Quotes & Sayings About Government Handouts

Anecdote: The East End seemed to be in the grip of yet another economic crisis ... By the winter of 1933, an army of the unemployed gathered daily outside the dock gates, desperate for a day or 2 paid work ... There was no cushion, no disaster fund, no stashed savings, no government handouts no syrup that could sweeten the bitter pill of poverty. — Melanie McGrath

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order. — David Frum

Too many Mainers are dependent on government handouts. Government dependency has not - and never will - create prosperity. — Paul LePage

Hard work and discipline lead to economic success. Government handouts and unsupervised policies of pity only rob people of incentive. If tax money continues to be wasted, it becomes morally wrong for our government to confiscate huge percentages of income and property from Americans, even if they are wealthy. — Bill O'Reilly

Government aid programs have been endlessly expanded, and the government has sought to maximize the number of people willing to accept handouts ... Roughly half of all Americans are dependent on the government, either for handouts, pensions, or paychecks. — James Bovard

Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut's muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space - it's massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we'll simply wither away. — Adam Carolla

One of Obama's greatest failures will be his legacy of making millions completely dependent on government handouts, not work ... So sad. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

The tax that was supposed to soak the rich has instead soaked America. The beneficiary of the income tax has not been the poor, but big government. The income tax has given us a government bureaucracy that outnumbers the manufacturing work force. It has created welfare dependencies that have entrapped millions of Americans in an underclass that is forced to live a sordid existence of trading votes for government handouts. — Paul Craig Roberts

If candidates spend money on ads and other political speech and their opponents are rewarded with government handouts to attack them, that chills speech and is unconstitutional. Non-participating candidates certainly don't volunteer to allow their opponents to receive taxpayer subsidies to bash them. — Bradley A. Smith

But I believe it is also true that a government committed to the policy of improving the nation by improving the condition of some of the individuals will eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between a national good and a chocolate sundae.
... I think that one hazard of the "benefit" form of government is the likelihood that there will be an indefinite extensions of benefits, each new one establishing an easy precedent for the next.
Another hazard is that by placing large numbers of people under obligation to their government there will develop a self-perpetuating party capable of supplying itself with a safe majority. — E.B. White

More and more people are becoming aware that government has nothing to give them without first taking it away from somebody else-or from themselves. Increased handouts to selected groups mean merely increased taxes, or increased deficits and increased inflation. — Henry Hazlitt

None of us here in Washington knows all or even half of the answers ... If you love your country, don't depend on handouts from Washington for your information. If you cherish your freedom, don't leave it all up to big government. — Barry Goldwater

Whether people are in America or in Africa, people want to work. They want to have purpose. They want to provide for themselves and their families. They don't want handouts. They don't want to be completely dependent on their governments - even though there's usually no opportunity for that anyway. — Scarlett Johansson

Americans had become lazy and irresponsible, focused on the pursuit of sex, money, and pleasures, unwilling to sacrifice and prepare for the obvious threats all around them. What fools to think "Guns, Germs and Steel" would no longer shape human history. For decades they partied at the Coliseum, enjoying the games and government handouts, the illusion of a protected empire. Sedated with unconstitutional entitlements. Freed from responsibility by a pandering political system, a corrupt culture, and professional soldiers who kept the wolves at bay. — Drew Miller

Finally, Obama's remarks are carefully constructed to undermine the arguments of conservatives, who frame the social programs funded by taxation as government handouts to the undeserving. Obama flips the taxes-as-handouts frame on its head, to yield a frame in which tax breaks are handouts to the rich, and the estate tax is a transfer of wealth from ordinary taxpayers to wealthy individuals - a frame that tells a vital truth. It — George Lakoff

When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need. — Robert Reich

I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. — J.K. Rowling

The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state. — Thomas Sowell

A few people had always made lousy choices. But how had a preexisting human propensity for self-destructive behavior exploded into a plague? As Mark's real, much more complete story - the one he didn't tell Berens - proved, it wasn't the increased availability of a drug like heroin, though that was gas on the flames. Lancaster's drug problem predated heroin, OxyContin, Percs. The problem wasn't caused by drugs at all, or government handouts, or single-parent families. While addiction could be as individual as people, common themes included alienation and disconnection. * — Brian Alexander