Nancy Gibbs Quotes

While I can see how the government has, at times, wasted taxpayers' money, and I can admit that too often its programs are ineffective, I also can see the good that government does.

The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.

The reason the government sells the census as your ticket to getting goodies - rather than as your civic duty - is that distributing goodies is now all the government does.

Social Security is a promise that we cannot and must not break.

Social Security is unequivocally the one contract the country is overwhelmingly in favor of.

Government should exist in order to help fortify the country and make those who are in need better able to meet their own.

Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years.

The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.

Julia progresses from cradle to grave, showing how government makes every good thing in her life possible. The weak economy, high unemployment, falling wages, rising gas prices, the national debt, the insolvency of entitlements - all these are fictionally assumed away in a cartoon that is produced by a president who wants us to forget about them.

If the government can make money, what on earth does it collect taxes for you and me for? Why don't it make what money it wants, take the taxes out, and give the balance to us?

We need transparency in government spending. We need to put each government expenditure online so every Floridian can see where their tax money is being spent.

Social Security is not a retirement savings plan; it is a social insurance program. It's a contract that says, as a society, we will look out for you and your family when you can no longer work.

I don't think you expand entitlements when so many people are dependent on government and when the money the federal government is offering is going to be taken away from you after just a couple of years.

Safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged are a must for any compassionate nation, but encouraging folks to go on the dole when not absolutely necessary is disgraceful.

Social Security has not contributed to the deficit problem.

To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.

Social Security has been effective for 70 years; prior predictions of its demise have been totally overstated.

The main purpose of Social Security is to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government for their basic needs in their retirement years.

People still seem to think that they should vote themselves money. They seem to think there is stuff which they think is the government's job, when it's really the individual's job.

When I look at Social Security, I consider it the most important social program in the United States, arguably the most successful program in the world.

At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.

People confuse compassion with government being compassionate with other people's money versus people being compassionate with their own money.

The promise of Social Security was reflected in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inter-generational compact that rewards hard work and provides retirement security.

I believe in infrastructure, I believe in investing in your hard assets. Where I think government starts to fail is when it starts getting itself weighed down with the social programs. And I think the American public just feels like a lot of that money is tossed aside and wasted.

My concept of government's role in people's lives is that it is limited but legitimate, and essential when people have nowhere else to turn.