Political Quotes

“on the other hand, what I do know and what I feel confident in stating is that our present welfare system is a tragic and destructive failure. At the very least, the present system has been accompanied by a massive increase in the very conditions that it was designed to alleviate: illegitimacy, family breakup, a negative attitude toward work, a culture of dependency. At most, our present system has been a contributing cause to those conditions. I should also like to observe, Mr. President, that those who oppose this bill, by and large, are those who individually--or whose philosophy--have guided and managed the system that this bill in large part dismantles. These people, these ideas clearly represent the conventional wisdom, a conventional wisdom that has guided and produced every change in welfare policy in this country, or almost every such change, for at least the past 30 years. Their present advice is to view with alarm these changes, to attempt to preserve the status quo, except to ask that we do a little bit more of what we have been doing with these last several decades. Mr. President, that conventional wisdom is bankrupt and ought to be abandoned, not only for the sake of our society as a whole but for the sake of the supposed beneficiaries of these welfare policies. Those of us who support this legislation, these changes, hope with some reason that this bill will increase incentives to work, some of those incentives being positive and some negative.”