It's long been part of populist conservative thinking that welfare recipients should be made to work in exchange for their benefits. It's largely based on the not-entirely-true assumption that people on welfare are simply refusing to work, rather than failing to find it or keep it for all kinds of reasons you can't fix simply by changing incentives. Anyway, it's one of those "damn straight" type ideas that politicians often say they believe, but never actually do because it's not that simple, or because there's too much resistance, or . . . well, or because they never really intended to do it in the first place.