Marshall Sanford: “I think this is what really gets underneath the skin of folks back home, these kinds of horror stories. I think what we…”

“I think this is what really gets underneath the skin of folks back home, these kinds of horror stories. I think what we also have to remember, we proposed fairly radical welfare reform, which I think is absolutely needed. But at the same time, I think what we are doing is preserving that hand-up element to welfare. In other words, when people are really down, what we have said is we are not going to abandon them. To give you an idea of that, again, the budget is constantly talked about as being extreme, extreme, extreme. Yet, over the past 7 years, we spent $492 billion on welfare. What is proposed here with the next 7 years is $878 billion on welfare. That does not seem extreme to me. It seems to me it preserves the helping hand nature, but it ends that hand-out nature.”