State of New Hampshire secondary Archives: on Welfare & Poverty

Bill Weld: Have private sector take over social services

Dan Feltes: Address discrimination in housing as a civil right

Karen Testerman: Not always government's responsibility to care for the poor

Rick Santorum: I authored the only bill to remove an entitlement

SANTORUM: As a matter of fact, I did do a lot to slow it up when I had a chance. I was the author of the only bill that actually repealed a federal entitlement, welfare reform. I actually promoted and tried to pass Social Security reform. I worked on Medicare and Medicaid. I was one of the only guys out there--in a time when we were running surpluses--talking about the need for long- term entitlement reform. When the government runs up a tab and you don't have the money to pay, then you have to increase the debt ceiling. But every time we tried to tie it with reducing spending. In the last go round, I said, no we shouldn't increase the debt ceiling because we've gone too far. But routine debt ceiling increases have happened for 200 years.

Rick Santorum: Block grant Medicaid, housing, & food stamps to states

SANTORUM: Means testing for Social Security. To subsidize high-income seniors doesn't make any sense to me. Food stamps is another place. We got to block grant it, send it back to the states just like I did on welfare reform. Do the same thing Medicaid & housing programs, block grant them, send them back to the states, require work, and put a time limit. You do those three things, we will help take these programs, which are now dependency programs, which people are continually dependent upon, and you take them in to transitional programs to help people move out of poverty.

GINGRICH: The duty of the president is to find a way to manage the federal government so the primary pain is on changing the bureaucracy. On theft alone, we could save $100 billion a year in Medicaid and Medicare if the federal government were competent.

Rick Santorum: Poverty is not a disability; believe in ability to work

And we stood up and said, no, that creating that dependency upon federal dollars is more harmful than not believing in people and their ability to work. And so we stood up and fought, and went out to the American public. Bill Clinton vetoed this bill twice. We had hard opposition, but I was able to work together and paint a vision.

We made compromises, but not on our core principles. The core principles were: this was going to end a federal program; we were going to require work; we were going to put time limits on welfare. I stuck to those principles, and we were able to compromise on some things like transportation funding and some day care funding, all in order to get a consensus that poverty is not a disability.

Ron Paul: Entitlements are not rights; only big guys get entitlements

PAUL: Entitlements are not rights. Rights mean you have a right to your life and you have a right to your liberty. I, in a way, don't like to use terms [like] gay rights, women's rights, minority rights, religious rights. There's only one type of right, it's your right to your liberty. It's caused divisiveness when we see people in groups because, for too long, we punished groups, so the answer then was let's relieve them by giving them affirmative action. I think both are wrong. If you think in terms of individuals and protect every single individual, no, they're not entitled. One group isn't entitled to take something from somebody else. There's a lot of good intention to help poor people. But guess who gets the entitlements in Washington? The big guys get them, the rich people. They run the entitlement system, the military industrial complex, the banking system.