Political Quotes

“One of the important studies was done not that long ago by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. He's done a couple of very important studies in the last 2 years. One of them was the level of welfare that's here in the country. I believe he counted 72 different programs that distribute the wealth from taxpayers in America to people who are sometimes taxpayers but more often a greater share of them are tax users. Of those programs, even though we brought down some of the welfare in the mid nineties, it didn't really reduce it so much as it produced a temporary plateau; and then it was built up again with a whole series of programs that we can't track. Well, he has done so. And it's a chilling thing to see what happens to a society that was a meritocracy, that rewarded people for their work, that now has become a welfare state. One of his definitive studies, Mr. Speaker, was this. He went in and looked at households that are headed by high school dropouts, without regard to their immigration status; whether they were legal, illegal, foreign or natural-born Americans, whatever their category might have been with their immigration status, if they headed households, and the average household, a family of four, and they were a high school dropout, they would draw down an average of $32,000 a year in taxes in the whole collection of the benefits that are there and they would pay about $9,000 a year in taxes. They would draw down 32, they would pay about 9,000 a year in taxes.”