I believe there is also a second consideration: the unwillingness to foster an attitude of entitlement among citizens, causing the government budget to be pre-committed to various social programmes leaving the decision makers limited room to invest in future economic development initiatives. In other words, the anti-welfare policy goes hand in hand with the wide control of the government over the national economy, rather than being paradoxial "why a rich government cannot give more".

I have no wish to start an ideological debate on this issue here, but would like to make a couple of points of a pragmatic nature.

First, we now live in a world where divorce rates are much higher than they used to be. A typical situation is that the husband gets involved with a younger woman, possibly starting a new family, leaving the wife to cope on her own with the earlier children. While in most cases the divorced wife and her children would have sufficient access to financial resources, such as the wife's own salary, division of family assets, and assistance from grandparents and other relatives, to provide for their own needs, a significant portion of such single mother families are badly off, and this number can be expected to keep increasing. Providing adequate financial resources in such situations not only alleviates current sufferings, but also generates future social benefits in giving the children a better chance to be educated and to develop normally.

Second, a social safety net makes it less likely that temporary economic setbacks, such as loss of job or major sickness, would lead to long term adversities putting people into desperate frames of mind. People would be less likely to go to loan sharks or engage in minor fund misappropriations, activities that have a tendency to snowball into more serious crimes in time. A small amount of assistance at appropriate moments can have very significant long term benefits by preventing small misfortunes from turning into major ones.

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added later: I posted this in singabloodypore.blogspot.com and there was some discussion

comment1: this point goes beyond the safety net. People will be more risk adverse when it comes to decisions in their career or business. A small impact maybe, but nevertheless contributes to lack of entrepreneurship here

comment2: there are still lots of jobs people refuse to take up low pay jobs

my reply:

which shows welfare is not responsible for this...

actually, the social/economic issue is more complex than I am willing to delve into; certainly one reason against welfare is that higher minimum wages would be needed to get people back to work, which is both good and bad

another issue I did not want to raise is welfare pumps money into poor neighbourhoods and indirectly helps HDB shops, hawkers etc; this too is more complex an issue than the two points I discussed

comment3:  where are we going to get the money to finance your social welfare programmes? taxes? while IRAS has indeed gotten a record haul of $10 billion, do we really want to spend that money on a social welfare system?

my reply:

just an example: an old age pension of 100$ per month for the oldest 5% of citizens would cost 15M$ a month or 180M a year, which would hardly impact the budget; however, if such a scheme exists, the old people would be constantly complaining that the amount is inadequate, the age limit is too high, etc, and their children would be saying "you got pension; dont need money from me" etc; so welfare is indeed a complex issue; I merely wish to point out some issues that others may not have thought of before them.