>Only a wishy-washy equivocating, journalist can write, "everything about the new system appears to be working and it's making the lives of all better but is it really a good thing."

The "making people dependent on the state" argument is also the standard conservative critique of things like unemployment benefit, so it's an argument that an awful lot of people seem to agree with. I expect that is why the author reaches for it so easily (I'm not necessarily saying that the author is a conservative, just that it's a popular way of thinking about these types of issues, hence why the author offers it as 'balance').