Chris Grayling Quotes

The benefits cap is right in principle because people don't pay their taxes so that families who could work don't work. People pay their taxes so we support people who really need to be supported.

But we will say something else. That for far too long in this country, people who can work, people who are able to work, and people who choose not to work: you cannot go on claiming welfare like you are now.

What we're putting forward is the most radical reform of the welfare state... for 60 years. I think it will have a transformative effect in making sure that everyone is better off in work and better off working rather than on benefits.

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.

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.

Without better economic opportunity, you can't have better public security and vice versa.

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

In Britain, the centrally prescribed welfare to work system short-changes the young unemployed. Transport, housing and education are over centralised.

Even the best community organizations and faith-based initiatives and the extraordinary charity of Americans across the country can't carry the brunt of eliminating poverty.

An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.

We spend billions of pounds on welfare, yet millions are trapped on welfare. It's not worth their while going into work.

No one should be richer than a ten millionaire and no one should be without a home.

Reduction of dependency is the greatest unmet need in social policy today.

Preventing poverty beats curing it.

There never can be equality of rewards or possessions so long as the human plan contains varied talents and differing degrees of industry and thrift, but ours ought to be a country free from the great blotches of distressed poverty.

Poverty decreased in America as a result of the War on Poverty

We used to wage war on poverty—not poor people.

We can start with housing, the sturdiest of footholds for economic mobility. A national affordable housing program would be an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan, and public health initiative all rolled into one.

During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being.

I, along with many of my Republican colleagues, believe there is so much more we can do for those who are trapped in our social safety net programs. But we are limited by the level of discourse with which of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are willing to engage.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

When you question this war on poverty, you get all the criticisms from adherents to the status quo who just don't want to see anything change. We got to have the courage to face that down, just as we did in the welfare reform of the late 1990s, and if we succeeded, we can help resuscitate this culture and get people back to work.

If the Left really wants to preserve family structure and advance cultural values such as work, why do they oppose reforms to a welfare system that pays teenage girls to have babies out of wedlock and disparage conservative proposals that require able-bodied Americans to work for their welfare benefits like food stamps?

What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance.

Politicians seem desperate to appeal to their respective versions of the so called 'middle class,' unable to empathise with the precariat and eager to dream up fresh and tougher sanctions against society's wounded.