Iain Duncan Smith Quotes

The old welfare system was hurting people by discouraging work and marriage. Welfare reform, and now this legislation, will build on the understanding that work and strong families are the foundation upon which we build our future.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

I know that there are many excellent arguments for a universal form of basic income. Since everyone would get it, it would remove the stigma that dogs recipients of assistance and 'entitlements'.

It will take a brave person to cull the benefits system and analyse who deserves and who doesn't.

There are many commitments I have made for reducing poverty. One is to reform social security. Social security reaches only 44 percent of Mexicans. One of my goals is to give social security to all the people.

The country will also need 'new forms of social welfare' instead of its current system which is excessively centred on pensions.

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.

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.

After years of piecemeal reform the current welfare system is complex and unfair.

While the rest of the country is still talking about welfare reform, Texas is implementing it.

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.

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

The Social Security System is the one great social policy achievement of the twentieth century.

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.

Welfare reform isn't easy.

We must have a welfare system that we can afford, which will mean giving greater attention to directing the welfare program toward its primary purposes and its intended beneficiaries.

Some people have proposed universal basic income, UBI, basically making sure that everybody gets a certain amount of money to live off of. I think that's a wonderful idea. The problem is, we haven't been able to guarantee universal healthcare in this country.

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

After all, Bill Clinton is the guy that signed welfare reform.

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

We already know that social security is more affordable in Scotland than it is in the rest of the U.K. - spending on social protection takes up a smaller share of our economic output and our tax revenues than is the case in the U.K. as a whole.

After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted.

On the one hand we have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable? But on the other hand let us look at the issue of dependency where we have trapped people in poverty through the extent of welfare that they have.

We have to define and put into practice a better, more coherent and effective policy on income security.