Paul Coverdell: “I do not know of any issue in the country for which there is more unanimity or agreement than the current status of our…”

“I do not know of any issue in the country for which there is more unanimity or agreement than the current status of our welfare programs. You can go to any community, any State, any region, any city, and, as I said, there is a unanimity that this program has failed. Sometimes in the discussions, we fail to acknowledge what that means. What that means is that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been condemned to stunted futures with no hope, no real education, no real prospect for opportunity in a life as we have come to know to be synonymous with being an American. You can do anything as long as it is different and it would be better. Every statistic that we have endeavored to improve with these massive welfare programs, with the exception of one piece of data, is worse today and not just a little worse, but dramatically so. Every condition of the target of the welfare programs is worse, not better. We have higher teenage pregnancies, we have more single-member households, we have less scores in our education programs. It is all worse. What makes it even more difficult to comprehend is that we have spent more of the Treasury of America on the War on Poverty than we spent on the Second World War, the First World War, Vietnam, Korea, and the Persian Gulf combined. We, essentially, prevailed on those battles, but we have lost the war on poverty.”