Political Quotes

“I thank the chairman of the Agriculture Committee for yielding, and I want to also thank him for his leadership on this bill. This is a carefully balanced bill that we have, and I don't challenge the convictions of the gentleman from Massachusetts. We've had enough exchanges on this topic to know that we have a difference of opinion without a difference in disagreeable personalities by any means. However, when I came to this Congress a little more than a decade ago, I was looking already at this growth in, then, food stamps. The number that I memorized at the time was that there were 19 million people on food stamps. That was a lot of people. Our population hasn't grown so much that it ought to grow to 48 million people. But when we see the expansion of the dependency class in America and you add this to the 79 other means-tested welfare programs that we have in the United States and each time you add another brick to that wall, it's a barrier to people that might go out and succeed. We're of the same heart here. We don't want people who need them and people who deserve them to go without SNAP benefits. On the other hand, we don't want to hand these out to people that are gaming the system, so to speak. So we've tightened the qualifications down on SNAP, and we've done so for a number of reasons.…”