In his response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, Sen. Rand Paul said two things that should have received more attention:

1. “We will not cut one penny from the safety net until we’ve cut every penny from corporate welfare!”

2. “The civilian bureaucracy at the Pentagon has doubled in the past 30 years, gobbling up the money necessary to modernize our defense. That’s why I will propose the first ever Audit of the Pentagon, and seek ways to make our defense department more modern and efficient.”

These comments are noteworthy because they have two things in common: They both come from a fiscal conservative perspective, a desire to limit out-of-control government spending which has landed us with $18 trillion in debt and counting.

But they also both recognize that not all spending is created equal—that there are some ways the government spends money that are worse than others. There are certain types of spending that should be tackled first.

This important distinction is not made often enough, particularly among advocates for fiscal responsibility.

Many limited government champions have focused on cutting social welfare programs first and foremost. Aside from the occasional nitpicking at relatively inconsequential (on the scale of an $18 trillion debt) stuff like NPR funding, ending social welfare is at the top of the list for many fiscal conservatives.

That’s a mistake for two big reasons.

First, some of what government spends money on is worse in terms of ethics and consequences than others. For example, take the two big issues Rand Paul mentioned: corporate welfare and wasteful military spending.

Corporate welfare—which is direct and indirect subsidies to businesses the government favors, often those with large lobbying and campaign funds—costs taxpayers upwards of $100 billion each year.

So not only, as with social welfare, is this wealth redistribution, but it’s a wealth transfer from middle class and poor people to wealthy and often corrupt businesses. It’s also an indirect attack on the honest businesses that don’t seek out special government favors. In short, corporate welfare deserves fiscal conservatives’ loathing more than social welfare.

Or what about military spending? As Rare’s Jack Hunter has ably argued, Republicans can never claim to be serious about cutting spending until they’re willing to adopt a far less aggressive (and therefore less expensive) foreign policy. War really is just one more big government program: wildly wasteful, mismanaged, and full of unintended consequences. It takes a quarter of every dollar the federal government spends—oh, and it also kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including a devastating number of kids.

Look, I don’t think social welfare is the government’s job. I think it’s up to us—and especially the church—to take care of “the least of these” in our communities. I think private charitable efforts are more efficient and effective at getting people out of poverty, helping those who can work to do so and those who can’t work to live a life of dignity.

But if I have to choose between attacking government spending that kills people or spending that feeds people, I’m going to stop the killing first.

The second reason focusing exclusively on social welfare cuts is a mistake is how the general public perceives it—and perception really does matter. Because while it’s easy to talk about these issues in the abstract, for millions of Americans, the prospect of the government ceasing to provide a social safety net is really personally scary.

Of course, there are people who abuse the system. Whenever you have a large-scale government program like this, there always will be. It’s the nature of the big government beast.

But there are also people who legitimately need the support they receive from the government right now—people who would legitimately need charitable help even if there was no government safety net.

People who, when imagining the end of social welfare, wonder how they could pay for their child to receive the life-saving surgery she needs.

How they could find the money to repair their car to keep driving to job interviews.

How they will be able to keep the lights on.

And when these people hear fiscal conservatives going on and on about moochers and welfare queens and what a waste social welfare is—while never mentioning the waste of war and corporate welfare—it’s not hard to imagine how they might react.

So here’s the thing: Yes, helping the poor should be something we do voluntarily, without the wasteful and ineffective government involved. More people in need would get more support, and we wouldn’t rack up more national debt to do it. But this is not a change which can happen instantaneously. As Sen. Paul’s father (and arch fiscal conservative) Rep. Ron Paul once wrote:

While our goal is to reduce the size of the state as quickly as possible, we should always make sure our immediate proposals minimize social disruption and human suffering. Thus, we should not seek to abolish the social safety net overnight because that would harm those who have grown dependent on government-provided welfare. Instead, we would want to give individuals who have come to rely on the state time to prepare for the day when responsibility for providing aide is returned to those organizations best able to administer compassionate and effective help—churches and private charities.

Ending social welfare should be on the fiscal conservative agenda, to be sure, but massive, immediate changes should not top our list.

But axing corporate welfare and bringing home the troops? Let’s do it yesterday—and even that’s not fast enough.