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| - For years, internet users have shared a quote about how to measure the success of welfare programs, attributing the words to Ronald Reagan, the former U.S. president and California governor.
The full quotation read: "We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added."
(X user @ThomasSowell)
Posts featuring (archived) the excerpt and attributing (archived) it to Reagan — without citing a primary source — appeared on X. The message also cropped up on Goodreads (archived) and the quote meme website BrainyQuote (archived), again without an exact citation of when and where Reagan allegedly said it.
In short, the quote was correctly attributed to Reagan, although the version that circulated online omitted one word — "more" — that appeared in the officially published version.
The quote featured in a testimony Reagan delivered before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance on Feb. 1, 1972, during hearings concerning proposed amendments to the Social Security Act. At the time, Reagan was the governor of California, a position he held from 1967 to 1975. The Committee on Finance invited him to testify in the 1972 hearings because of his partially successful campaign to include sweeping cost-cutting measures in California's Welfare Reform Act of 1971.
A screenshot of the quote as it appeared in a 1972 congressional publication of the hearings' public witness statements can be seen below with the relevant text surrounded by a red outline.
(Screenshot from "Social Security Amendments of 1971: Hearings Before the Ninety-Second Congress")
As can be seen in that screenshot, the transcript of Reagan's words differs very slightly from the version that has circulated online. Specifically, while the transcript read, "We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many more are added," the version that circulated online omitted the word "more" from the quote's final clause.
Snopes found no video or audio recordings that might provide more secure confirmation of the precise wording Reagan used in his testimony, nor did we encounter any evidence that such recordings exist.
However, a syndicated AP article released the same day as Reagan's testimony does include the word "more" in the quote, as can be seen in the clip below. This specific clip appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, a California newspaper; other newspapers that ran the same article also had the word "more" in the quote.
Reagan Would Back Nixon Welfare Reform If...
Article from Feb 1, 1972 Santa Cruz Sentinel (Santa Cruz, California)
Ultimately, because the inclusion or omission of the word "more" does not significantly affect the meaning of his message, we have rated this as a correct attribution.
Previously, Snopes investigated the claim that Reagan once said: "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism." That attribution was also correct.
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