[Sailor Steve]

"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury;
they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."
-James Madson, on a bill to subsidize cod fishermen, 1789

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-James Madison, 1794

"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
-Thomas Jefferson, 1798

"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject (prohibition), but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1930

Funny how quickly he went back on that part about "not...social welfare".

Personally, I believe that welfare is a good idea, but at the State level. The Federal Government was created to arbitrate disputes between the states and to Represent the country as a whole to the rest of the world, and I believe that its powers should be limited to that and no more.