Guy Standing Quotes

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

I've always thought my main concern is to alleviate the burdens on people, who were earning less money, perhaps than £80,000.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to welfare's Catch-22, families receiving benefits cannot save for the future.

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

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.

I have to address the economic conditions of everybody, including, and perhaps first, those who are poor.

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.

Poverty should not just be made an issue - there is need to actually work on it.

You are not going to lift everybody out of poverty through the kindness of wealthy people.

The matter of social security and these grants is to help to address the levels of poverty in the country.

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

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.

Safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged are a must for any compassionate nation, but encouraging folks to go on the dole when not absolutely necessary is disgraceful.

We've got to take care of the poor.

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.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

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

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

When they seek to cut programs that help families living in poverty, I will fight them every step of the way.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; and does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities.

I’m really not concerned about the very poor. They have a safety net.

We don’t want to turn this [social] safety net into a hammock that ends up lulling people in their lives into dependency and complacency.