Dennis Prager Quotes

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.

People like entitlements. That's why we spend so much on them.

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

When President George W. Bush attempted to reform Social Security, that proposal was more unpopular with Americans than the Iraq war. People love their entitlements.

Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.

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.

I don't believe in welfare.

The government has made $44 trillion in promises we can't afford to keep. We must get serious now about our long-term budgetary problems, recognizing that the sooner we act, the less painful the choices will be.

I do not believe that the Social Security system is in crisis. The Social Security Administration itself recently reported that the system is able to pay full benefits as they are defined today until at least 2042.

No major entitlement, once it has been implemented, has ever been unwound.

An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.

The 1935 Social Security Act established 65 as the age of eligibility for payouts. But welfare state politics quickly becomes a bidding war, enriching the menu of benefits, so in 1956 Congress entitled women to collect benefits at 62, extending the entitlement to men in 1961.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

It’s been a very slow, very expensive business—reforming the welfare state.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

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

It is not in accordance with the genius of our Government or our country to pay pensions.

Americans oppose public intervention or regulation if it helps others, but favor it if it helps them — take social security, disaster relief, public works projects, for example.

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.

What begins in Washington as simple, garden-variety grasping becomes an entitlement, the argument being that the longer the benefit has lived, the more the beneficiaries have built their lives around it, so ending it would be disruptive.

There was a council house waiting for me when I had Ryan, there was a welfare state. I never put into the system before I took out, I was on income support before I'd even paid a penny of tax.

The welfare state, which grew out of post-war solidarity, has for decades been based on the principle that those who pay into the system are entitled to expect that the safety net will be there for them when they fall on hard times.

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.