Thomas Sowell Quotes

Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.

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.

Contrary to what President Obama said in his inaugural address, going on Medicare and food stamps does not strengthen us. Just ask people who are fourth-generation welfare recipients.

I believe welfare makes you lazy and unproductive.

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.

Giving a poor person money keeps them poor.

I knew that good people who wanted to be a part of the American dream have become trapped in dependency because the federal government and the state government had made it in their economic interest not to take a job because the benefits that they didn't work were better. I changed that.

We spend billions of pounds on welfare, yet millions are trapped on welfare. It's not worth their while going into work.

Conservatives were sure that if you eliminated welfare for single moms, it would eliminate - or at lease greatly reduce - single motherhood. So in 1996 we had welfare reform. Did not change the trend in the least. Soon half of all babies will be born out of wedlock.

We are told, over and over: "Get off welfare. Cut the umbilical cord to the Government." But when we try and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we're slapped back down.

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

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

Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

The first (lesson) which we meet again and again in history, is that once the dole or similar relief programs are introduced, they seem almost inevitably - unless surrounded by the most rigid restrictions - to get out of hand. The second lesson is that once this happens the poor become more numerous and worse off than they were before, not only because they have lost self-reliance, but because the sources of wealth and production on which they depend for either doles or jobs are diminished or destroyed.

The greatest crime of welfare isn't that it's a waste of money, but that it's a waste of people.

Transfer payments discourage the recipients from earning income in the present and from investing in their potential to earn income in the future. People respond to a reduced cost of idleness by choosing to be idle more often.

What are people released from prison expected to do? How are they expected to survive? Can't get a job, locked out of housing, and even food stamps may be off limits. Well, apparently what we expect them to do is to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees, fines, court costs, and back child support (which continues to accrue while you are in prison).

Largely, as a result of the policies and priorities of the Reagan administration, more people are becoming poor and staying poor in this country than at any time since World War II.

Speaker Newt Gingrich says that what is wrong with the present system is not that people abuse welfare but that welfare abuses people.

When you live in a poor neighborhood, you are living in an area where you have poor schools. When you have poor schools, you have poor teachers. When you have poor teachers, you get a poor education. When you get a poor education, you can only work in a poor-paying job. And that poor-paying job enables you to live again in a poor neighborhood. So, it's a very vicious cycle.

When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.

You can't start taking away benefits if people don't have any opportunities.

The ultimate objective of subsidies should be to empower the poor, to break the cycle of poverty, and become foot-soldiers in our war on poverty.

As far as unwed mothers on welfare are concerned, it seems to me that they must be capable of some other form of labor.

We will not cut one penny from the safety net until we've cut every penny from corporate welfare.