Entitlements Quotes

#1. There are three legs of the stool; spending, entitlements and making the tax code fair and equitable. That's the three legs of the stool. If we do all of those in a responsible, bipartisan way, I think the American people would all be very, very happy.

Claire McCaskill

#2. You have to take away some of tax breaks for the wealthy, and you have to cut back on some entitlements. Because, unless we do all of these things, it just doesn't work. And what's good theater and what's good politics isn't necessarily good economic policy.

Michael Bloomberg

#3. White privilege is the unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements benefits and choices bestowed on people solely because they are white. Generally white people who experience such privilege do so without being conscious of it.

Peggy McIntosh

#4. I'll let Democrats defend spending our grandchildren broke on entitlements.

Christopher Buckley

#5. Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won't primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.

David Limbaugh

#6. As long as Republicans won't - won't raise taxes and as long as Democrats won't in any way make entitlements based on need, rather than just across the board, I really think that we're doomed to this deadlock.

Mark Shields

#7. If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements.

Shashi Tharoor

#8. I don't think you expand entitlements when so many people are dependent on government and when the money the federal government is offering is going to be taken away from you after just a couple of years.

George Pataki

#9. Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.

William Vickrey

#10. We're going to have to raise revenues in some form or fashion, and we're going to have to cut spending, including entitlements of all kind, including the military. We all know this. Lets get on with it.

Douglas R. Oberhelman

#11. Our Founders warned against this. They said don't ... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done; freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.

Sharron Angle

#12. The social and racial conflict, which springs from the redistribution ideology, may deepen as economic output is shrinking and transfer 'entitlements cause budget deficits to soar. The U.S. dollar, which has become a mere corollary of government finance, is likely to survive the soaring deficits.

Hans F. Sennholz

#13. The Democrats generally recoil from the subject of entitlements.

Bill Keller

#14. I agree with the idea of cutting [budget], but it should all be coming out of entitlements for the affluent and not out of domestic discretionary, which is welfare, education, all the stuff the government does, parks, FBI, and it shouldn't be coming out of Medicaid.

David Brooks

#15. There is a difference between helping, comforting, feeding, and empowering people. As I've said many times: Simply giving money (or entitlements) to poor people only serves to keep them poor longer.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#16. I think that retiring the baby boomers is going to be one of the great challenges in America, that you cannot make fiscal sense out of the future of our children without taking on entitlements.

Richard Lamm

#17. The Good Friday Agreement and the basic rights and entitlements of citizens that are enshrined within it must be defended and actively promoted by London and Dublin.

Gerry Adams

#18. Democrats believe, plausibly, that middle-class entitlements are instantly addictive and, because there is no known detoxification, that class, when facing future choices between trimming entitlements or increasing taxes, will choose the latter.

George Will

#19. I respect every mother and I believe people are entitled to use whatever benefits, claims and entitlements, if you like, that are available to them

Chris Bowen

#20. GOP candidates routinely sign a pledge never, ever to raise taxes. Democratic candidates aren't even asked to sign a parallel pledge never, ever to cut entitlements.

Timothy Noah

#21. We need to resist the temptation to create more entitlements and more entitlements, which is one of the reasons we are heading recklessly toward fiscal crisis.

Jeff Sessions

#22. One of the consequences of such notions as 'entitlements' is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.

Thomas Sowell

#23. The discussion in Washington has changed dramatically. I mean, it's no longer a question of should we address entitlements - it's no longer a question of do we need to reduce spending in the future.

Mark Zandi

#24. We ought to make sure that the eligibility for entitlements meets the demographics of America.

Mitch McConnell

#25. As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren't culturally distinct anymore. Then we're part of someone else's corporate plan, we're a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we're a black dot on a bottom line.

Alexandra Fuller

#26. To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.

Timothy Noah

#27. So now that the illusion of infinite growth is being exposed, the corresponding ballooning entitlements that enticed the larger public to become complicit in the illusion are becoming unglued.

Charles Hugh Smith

#28. I think that whether you're on the right or on the left as an economist or as a policy maker, every serious analyst I know agrees that at some point you have to deal with entitlements.

Peter Blair Henry

#29. Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren't entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself.

Jonathan Kozol

#30. Marriage equality - I think that it's a constitutionally guaranteed right. Let's end the drug wars. Let's balance the federal budget, and that means reforming the entitlements - Medicaid, Medicare.

Gary Johnson

#31. Conservatism is a hard choice for a society that has become accustomed to big government and big entitlements promoted by liberals.

Jesse Helms

#32. Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of 'entitlements', which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

#33. An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge 'social wealth' that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results.

Edmund Phelps

#34. Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst.

Virginia Postrel

#35. If Jackson had learned one thing over the years it was that nothing, absolutely nothing, was above corruption so long as human beings were involved, because, in truth, most people were not above the lure of the dollar or other material entitlements.

David Baldacci

#36. Entitlements seem to grow with prosperity; not only because they are indexed to inflation or GDP, but also because a prosperous country tells itself it can afford more benefits.

Amity Shlaes

#37. Deficit consumption is, in effect, drawing down on the capital entitlements of future generations

Jonathon Porritt

#38. There are two important things to remember about 'entitlements': They are hugely popular programs for a very good reason, and actual sensible 'reform' would mean improving them, not sacrificing them at the altar of 'fiscal responsibility.'

Alex Pareene

#39. You don't need a hand-out, you need a hand-up! And that's what we need to portray: 'Look, do you want to live in mediocrity? Because that's all that the entitlements are going to do for you. Keep you living in the lowest socio-economic scale.

Rafael Cruz

#40. Our best days are in front of us. We can reform those entitlements, we can change that corporate tax code and lower it. We can put America back on track on a growth level and a growth rate that we've never seen in the history of this country.

Rick Perry

#41. I'd hate to paint with a broad brush, but many Democrats don't feel that we have a crisis in entitlements, and Republicans do.

Dave Camp

#42. We Nigerians must reclaim our sovereignty, our civic entitlements.

Wole Soyinka

#43. Daily Christian living, in other words, is daily Christian dying: dying to our trivial comforts, soul-shrinking conveniences, arrogant preferences, and self-centered entitlements, and living for something much larger than what makes us comfortable and safe.

Tullian Tchividjian

#44. When President George W. Bush attempted to reform Social Security, that proposal was more unpopular with Americans than the Iraq war. People love their entitlements.

Robert Kiyosaki

#45. Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

George Will

#46. Since FDR's New Deal, corporations and wealthy families have been non-stop finding new ways to get tax breaks, deregulation and entitlements from the government.

Adam McKay

#47. Because who is more oppressed," exclaimed Leslie. "Those that seek nothing but entitlements for themselves or those that claim for everything, social security, housing benefit, disability and pay for nothing." One

Ben Aaronovitch

#48. We were endowed by our Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We were not endowed by the Federal Government. We were not endowed by entitlements. We were not endowed by pork barrel spending; we were not endowed by budgetary earmarks.

Lawrence Kudlow

#49. Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress but they regard the things government does for others as socialism.
[Address to National Press Club in Washington DC, as quoted in Freedom and Union (April 1952)]

Earl Warren