George Osborne Quotes

What we're putting forward is the most radical reform of the welfare state... for 60 years. I think it will have a transformative effect in making sure that everyone is better off in work and better off working rather than on benefits.

In many ways, Scotland will benefit more than other parts of the UK when Universal Credit comes in. A larger percentage of people will see an increase in their income through moving into work or taking on more hours.

We need workfare over welfare.

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.

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.

Tax credits are designed to help people who work hard but who, through no fault of their own, don't earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

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.

It's up to government to make work pay more than welfare.

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

The concept of doing something with child benefit, of changing the rules around child benefit, is something that has been being discussed for some time.

Ma was legally blind due to a degenerative eye disease she'd had since birth. This meant she was entitled to welfare, and our lives revolved around the first day of every month when her payment was due.

I know we will look back on this and think how odd it was we were championing the rights of lone mothers to bring up their children on benefit.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

The answers to feeding hungry children is not fewer dollars to feed hungry children, it's to do more. It is to raise the minimum wage. It is to increase, not dismantle, the earned income tax credit. It is to make college more affordable for more middle class families, not more expensive. These are the things that grow our middle class.

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

The nation’s welfare system is a monstrous consuming outrage…. There should be no government program which would make it more profitable for a person to go on welfare than it would be to work.

Our pandering politicians compete to add names to the dependency of entitlement rolls instead of evaluating the success of these programs by how many people leave the dole and are restored to an independence. And these bulging entitlements are saddling our offspring with unsustainable generational debt.

We need people to go to work. If you're on food stamps, and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you're on disability insurance and you're not supposed to be, you're not truly disabled; we need you to go back to work.

Working people of this country want economic security. The worst possible thing you can do for those families is bust the public finances, have some welfare system this country can't afford.

Drug testing for recipients of various welfare programs - I really think that's something that needs to be considered.

I am in favour of a fully transferable allowance.

The 1996 welfare reform law, for the first time, connected welfare benefits with an expectation that recipients would work or participate in training. That work requirement led to record increases in employment and earnings and a record decrease in poverty and welfare dependence after it was enacted.

I think what the Conservatives have done, scaling back welfare payment, is overwhelmingly positive. There's only a certain amount of welfare they can give out.

Across Europe, not just in the U.K., the old Beveridge and Bismarckian variants of the welfare state have been dismantled. In their place has been erected a mish-mash of means-tested, behaviour-tested social assistance, with a growing tendency to force young unemployed into workfare schemes, which are helping to depress real wages.

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