This doesn’t exactly apply because most welfare spending (and in fact most government spend) is leveraged against future economic growth and inflation, so it actually is possible to create self-fulfilling prophecies via stimulus spending so long as that spend eventually produces real growth. This case might or might not be the most efficient way to do that, but governments are rarely trying to maximize efficiency at the expense of all else so we shouldn’t really count that against the argument. So this would seem a neutral, at worst, scenario rather than one of dead-weight loss as you argue.
This doesn’t exactly apply because most welfare spending (and in fact most government spend) is leveraged against future economic growth and inflation, so it actually is possible to create self-fulfilling prophecies via stimulus spending so long as that spend eventually produces real growth. This case might or might not be the most efficient way to do that, but governments are rarely trying to maximize efficiency at the expense of all else so we shouldn’t really count that against the argument. So this would seem a neutral, at worst, scenario rather than one of dead-weight loss as you argue.