Todd Tiahrt Quotes

The old welfare system was hurting people by discouraging work and marriage. Welfare reform, and now this legislation, will build on the understanding that work and strong families are the foundation upon which we build our future.

Welfare reform isn't easy.

We passed welfare reform. All of you know I believe we were right to do it.

When I left, there were over 1 million fewer people on welfare in New York state than when I took office, replacing dependency with opportunity.

We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence.

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

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.

And I have a plan to do even better, to end welfare as we know it

The poverty we see in America is now too widespread, and too complex, for easy fixes. But I do think we can reimagine many of our institutions and can create new ones in ways that would be effective. We could, for example, create social insurance systems, similar to social security, such as that we went through in 2008-9. We could create a financial transaction tax, oil profit taxes and a fairer estate tax system, and we could plow much of the revenue raised from these into job training programs, into better education infrastructure, into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

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.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

Some welfare programs in the past have not been well-designed. They increased dependency.

While I was governor, 85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. I wanted to increase the work requirement.

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?

We should be reforming our entitlement programs to empower people.

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?

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.

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.

You cannot tackle Britain's debts without tackling the unreformed welfare system.

It will take a brave person to cull the benefits system and analyse who deserves and who doesn't.

I'm not saying that people on welfare don't contribute in their own way, but as many as possible should be encouraged to be economically active as well as socially and culturally active.

We may not realize it, but a crucial step in building a healthy economy is helping people move from welfare to work.

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