Jim DeMint Quotes

What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.

You cannot tackle Britain's debts without tackling the unreformed welfare system.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

It’s been a very slow, very expensive business—reforming the welfare state.

Americans oppose public intervention or regulation if it helps others, but favor it if it helps them — take social security, disaster relief, public works projects, for example.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

Why is it is claimed that if people won't or can't take care of their own needs, that people in government can do it for them?

The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.

We need to make sure our government programs encourage work, not dependence.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

After years of piecemeal reform the current welfare system is complex and unfair.

Cynically but accurately put, Americans oppose public intervention or regulation if it helps others, but favor it if it helps them - take social security, disaster relief, public works projects, for example.

I was once a welfare recipient and am very aware of the successes and failures of this critical safety net. There are those that would have us believe that those receiving TANF benefits are lazy, shiftless, freeloaders who are just sitting around thinking of another way to suckle from the government teat.

We have a dangerous tendency. Roughly half the people in the country pay little of no taxes. These people who are disproportionate beneficiaries of government programs are in favor of more government programs.

The relief now given by the Poor Laws is so widely extended that no man of humanity could venture to propose their immediate abolition.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

I think what the Conservatives have done, scaling back welfare payment, is overwhelmingly positive. There's only a certain amount of welfare they can give out.

The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people's pockets but to put more responsibility in people's pockets.

When poverty declines, the need for government declines, which is why expecting government to solve poverty is like expecting a tobacco company to mount an aggressive anti-smoking campaign.

Liberals want to manage the damage with government programs to take care of those who have fallen between the cracks. Populists want to fix the cracks so that people don't fall in the first place.

The seeds of today's runaway government were planted when it was decided that government should help those who can't help themselves. From that modest, compassionate beginning to today's out-of-control mega-state, there's a straight, unbroken line. Once the door was open, once it was settled that the government should help some people at the expense of others, there was no stopping it.

The sheer number of government employees and welfare recipients effectively transforms the purpose of government from maintaining order to confiscating as much as possible from vulnerable taxpayers.

Government welfarism, with its ever-increasing army of pensioners and other beneficiaries, is fatally easy to launch and fatally easy to extend, but almost impossible to bring to a halt - and quite impossible politically to reverse, no matter how obvious and catastrophic its consequences become.

The true enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who defend an imploding status quo.

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.