that the balance of the problem stemmed from the typical right wing obsession with the desire to obliterate the social safety net but the lack of pushback was due to an explicit underestimating of the scope of resulting fuckery - see also those black politicians who didn’t push back on Tough on Crime bullshit. People made bad calls out of panic and circumstances, and fixing the problems are far simpler onbpaper than in application, particularly because of those who see the situation as a feature, not a bug.