Andrew Marr Quotes

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

Even in the United States, 'you have a sort of welfare state, even if you don't want to admit it -- you don't allow people to die on the street.

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

Welfare reform isn't easy.

I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

You know, I think that the Republicans have made it really clear that they want to end the so-called social safety net from cradle to grave.

As more people rely on government programs, the harder it becomes to conduct the necessary reforms to preserve them to help our society's most vulnerable.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

Social safety-net spending is an important form of public funding that helps offset disparities in family resources for children.

The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.

Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change.

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.

I don't believe in welfare.

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

While the rest of the country is still talking about welfare reform, Texas is implementing it.

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.

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.

In 1996, Republicans used reconciliation to pass major legislation that ended six decades of welfare policy.

Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

As we grow richer, the ties that used to bind workers together in a risk-pooling welfare state (first locally, later nationally) have loosened.

Welfare is hated by those who administer it, mistrusted by those who pay for it and held in contempt by those who receive it.

55 percent of the national budget consists of entitlements. These are established by law but do not get funds appropriated annually—not part of the usual give and take of the Congress and the administration. If you meet the criteria of the law, you get the money.

We are tired of a welfare system which dehumanizes us and dispenses payments under procedures that are often ugly and paternalistic.

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.