The number of government tests and requirements for poor people receiving government aid has grown in recent years. Utah in 2012 passed a law requiring drug testing for recipients for Temporary Aid to Needy Families, Alabama passed a similar law in 2014, and Arkansas followed in 2015. Other states, including Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Kansas require drug testing if “reasonable suspicion” exists.

These drug tests target people with almost no income who, in the case of states such as Arkansas, receive as little as $204 a month. And the drug tests hardly ever turn up positive. In 2014 Governor Rick Snyder signed a law in Michigan implementing a pilot program to drug test welfare recipients in three counties; none of the people in the pilot program have tested positive for drugs.

Middle-class and wealthy Americans may not be getting housing vouchers, but they are getting tax deductions, which come when people itemize their taxes rather than take the standard deduction. Itemizing taxes isn’t worth it unless you’ve spent more on tax-deductible items (including mortgage interest, charitable giving, and also the odd luxury item, such as a yacht) than the standard deduction, which was $12,600 this year for a married household filing jointly. According to one report, more than 95 percent of tax filers making over $200,000 itemized their deductions in 2011, compared to just 13 percent of those with incomes of $50,000 or less.

Make no mistake: These types of tax breaks are government subsidies, not substantively different than a housing voucher. Take the mortgage-interest deduction. When someone buys a home, he or she can deduct the interest he or she pays on the mortgage, up to $1 million. When someone deducts this interest from his or her income, not only is he or she avoiding paying taxes on that money, but he or she might also avoid the higher tax rates that kick in after certain earnings thresholds. And the higher a person’s tax bracket, the more he or she saves. Households making less than $200,000 deducted an average of $3,500 in real-estate taxes in 2013, while those with incomes over $10 million deducted an average of $77,000, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), a nonprofit that helps low- and moderate-income people build wealth.

Here’s an example from CFED of how two homebuyers could benefit differently:

As an example, let’s imagine that both a middle-income family, the Hendersons (15% tax rate), and a high-income family, the Hamptons (39.6% tax rate), bought homes that cost $300,000. Over the course of the year, both the Hendersons and the Hamptons paid $13,452 in mortgage interest and property taxes. Because this amount is greater than the $12,200 Standard Deduction (by a total of $1,252), they both opted to itemize their deductions in lieu of taking the Standard Deduction [CFED is using tax brackets from 2014]. But the value of this additional $1,252 in deductions differs for the two households. The Henderson family’s tax refund will be $188 bigger—$1,252 times their tax rate, 15%. The Hampton household’s refund will be $496 bigger—$1,252 times their tax rate, 39.6%. Both bought the same value house. Both chose to itemize deductions. Both deducted the same amount of mortgage interest and real estate taxes. And yet, the Hamptons get more than 2.5 times as much help from homeownership tax programs as the Hendersons.

“It’s equivalent to the government sending you a check,” says Chuck Marr, the director of federal tax policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “The mortgage-interest deduction is essentially the government paying a share of a person’s mortgage.”