Ross Perot on Welfare & Poverty 1992 & 1996 Reform Party Nominee for President

Get business & churches involved with schools

We should persuade religious groups and community organizations to enlist volunteers to work one-on-one with students who need help and who need to know that someone cares about them.

Transform welfare recipients to productive citizens

Education is part of the answer. Determining how people can be transformed into productive citizens, despite severe skill limitations, must be part of that equation. The nation did it with the Works Progress Administration half a century ago. It would certainly seem that creative, sensitive people of today should be able to find more sensible answers than putting people onto the welfare rolls.

People who are simply handed a check for doing nothing are robbed of pride. They do not have the inner satisfaction that comes with contributing something of themselves to society. They have no infrastructure that tells them their existence is meaningful.

21% child poverty rate is unacceptable

In 1970, 14% of our children lived in poverty. Today we have 21% of our children living in poverty. We will never be able to solve the dropout and discipline problems in our schools until we can get our children into a solution where they have at least some kind of minimum standard of supervision and attention at home.

A 21% child poverty rate in the greatest country in the history of man is unthinkable. A 21% child poverty rate in a country whose alabaster cities are supposed to gleam undimmed by human tears is absolutely unacceptable. This statistic is another alarming indicator of where an improperly managed government has taken us.

Massive redistribution from wealthy to poor

“H. Ross Perot is widely considered to be an archetypal Texas right-wing kook. Yet he is prepared to endorse strongly redistributionist policies. Even more startling, he is willing to promote them with rhetoric no leading Democrat would dare to indulge in for fear of being dismissed as hopelessly out of tune with the times. Even leftist politicians rarely say as clearly as Perot does that what they have in mind is taking money from you and giving it to someone else. he urges a massive new transfer program designed to take money from the prosperous and use it for the benefit of the poor. The banner under which he proclaims all this was nothing less than equalization.“