Katie Piper Quotes

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside.

Programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and job retraining help Americans get back on their feet when they are down and out and laid off through no fault of their own.

Could we do without the social safety net, without Social Security, without Medicare, without farm subsidies, without unemployment compensation, without school lunch programs, without housing assistance? Of course we could. But we would not be a civilized society and we would not be an American nation any of us would be proud of.

Poverty in America wears a diaper much more often than it wears a hearing aid. Money desperately needed by poor kids is going to rich elderly.

I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

For women who turn to welfare, Big Brother becomes Husband.

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.

When we stand up for America, we stand up for what America stands for, which is a safety net for our seniors and really helping our families be able to help themselves.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.

In Britain, where the social safety net is more like a social swaddling cloth, crime rates other than murder are significantly higher than in the United States.

I don't believe in welfare.

A system that was originally designed to support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

The decision is 'trust fund' versus 'no more Medicaid' - and that shouldn't be a tough decision.

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.

Do we really want a society in which the stigma of going on the dole has been erased?

I was on food stamps until I was 18 and became an adult.

The worst thing we could do is impose time limits and then expect people to sink or swim once they move off welfare.

Almost one-fourth of our children are living in poverty. No other western industrialized nation has anything close to that figure. This is not an act of God. There is no divine intervention that says children in America have to live in poverty more than children in Italy, or Denmark, or Great Britain, or Canada, or other western industrialized nations. It a result of flawed policy. It is a result of policy that panders to those who make campaign contributions rather than to needs

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

What is this War on Poverty? Money is going to people in Chicago who are against me.

If poverty was an easy problem to solve, it would have been solved a long time ago.

Poor young children and the elderly must be fed at public expense.

I believe in a safety net. I believe one of the responsibilities of the Federal Government is a safety net.