George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

The great network of social insurance programs established by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, President Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, President John F. Kennedy’s Great Society, and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and defended by President Bill Clinton, sharply limits the amount of poverty a downturn [in the economy] can cause.

Political and economic insecurity inevitably translates into insecurity in people's everyday lives, from lack of access to welfare to the increasing lack of security in the workplace.

A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.

To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall.

We've got to take care of the poor.

Because Social Security is specifically designed to boost the retirement income of low earners with a progressive benefit formula, the program has played an enormous and necessary role in keeping Latinas out of poverty.

Social Security is meant to be - to make sure that no one who's worked hard and played by the rules and paid into the system grows old in poverty in America.

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.

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

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.

Social Security is a problem solving program, not a problem creating one .... Social Security is our best anti-poverty program.

The needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich

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.

Destroy poverty, that source of crime, by assuring to each the satisfaction of all needs! And how difficult is this to achieve?

Let’s make the poor richer.

Contemporary capitalist polities need to accept that inequality and insecurity will continue to be the inevitable results of market operations and find ways to shield citizens from their consequences—while somehow still preserving the dynamism that produces capitalism’s vast economic and cultural benefits in the first place.

Generous, effective, and broadly accessible social welfare policies do not require large government bureaucracies staffed with armies of public servants.

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

Is our national goal to place as many people on welfare, food stamp support, as we can possibly put on that program? Is that our goal? Is that a moral vision for the United States of America, just to see how many people we can place in a situation where they're dependent on the federal government for their food?

I understand welfare because I lived it. I understand the difference between a want and a need. The Republican Party promised to bring welfare change. We must deliver on this promise.

Too often, while well-intentioned, our poverty programs fail the poor. They fail them by keeping them in cycles of dependency.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net.

One of the flaws in the American dream is that there isn't as much of a safety net as you may get in other countries.

Chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits, or workfare.