And instead of either keeping dying industries alive or giving out food stamps, why not employ the people to do something about ,e.g., US infrastructure. It’s not there’s a lack of work if you have the money to pay someone.
Even better, to the extent that the government can identity useful things that need to be done (it has a very poor track record so far)
Yes, government sometimes do stupid shit. But so do large corporations, and governments aren't particularly worse.
Note that I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with being on welfare. But as a society I think we should decouple our determination of who deserves to be on welfare from our decision about how rapidly we want to destroy our environment.
In other words, let's just pay them normal food stamps or welfare checks, not keep the polluting plants open for decades longer than necessary.
For some reason many American workers feel totally proud being the indirect recipients of corporate welfare, yet would feel ashamed simply getting food stamps every month. There is zero difference between the two, except that in this case the food stamps are a LOT better for the environment.