Gwen Moore Quotes

In 1996, Republicans used reconciliation to pass major legislation that ended six decades of welfare policy.

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.

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

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

Today we are ending welfare as we know it.

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

The Democrats want to help people who have been disadvantaged by the economy these last decades. The Republicans want to weaken and roll back various aspects of what the Democrats have tried to do.

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.

Believe me, every American, every person in this country, if I have anything to say about it, will know precisely what is going on with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because they are beginning to appoint people who are typical right-wing Republicans who want to privatize and cut Social Security.

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme

The Welfare State, which begun in Imperial Germany for the truly indigent and disabled, has now become "everybody's entitlement" and an increasing burden on those who produce.

The US, for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defence, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.

Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.

I wrote my thesis on welfare policy.

What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.

I don't believe in welfare.

I agree with President Roosevelt, and generations since, that American seniors deserve better than poverty.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

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

An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.

Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

A mature welfare state is always broke.

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.

Europe’s conservative parties, like Republicans in the United States, have for the most part, turned into shrill apostles of austerity at almost any social cost.