Newt Gingrich on Welfare & Poverty Former Republican Representative (GA-6) and Speaker of the House

Obama is the Food Stamp President; teach poor to get jobs

GINGRICH: The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. Now, I know among the politically correct, you're not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable. I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn some day to own the job. [For example], NYC pays their janitors an absurd amount of money because of the union. You could take one janitor and hire 30-some kids to work in the school for the price of one janitor, and those 30 kids would be a lot less likely to drop out. They would actually have money in their pocket. They'd learn to show up for work. They could do light janitorial duty. They could work in the cafeteria. They'd be getting money, which is a good thing if you're poor. Only the elites despise earning money.

Fight crisis of secularism with church-based charity

The themes are akin to many of those he struck as Speaker of the House. Then, his major proposal was a dramatic dismantling of government welfare. In its stead would come private charities, many of them faith-based, that he said did a better job of uplifting the neediest. It was public vs. private, secular vs. religious.

In part because of Gingrich's own efforts, the promotion of religious groups and faith-based services is now built into the highest levels of government. Gingrich led Congress to enact a major welfare reform law, which included a historic provision allowing faith-based groups to win government contracts to run social service programs.

FactCheck: Poverty rate has fallen under War on Poverty

PolitiFact.com reports: [LBJ's programs] focused on elderly poverty, which is down to 13%. [Gingrich also] uses the wrong numbers. The poverty rate was 17.3% in 1965, not 14%. So the poverty has fallen by 3 percentage points, or by about 1/6 its original level. Counting different years shows even more decline. In 1962, the poverty rate ranged was 20%. In pre-recession 2007, it stood at 12.5%. Comparing 1962 and 2007, the poverty rate dropped by over 1/3.

When free welfare is provided, people choose not to work

1996: One out of 184 programs block-granted back to states

There was just one problem with the 1996 reforms: they only reformed one federal program. The federal government sponsors another 184 means tested welfare programs, including Medicaid, Food Stamps, 27 low-income housing programs, 30 employment and training programs, 34 social services programs, and 24 low-income child care programs, among others. All these programs could and should be block granted back to the states just as AFDC was in 1996, effectively shedding the federal government of responsibility for welfare.

$1,000 tax credit for low-income first-time homebuyers

• A tax credit for the purchase of home computers used for educational or professional purposes.
• A $1,000 tax credit for low-income first-time homebuyers.
• Refundable tax credits for auto companies for the cost of flex-fuels cars, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and the development of hydrogen cars.
• Tax credits to encourage investment in biofuels and "renewable forms of energy."
• A permanent 50% tax credit for research and development, or at least for "companies that are willing to take on government's 'grand challenges' (for example, the first inhabitable moon base)."
• A special business tax credit for "corporations that fund basic research in science and technology at our nation's universities."

Ten Lessons from Successfully Transforming Welfare

1. Successful reform always starts with a big idea
2. Decide whether to repair or replace
3. Great change never starts with government
4. Cheerful persistence is necessary to successfully deliver large-scale reform in a free society
5. Collaboration is critical (including involvement of key governors)
6. Real change always requires winning the argument
7. Words matter; communication good policy
8. Real change must be consistent with broad American values
9. Opponents of reform must be forced to carry the burden of their positions
10. Real change must be citizen-centered.

Boys Town-style orphanages better than kids on welfare

I thought this was a horrible idea. In a speech before the New York Women's Agenda on Nov. 30, 1994, I criticized Gingrich.

Gingrich swung back: "I'd ask her to go to Blockbuster and rent the Mickey Rooney movie about Boys Town [an orphanage]. I don't understand liberals who live in enclaves of safety who say, 'Oh, this would be a terrible thing.'"

Reach majority by better ideas, not by handing out goodies

I wanted that GOP majority to be a certain kind of majority, one based on ideas. I also wanted it to represent a party that would be open and beckoning to a majority of our fellow Americans not because we were handing out goodies to people but because we had better proposals for them and their families’ futures. In short, I wanted to do nothing less than replace the welfare society with a society full of opportunity. I dreamed of a society that would begin to move the powers of a smothering, overcentralized federal government back to the states and local governments back into the hands of volunteers much closer to the people and better aware of their real needs and wants.

Eight steps to improve opportunity for poor

One of the encouraging developments of the last few years has been that a lot of truly caring, intelligent people have spent a lot of time thinking about the tragedy of modern welfare systems. As a result, we now have a fairly good idea of what works and what doesn’t. The eight steps we need for improving opportunities for the poor are:
1. Shifting from caretaking to caring: Caretaking’s most important concern is to make the provider feel good, while caring’s first concern is the outcome for the person being helped.
2. Volunteerism and spiritual renewal: more volunteers could get to know individuals and their families, [and ] emphasize spiritual salvation.
3. Reasserting the values of American civilization
4. Emphasizing family and work.
5. Creating tax incentives for work, investment, and entrepreneurship.
6. Re-establishing savings and property ownership.
7. Learning as the focus of education.
8. Protection against violence and drugs.

Welfare state has distorted beyond its original intent

With those two sentences, refined from years of study and practice, Newt Gingrich found the message that convinced the nation to elect a Republican majority to Congress. That majority chose him Speaker of the House.

Those two sentences--one undeniable, the other contentious--are the essential Gingrich. They are the end result of a career-long search by Gingrich for a message simple and powerful enough to convince Americans that the welfare state had been distorted beyond its original intent. A mammoth, overreaching federal government now is causing more harm than good.

Error at core of welfare state is its dehumanization

Look at what the welfare state does. The welfare state reduces citizens to clients, subordinates them to bureaucrats, and subjects them to rules that are anti-work, anti-family, anti-opportunity, and anti-property. Now, if you doubt this, one project might well be to apply for the system. Just spend two days being a person who's applying to get into the system.

The evening news is the natural result of the welfare state. That literally, when you watch the killings, you watch the brutality, you watch the child abuse, my question back would be: What did you think would happen when you put people in these kind of settings and you deprive them of their God-given rights and you then say to them, 'Now you are less than a full person.'

Welfare vouchers allow choice & reduce bureaucracy

In 1984, Gingrich said, "No one must fall beneath a certain level of poverty, even if we must give away food and money to keep that from happening." He urged the creation of day care centers for welfare mothers who would be forced to leave home to work or study. But in another preview of the Contract With America, Gingrich suggested that minor girls should be ineligible for Aid to Families With Dependent Children if they became pregnant. Aid would go first to their parents or guardians.

Food stamps crowd out space shuttles

In "Window of Opportunity," Gingrich wrote: "The amazing fact was that America literally stood in the Moon and watched in its living rooms as the dream of freedom reached out beyond our planet in 1969. And yet we turned back and wallowed in the problems of the welfare state for a decade. Food stamps crowded out space shuttles; energy assistance crowded out a solar-power-satellite project that would have provided energy for all; more bureaucracy in Health and Human Services shoved aside a permanently manned space station."

Replace welfare state with opportunity society

I believe when we are told that children are so lost in the city bureaucracies that there are children in Dumpsters, when we are told that there are children doomed to go to schools where 70% or 80% of them will not graduate. When we're told of public housing projects that are so dangerous that if any private sector ran them, they would be put in jail, and we're given, "Well, we'll study it. We'll get around to it." My only point is: We can find ways immediately to do things better and to reach out and to break through the bureaucracy and to give every young American child a better chance.

Limit welfare to 2 years & cut welfare spending.

[As part of the Contract with America, within 100 days we pledge to bring to the House Floor the following bill]:

The Personal Responsibility Act:
Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.