I guess he is alluding to a popular conception of welfare recipients as people who are only content to collect their checks, and don't have any other aspirations or financial/social stakes.

Which might apply to some, but is a huge carricature on the whole. And even where it does apply, it's more because of a lack of opportunities and felt sense of systematic injustice rather than people being actual lazy stereotypes due to DNA or something.

This is more or less what i meant. Why someone who is useless and knows it's irreversible, would vote for anything but more free stuff?

Well, receiving payment from the state doesn't make one "useless" except in the eyes of the protestant work ethic, and all the moralistic garbage that comes with it.

In fact people creating much monetary worth could be many orders of magnitude more useless and destructive for society than a welfare recipient.