Richard M. Daley Quotes

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

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

There are two important things to remember about 'entitlements': They are hugely popular programs for a very good reason, and actual sensible 'reform' would mean improving them, not sacrificing them at the altar of 'fiscal responsibility.'

I don't like a lot of social programs either because it makes you non-productive.

I don't believe in welfare.

If you throw a welfare state into the middle of a democracy, it’s very hard to get rid of the beast.

Congress may spend money in aid of the "general welfare.

There are very few people on welfare who like it.

We're moving more and more toward user fees, but the people who use social service programs obviously don't have the ability to pay for them.

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.

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.

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.

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

I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.

People from both political parties have long recognized that welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty. It robs people of self-esteem.

The government has become a mechanism for distributing largess, and your census form is your ticket.

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

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

Cynically but accurately put, 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.

I never knew an instance of the English parliament's undertaking to relieve the poor, by a distribution of bread in time of scarcity.... I think, that according to the principles of their government, they would only vote a sum of money, and address the King to employ it for the best.

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.

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

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