Barney Frank Quotes

Poverty-fighting programs are not handouts - they are investments.

We think there are better solutions to fighting poverty because we see what the War on Poverty has produced. It produced tens of trillions of dollars in spending. It has been a 51-year exercise, and yet the poverty rates in America today are not much better than when we started the War on Poverty.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks.

We have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them.

The Democrats want to help people who have been disadvantaged by the economy these last decades. The Republicans want to weaken and roll back various aspects of what the Democrats have tried to do.

The government’s unprecedented expenditures failed to bring about the decline in poverty that Johnson had promised. Instead, they made things worse.

And I do not intend to lead a state where we simply tolerate poverty in our communities.

Ironically, socialist countries do tend to have immediate short term decreases in poverty before collapsing.

I think the right-wingers have to buddy up to the fact that either the minimum wage has to go up, and people get enough money to live, or you're always going to have people needing government assistance. You can't have it both ways.

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.

As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it, the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.

If war is the solution, why didn't Roosevelt declare war on poverty?

Bill Clinton has done more to help the middle class than any leader in decades.

Franklin Roosevelt said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance to those who have much; it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little. This reconciliation package fails that test as well.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

I have committed my life to helping the poor, and I believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart's lead in providing opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans battling poverty would realize the American dream.

When you talk about war on poverty it doesn't mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

Taxing poor families runs counter to decades of effort to help people lift themselves out of poverty through work.

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?

Let us invest less and less in war and tax cuts for the richest 1 percent, and more and more in jobs and schools for the other 99 percent.

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

Tax credits are designed to help people who work hard but who, through no fault of their own, don't earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

With fewer resources to share around more people, how can the poor have improved lifestyles?

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.