First, I would say: same, way more money goes in subsidies and pseudolegal tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy than on welfare.

Second, I would try to explain that that's not actually how taxes work anyway. The government doesn't gather all the tax money into a big pile, count it all up, and then make a budget to decide how to spend it. Instead, money collected as taxes basically just ceases to exist - it's deducted from your account and disappears. Separately to this, the government simply creates as much money as they want to fund their budget. (At least, any government with currency sovereignty does - this excludes Eurozone countries and many local or municipal authorities, who actually do have to make a money pile, or else borrow it from somewhere.)

Printing too much money can have inflationary effects - prices increase because there's more money around to buy things - so taxing away and destroying some money is necessary, but if the newly printed money is spent to develop economic activity then you can actually safely print more than you tax by quite a large margin. Neoliberal economists are incapable of/choose not to understand this because it leads to higher wages, lower unemployment and increased bargaining power for the workers, which could ultimately lead to greater political power. Instead they preach austerity doctrine, telling the lie that governments need to cut services and reduce spending to 'reduce their deficit', selling off public goods and services to the private sector so they can extract a profit - at the expense of the nation's people.