Newt!, by Dick Williams: on Welfare & Poverty

Newt Gingrich: 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.

Newt Gingrich: 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.'

Newt Gingrich: 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.

Newt Gingrich: 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."

Newt Gingrich: 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.