Robert Higgs Quotes

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

We don’t want to turn this [social] safety net into a hammock that ends up lulling people in their lives into dependency and complacency.

Welfare makes you dependent upon someone to take care of you.

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

We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, where we put people in bondage so they can't be all that they're capable of being.

The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive - such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.

If we have more people on the receiving end of government - more people as the middle class becomes sucked in more and more to these entitlement programs, for example - then we're going to be in a place where it's going to be hard to go back. It's going to be hard to go back again. It's going to be hard to take away stuff. It's not impossible.

Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget - or never learn in the first place - how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness.

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.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

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.

Last year in the United States alone over $98 billion was distributed in unearned government transfer payments and other aid to millions of men and women who most often did nothing for what they received. This character-weakening government dole is repeated in almost every nation of the world. We encourage Latter-day Saints everywhere to remain free of government assistance. Work for what you receive.

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief.

I think that we're so generous in some of our social problems that people are unwilling to get a job outside in the heat. Rather than get 15 dollars to go get roofing, they'd rather get 9 or 10 dollars in benefits.

The eligibility for food stamps has widened and widened; welfare has been widened - unemployment insurance and disability insurance. These are all incentives not to work.

In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.

You get people who are on benefits who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside.

I wish someone would give me some money for doing nothing.

The government's goal is to provide income support for families most affected by socio-economic hardship. The support... will be conditional on vocational training and job reintegration.

I disagree with those who say welfare is a waste of money. It's a good means to creating new jobs.

The people who deserve and need subsidies are those who are on average incomes and less.

I've been around enough to realise that there are two things that once people have them, they don't want to give up, and it's extremely difficult to convince them to give up: one is privileges, and the other is subsidies.

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

No solution [to the problem of poverty] is so effective as providing income to the poor. Whether in the form of food, housing, health services, education or money, income is an excellent antidote for deprivation. No truth has spawned so much ingenious evasion.

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