Best 142 quotes in «welfare quotes» category

The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.

The proper education of a man decides his welfare, but the interests of a whole family are secured by the correct education of a woman.

There is a missionary spirit—a spirit which urges us to live outside ourselves and to be concerned for the welfare of others.

There ought to be a thoughtful welfare-reform debate that doesn't turn into something that could be called scapegoating.

The solution to this problem [welfare-statism] must take a positive form: the restoration of a faith in what free men can accomplish.

The welfare of our children is our main concern, and their best interests are our first priority.

Those who abuse our welfare system will be priorities for immediate removal.

This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.

To have created a Welfare State was a great achievement; but we must go on to create a Welfare Planet.

To continue on the road we Americans have traveled for the past century is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both.

True material welfare is never inconsistent with performance of religious obligations.

We evolved without social welfare and we are equipped to solve our problems without it.

When have handouts ever worked? In the United States, we learned that welfare for our own citizens not only turned into a debilitating crutch, it created a more or less permanent underclass.

The welfare system is the breeding ground of crime, addiction and radical politics.

We have to shift our understanding of ourselves as separate individuals, each seeking our own welfare, to an understanding of how we fit into social, biological, and physical environments.

We're at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud, solid, reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.

We should vote for the welfare of the country, not for the welfare of the party.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy--to be followed by a dictatorship.

Work is the inevitable condition of human life, the true source of human welfare.

A ‘discouraged worker’ is someone of legal employment age who has stopped actively seeking employment because he or she has simply given up looking, hence the term ‘discouraged.’ Well I’m fucking discouraged at having to pay for the lazy sod!

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed. Simply put, it lacks values, and such a system will eventually collapse once its true light is discovered by the masses. Though some say that capitalism is a modern system, corruption has been the source for the demise of every great civilization.

Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.

Badger had been waiting with ever increasing certainty for that brown, government stamped envelope, to hit the floor with the impact of several atomic bombs; the shockwaves hitting him before the sound could penetrate his ears.

By far the most significant consequence of "selfish capitalism" (Thatch/Blatcherism) has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s.

But Frances was beginning to feel that somewhere along the line, property, business, and all that contributes to the creation of wealth, must give back to government enough to guarantee adequate safeguarding of human welfare. The question would be, how to protect human beings against homelessness, starvation, and dependent old age without breaking down human initiative. She was seeing this as one fundamental problem of the government of the future; seeing too that somewhere leaders must arise who will be able to cope with this problem—honest leaders who will see the problem in its many-sidedness, and at last be able to solve it constructively.

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS.

Clearly, our immigration policies should be reexamined. A convincing case can be made on environmental grounds alone that a nation of 300,000,000 needs no more people, especially since it would enjoy natural growth if the borders were closed tomorrow. How can we possibly claim to be fighting environmental degradation or hope for energy independence when we import a million or more people every year? How can we claim to be fighting poverty, crime, school failure, or disease when we import people who are more likely than natives to be poor, criminals, school failures, and to suffer from strange diseases? Immigration is even harder to justify when many newcomers speak no English, maintain foreign loyalties, or practice disconcerting religions. It is profoundly unwise to add yet more disparate elements to a population already divided by diversity. [D]emographers and economists are making dire projections based on the lower likelihood of blacks and Hispanics to become productive workers. These people go on to insist that the solution is to improve education for blacks and Hispanics, but the United States has already made enormous efforts to that end. There is no reason to think some kind of breakthrough is imminent. Clearly, the solution to the problems posed by an increasing Hispanic population is to stop Hispanic immigration. However, [...], our policy-makers are too afraid of accusations of racism to draw such an obvious conclusion. Americans must open their eyes to the fact that a changing population could change everything in America. The United States could come to resemble the developing world rather than Europe—in some places it already does. One recent book on immigration to Europe sounded a similar alarm when the author asked: “Can you have the same Europe with different people?” His answer was a forthright “no.” It should be clear from the changes that have already taken place in the United States that we cannot have the same America with different people, either. Different populations build different societies. The principles of European and European-derived societies—freedom of speech, the rule of law, respect for women, representative government, low levels of corruption—do not easily take root elsewhere. They were born out of centuries of struggle, false starts, and setbacks, and cannot be taken for granted. A poorer, more desperate America, one riven with racial rivalries, one increasingly populated by people who come from non-Western traditions could turn its back on those principles. Many people assert that all people can understand and assimilate Western thinking—and yet cultures are very different. Can you, the reader, imagine emigrating to Cambodia or Saudi Arabia or Tanzania and assimilating perfectly? Probably not; yet everyone in the world is thought to be a potential American. Even if there is only a small chance that non-Western immigrants will establish alien and unsettling practices, why take this risk? Immigration to the United States, like immigration to any nation, is a favor granted by citizens to foreigners. It is not a right. Immigration advocates often point to the objections Anglo-Americans made to turn-of-the-century immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Hungary, and other “non-Nordic” countries. They point out that these immigrants assimilated, and insist that Mexicans and Haitians will do the same. Those advocates overlook the fundamental importance of race. They forget that the United States already had two ill assimilated racial groups long before the arrival of European ethnics—blacks and American Indians—and that those groups are still uncomfortably distinct elements in American society. Different European groups assimilated across ethnic lines after a few generations because they were of the same race. There are many societal fault lines in “diverse” societies—language, religion, ethnicity—but the fault line of race is deepest.

Capitalism is a social system owned by the capitalistic class, a small network of very wealthy and powerful businessmen, who compromise the health and security of the general population for corporate gain.

Calling out the supposed ‘abuse’ of welfare by blacks and other people of color is a time-honored tactic for distracting the general public from actual national issue. It also taps into latent, subconscious racism, which is what right-wing politicians would call a ‘win-win.

Competing images of the poor as 'deserving' and 'undeserving' became central components of the debate.

Consulates monitor American welfare programs and make sure Mexicans make the most of them. Some programs are closed to illegal immigrants but food stamps (the program is known since 2008 as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP) are not. Many illegal immigrants hesitate to apply for them for fear their status will be discovered and they will be deported. Mexican Consul Luis Miguel Ortiz Haro of Santa Ana in Orange County, California, went on Spanish-language television to tell Mexicans it was safe to apply. “It won’t affect your immigration status,” he explained. More than 1,200 people applied for food stamps the next day. Consulates also have a program called Ventanillas de Salud (Health Windows), which publicizes American hospitals and clinics that treat illegal immigrants for free. In 2007, the consul in Los Angeles proudly noted that 300,000 Mexicans in the area had benefited from the consulate’s medical advice. Cost to taxpayers for medical treatment for illegal immigrants in Los Angeles Country runs to about $400 million a year. In 2005, as it does every year, the consulate in Los Angeles gave the school district nearly 100,000 textbooks. The history books are the ones used in Mexico. They refer to the American flag as “the enemy flag” and say “we love our country because it is ours.” In Salinas, California, the consul general for the area organized a “Mexican Flag Day” to promote Mexican patriotism at an American public school.

Different groups have different priorities. Because Hispanics tend to have low incomes, they support increases in government services, even at the cost of more taxes for others. Most Hispanics supported all five spending initiatives on the May, 2005 California ballot; most whites opposed all five. Prof. Nikolai Roussanov of the Wharton School has found that both blacks and Hispanics spend 50 percent less on medical care than do whites with similar incomes, and that blacks and Hispanics spend 16 percent and 30 percent less, respectively, on education than do whites with similar incomes. Many studies have also found that blacks and Hispanics save less than whites for future goals like retirement. How do they spend their money? Blacks are more likely than whites to buy lottery tickets and to spend disproportionately more money doing so. Prof Roussanov says the biggest difference, however, is that blacks and Hispanics spend 30 percent more than whites with the same income on what he calls “visible goods” meant to convey status, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry. Different groups have different buying patterns. In 2004, Sears decided to turn 97 of its 870 locations into “multicultural stores,” in which clothing, signs, décor, and displays were geared to Hispanics and blacks, who do not have the same tastes and body sizes as whites. Hispanics want “stylish,” form-fitting clothing in bright, loud colors, and the highest heels available. Blacks need more “plus” sizes. In the multicultural stores, Sears displays the loud clothing prominently, near entrances. Clothing white women are likely to buy, such as the more traditional Land’s End line, is in the back. For years there was a Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California, filled with Roy Rogers memorabilia and even his horse Trigger—stuffed, of course. That part of California is now heavily Hispanic, and no one is interested in Roy Rogers. The museum moved to Branson, Missouri, which has become a resort catering to bluegrass and country music fans, who are overwhelmingly white. Victorville immigrant Rosalina Sondoval-Marin did not miss the museum. “Roy Rogers? He doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “There’s a revolution going on, and it don’t include no Roy Rogers.

Disabled people are now having to beg for small payments that once were held up as entitlements, and a way of making society fairer.

Divorce is a marital welfare. It's just couples asking society to bail them out because they didn't do enough research before they got married. How is that our fault? Don't drag down my country's statistics just because you ran off and got hitched before you ever saw each other in a bad mood.

Don’t pack your bags just yet, stay awhile, Don't try to run away to higher ground, You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune, And you are such an entertaining crowd! (I’ve never had such cheerful toys to play with...) Forget I said that – just a little natural disaster Humour, Ha-ha-ha. Pull up a rusty lawn chair On the waterfront in New Orleans, And ignore the wind that howls, Things aren’t always as they seem. I can smell fear in the air, Fresh amidst the cornbread steam, Forgive me if I sound excited, (I’m going to be famous, you know!) And let me take your money, please! I’ll drown your family, hunt down your pets, I’ve got tricks that I’ve never even tried yet, And it’s so easy when I get the chance! (I’ll swipe your house in just one glance!) As the saying goes, it all comes out in the wash, But I’m the only wash that leaves no stone unturned, Financial devastation is my middle name, And social degradation is my third! You, little boy from the bayou bank, You used to fish for pointless fun (I can appreciate having fun), But after I go, you’ll find your parents poor, You’ll have eviction notices on your door, You’ll have to sell any fish you can catch, In a desperate grasp for money, Although I hate to break it to you, That bayou’s polluted, honey! I see nothing in your future but welfare cheques! And you there, little girl with the closet of toys, You were born well-off with a room of your own, You have dresses that look more like They’re from fairy-tales, Glittery lace on your schoolgirl gowns. Wait ‘till murky water licks those hems, And your family is bankrupt And you’re homeless with them! Accept what’s to come, won’t you please? I’m just a carousel of wild winds Who’ll bring you to your knees! Hell, yeah! Take a bow, take a bow, Take a bow before your god… I might just pardon you If you’ve got magic up your sleeve! If you’re swift and resourceful you could outrun me! I always love a challenge! I always love a game… The question on your mind Is in regards to my first name, Right? My name is Katrina, the witch of the skies, A sorceress whose debut dance makes everyone die, I know it’s not what you wanted! (But I’m selfish through and through), So, c’mon and make me happy! Whether you’re ready or not…

Free education, almost free healthcare, a generous benefits system and a better state pension than elsewhere, guarantee equal opportunities for all citizens. The only problem is that all these require a considerable amount of public revenue. This is why the common assertion that to be born in Finland is like winning the jackpot in the lottery is only applicable when you are at the receiving end. A far more common experience is that you need to win the lottery just to cover the tax bill.

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions. Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?

I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.

I believe the Law of the Land should allow migrants three months on benefits and then the benefits cease

If we begin to diligently care for the environment, it will greatly improve human health.

[I]n around AD 170, a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental and vitriolic attack against the religion. It is clear that, unlike the other authors who have so far written about it, Celsus knows a lot about it. He has read Christian scripture – and not just read it: studied it in great detail. He knows about everything – from the Creation, to the Virgin Birth and the doctrine of the Resurrection. It is equally clear that he loathes it all and in arch, sardonic, and occasionally very earthy sentences, he vigorously rebuts it. The Virgin Birth? Nonsense, he writes, a Roman soldier had got Mary pregnant. The Creation is ‘absurd’; the books of Moses are garbage; while the idea of the resurrection of the body is ‘revolting’ and, on a practical level, ridiculous: ‘simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted?’ What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion – a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar – might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one. Christians shirked military service, the clergy actively preached pusillanimity, and vast amounts of public money were spent not on protecting armies but squandered instead on the ‘useless multitudes’ of the Church’s monks and nuns. They showed, Gibbon felt, an ‘indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare’.

Hospitals cannot continue to hemorrhage. For the country as a whole, medical insurance premiums include a surcharge that pays for treating the uninsured. However, if the proportion of uninsured indigent patients exceeds a certain figure, a hospital has no choice but to close. In California alone, the heavy cost of free medicine for foreigners forced no fewer than 60 hospitals to shut down between 1993 and 2003; many others were on the verge of collapse. From 1994 to 2004, the number of hospital emergency rooms in the country as a whole dropped by more than 12 percent. In May 2010, Miami’s health care system was so strapped, it was considering closing two of its five public hospitals. This would mean laying off 4,487 employees and the loss of 581 acute-care beds. Experts explained that treating uninsured patients had stretched the system to the breaking point. Houston is a good example of a city whose hospitals are barely making ends meet. In the nation as a whole, about 15 percent of the population has no medical insurance, but Texas, with its large population of Hispanics, has the highest percentage at 24 percent. In Houston, the figure is 30 percent. The safety net cannot accommodate so many people who cannot pay. “Does this mean rationing?” asks Kenenth Mattox, chief of staff at Ben Taub General Hospital. “You bet it does.” There is such a crush at Houston’s emergency rooms that ambulances often wait for one or two hours before they can even unload patients. The record wait is six hours. Twenty percent of the time, hospitals end up sending patients to other hospitals, and some have died after being diverted. Politicians and businessmen pull strings so friends can cut in line. Americans who fall sick in Mexico do not get free treatment. The State Department warns that Mexican doctors routinely refuse to treat foreign patients unless paid in advance, and that they often charge Americans for services not rendered.

If only one word of the ‘Gnani Purush’ [the enlightened one] is understood, then your welfare [that which liberates] is done.

If someone’s been signing on for six months with still no sign of finding gainful employment, then in order to continue to receive their Unemployment Benefit or Jobseeker’s Allowance they should complete at least 30 hours of compulsory work a week with the idea being that not only do they benefit their own communities, but this would also assist them in developing basic employability skills

In a civilized society, welfare and warfare cannot go hand in hand.

Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness.

Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.

My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to "roll back" the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the despised public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs. That defect is intolerable to the masters, who now feel, with some justification, that changes in the international economic and political order offer the prospects of creating a kind of "utopia for the masters," with dismal prospects for most of the rest. It should be unnecessary to spell out here what I mean. The effects are all too obvious even in the rich societies, from the corridors of power to the streets, countryside, and prisons. For reasons that merit attention but that lie beyond the scope of these remarks, the rollback campaign is currently spearheaded by dominant sectors of societies in which the values under attack have been realized in some of their most advanced forms, the English-speaking world; no small irony, but no contradiction either.

Now there is an attempt to reverse the history, to go back to the happy days when the principles of economic rationalism briefly reigned, gravely demonstrating that people have no rights beyond what they can gain in the labor market. And since now the injunction to "go somewhere else" won't work, the choices are narrowed to the workhouse prison or starvation, as a matter of natural law, which reveals that any attempt to help the poor only harms them—the poor, that is; the rich are miraculously helped thereby, as when state power intervenes to bail our investors after the collapse of the highly-toured Mexican "economic miracle," or to save failing banks and industries, or to bar Japan from American markets to allow domestic corporations to reconstruct the steel, automotive, and electronics industry in the 1980s (amidst impressive rhetoric about free markets by the most protectionist administration in the postwar era and its acolytes). And far more; this is the merest icing on the cake. But the rest are subject to the iron principles of economic rationalism, now sometimes called "tough love" by those who allocate the benefits.