There's a line somewhere where "giving poor people comfort" goes from providing good and useful social services to essentially a bribe. Where that line is varies based on who you ask - for some it's student debt cancellation (a US thing), for others it's $1000+ subsidies for housing, other people may not see any service the government provides as a "bribe" of any sort.

Caring about these bribes/"power grabs" is important (even if this guys comment strikes you as trollish). Just because you agree with a social service to benefit some group doesn't mean that the people in power won't abuse their power in the future. They might abuse their support by holding these social services (or "comforts") hostage. Once you have people who have adapted to living in their subsidized housing (which can/will happen quickly) you open the door for political leaders to say "you must vote for me or tolerate my bad behavior or else this goes away".

Even if the method by which "this goes away" is that the opposing political group would be the one to remove the social service, it's something that needs to be considered. To circle back, if you do something that is considered beyond the line of "comfort for poor people" and is seen as a "power grab" by enough people - you're more likely to have the opposition emboldened to eventually remove that service.

You are free to not agree that giving housing subsidies is not crossing the line into bribe territory. I would say it's important for you to understand that for many people, there is a line. Your example of unlimited candy and soda as being a bribe is a bit odd, but also seems demonstrative to me that your thinking on this is further to an extreme than you might realize.

And yes - this is true of everything the government does. That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.

That's why I'm saying it's really important to consider that for some people, certain policies can cross a line for what feels fair or what feels like a political bribe. Like I said, you're free to disagree with where that line is, but pretending it doesn't exist (or just writing off anyone on the other side of it) is a sure fire way to bring about consequences that just might be worse than what was originally happening.

I'm not pretending people don't have their own lines, but I think they're fundamentally wrong to say the line exists within the space of "doing unequivocally good things for poor people [which admittedly may have negative downstream effects, as do all actions]"

> That's why it's an important thing to consider when the government promises to do something or provide a service. It can go away at any time, and people who became reliant on it will suffer it's loss.

Sure, it's something to think about, but it's not a realistic impediment to enacting a good policy. If the worst thing you can say about a policy is that "it might end, and that would be bad" you should do that policy. Besides, government programs tend to get institutionalized and are often much harder to undo than to do.