I had assumed that we were discussing the "general welfare" of "We the People" - not the general welfare of the federal government.
And I think the correct interpretation may be closer to being "neither".
As I said, a great many people have a flawed understanding of the original meaning/effect of the Constitution. For example, under the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, states could regulate firearms as much as they wished. They could ban guns if they wished
They could also discriminate on the basis of religion, have official state churches, and suppress the press and even the right to free speech, as much as they wished. Cruel and unusual punishment would be totally okay as long as it was the states imposing it. The Constitution, as ratified with the Bill of Rights, didn't prohibit any of that.
Instead, it was intended to establish the rules governing the relationships between the states, and to perform only such federal functions for the people that the states themselves were
incapable of performing. It was not intended for the federal government to exercise the kind of powers that the states themselves were perfectly able to execute on behalf of their citizens. And in that regard, the federal government, and
only the federal government, was further limited by the Bill of Rights. The preservation of those rights on the state level was left entirely to the discretion of the individual states.
So that should be the baseline for interpreting the proper meaning of "general welfare" in Article I. It would be the type of stuf that would be of benefit to the citizens of the country but that only the federal government could perform. A perfect example of that would be the Louisiana Purchase. The purchasing of such a vast new territory clearly benefited the people of the country as a whole, but was the sort of action that only the central government could perform.
Obviously, all forms of social welfare programs are perfectly capable of being ordered and administered by any state or local government. And therefore, I would argue, should have been deemed unconstitutional when implemented by the federal government under the "general welfare" clause of Article I.