Charles Boustany Quotes

The bureaucracy is what we all suffer from..

We are tired of a welfare system which dehumanizes us and dispenses payments under procedures that are often ugly and paternalistic.

Most Americans get that there is a need for a safety net in our country, and we support that safety net.

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.

State universities in Illinois are a microcosm of our state government - broken with work rules and administrative bureaucracy.

Can we have a serious conversation about improving the integrity of our poverty programs in this country?

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.

We do know the welfare system, starting in the '60s, basically encouraged the dissolution of marriage, encouraged families to separate in order to get the benefits.

At its core, government welfare is predicated on a false compassion.

I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.

There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside. That is not the path that Australia will tread. Nor do we want the burdens of nanny state paternalism that now weigh down many economies in Europe.

We shouldn't turn the safety net into a hammock. It should actually be a safety net.

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

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

You know where nice people end up? On welfare.

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

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

Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist.

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order.

Ultimately, my proposal isn't intended to increase or decrease the amount of federal spending spent on antipoverty programs.

Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensations for injustices - leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.

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

The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…they don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.

It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?

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