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The False Dawn of Poor-Law Reform: Nixon, Carter, and the Quest for a Guaranteed Income

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Alice O'Connor
Alice O'Connor
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

In August 1969, President Richard M. Nixon approached the American people with a radical proposal to do what the federal government had never done before: guarantee a minimum level of income for every American family unable to provide one for itself. Eight years later, in August 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced a similar proposal for a federal guarantee of income, this time along with an expansion of public works jobs. Like Nixon before him, Carter soon abandoned his bill, and with it the quest for a federal income guarantee. Thus, inconclusively, ended a decade-long struggle to replace the nation's uncoordinated, incomplete collection of welfare programs with a single, comprehensive system of federal relief. This struggle took place against a backdrop of economic stagnation and demographic change that sent social spending soaring and made existing poor-relief arrangements seem increasingly obsolete. It also tapped into growing taxpayer resentment and a rising tide of popular animosity toward welfare. In part for these reasons, the quest for a guaranteed income marked the end of an era of liberal government activism against poverty, and ushered in a new era of poor-law reform. Welfare, not poverty, was the social problem of the 1970s. And the idea of a guaranteed income was the solution embraced by a new, more chastened and conservative, ideological center.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 10 , Special Issue 1: Loss of Confidence: Politics and Policy in the 1970s , January 1998 , pp. 99 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1998

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References

Notes

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3. Richard M. Nixon, Television Address, 8 August 1969.

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22. Nixon, State of the Union Address, 22 January 1971.

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28. Newsweek, 8 February 1971, 26. For more on the welfare crisis as the result of a strategy employed by the NWRO, see Frances Fox Piven and Cloward, Richard A., Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1993), 330–38.Google Scholar

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32. Steiner, “Reform Follows Reality,” 65.

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38. Moynihan, “The Crises in Welfare,” 15. On the significance of the imagery of the black welfare mother, see Jane Sherron De Hart, “The Welfare Mother as Racialized ‘Other’: Public Assistance, Citizenship, and National Identity,” in Defining the Nation: Personal Politics and the Politics of National Identity (Chicago, forth-coming), chap. 6.

39. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 93.

40. On the ideological and gender dimensions of the contrast between social insurance and welfare, see Gordon, Linda, Pitied But Not Entitled, Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York, 1994), 145–207.Google Scholar

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46. Of course, public assistance for the working poor was not without precedence, having been used in the past to maintain minimal living standards while keeping wages low. The most famous, if short-lived, example was a late eighteenth-century scheme of wage subsidies implemented at Speenhamland, England, which helped to maintain a low-wage structure while warding off food riots among the poor. As noted by Moynihan, Piven and Cloward, and others, Nixon's FAP would operate in much the same way. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 29–32.

47. Robert Haveman, Introduction, in Haveman, ed., A Decade of Anti-Poverty Programs, 17.

48. Watts, JEC Statement.

49. National Journal, 19 October 1974, 1565.

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54. Robert Levine to Sargent Shriver, 6 May 1967, IRP Archives.

55. Levine to Theodore Berry, 7 June 1967, IRP Archives.

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58. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 218–20.

59. Although Nixon promoted his plan as “workfare and not welfare,” critics at the time noted that its proposed sanctions—benefit reductions for the adult nonworker, but not absolute cutoffs—were not as tough as they might be. Nor did the prospects for getting nonworking recipients into jobs look very promising. Evaluations of the HEW-Labor administered WIN program showed that, due to a combination of inadequate day-care and transportation facilities, interagency squabbling, and a high degree of disability among recipients, WIN was having trouble filling its existing training slots, let alone placing enrollees in jobs. “Administration Welfare Reform Woes Increased by Record of WIN Program,” National Journal, 24 January 1970, 162–64.

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66. Time, 1 February 1971, on Nixon's speech.

67. On Nixon's pattern of selectively preserving certain liberal tenets, see Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement, 218. Nixon referred to the “full employment” budget in his 1971 State of the Union address.

68. Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 28–29.

69. On southern opposition to FAP, see Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 26; and Quadango, The Color of Welfare, 129–31.

70. Williams, The Struggle for a Negative Income Tax, 20.

71. O'Connor, “Social Research as Social Policy.” On Senator Williams and the “notch” effect, see Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 26.

72. Elliot Richardson and James Hodgson to Nixon, 2 June 1972, Needham Papers, Box 6, Ford Library.

73. Nathan, The Plot That Failed, 70–76. By 1977, Nathan notes, the White House role in domestic policy was virtually “nonexistent” because of Watergate. Nevertheless, Nixon had succeeded in establishing the mechanisms of adminstrative control over the bureaucracy.

74. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, “Income Supplement Program” (Washington, D.C., 1974); National Journal, 19 October 1974, 1559–66.

75. National Journal, 19 October 1974, 561.

76. The evolution of these models is discussed in detail in Kraemer, Kenneth L. et al. , Datawars: The Politics of Modeling in Federal Policymaking (New York, 1987), 38–62.Google Scholar

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79. Secretary Weinberger to President Gerald R. Ford, 20 December 1974, White House Operations Collection, Cheney Files, Box 13, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.

80. Lynn, “Income Maintenance,” in Haveman, 117.

81. Weinberger to Ford, 7 January 1975, and Kenneth Cole to Ford, 15 January 1975, both in Needham Papers, Ford Library, Box 6.

82. The letter, which was sent to Ford by Princeton University economist Albert Rees, was also signed by Princeton's William J. Baumol, Wisconsin economist and pioneer poverty researcher Robert J. Lampman, Joseph Pechman of the Brookings Institution, Nixon CEA Chair Herbert Stein, James Tobin of Yale, and Harold Watts of Columbia University, who had been a principal investigator in the income-maintenance experiments. Rees to Ford, 8 April 1976, W. Allen Moore Papers, Box 4, Ford Library.

83. U.S. News and World Report, 22 December 1975, 17–19.

84. For a discussion of the movement in the 1970s for expanded labor market and employment policies, see Weir, Margaret, Politics and Jobs (Princeton, 1992), chaps. 4–5.Google Scholar

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86. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 176; Garfinkel and McClanahan, Single Mothers and Their Children, 118–19.

87. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 117–19.

88. Doolittle et al., “Mirage,” 63.

89. Ibid., 63. For an earlier case for the incrementalist approach, see Aaron, Henry, Why Is Welfare So Hard to Reform? (Washington, D.C., 1973).Google Scholar

90. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 110; 123–25.

91. Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 49–51.

92. Kraemer, Datawars, 126–43.

93. A description of the KGB model is in a paper by the model's creators (listed in reverse order here): David Betson, David Greenberg, and Richard Kasten, “A Simulation of the Program for Better Jobs and Income,” Technical Analysis Paper #17, Office of Income Security Policy, HEW, January 1979. On the “monster memo,” see Patterson, James T., “Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform,” in Fink, Gary and Graham, Hugh, eds., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post–New Deal Era (Lawrence, Kan., forthcoming).Google Scholar

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95. For an overview of Carter's economic policy, see Bruce Schulman, “Slouching Toward the Supply Side: Jimmy Carter and the New American Political Economy,” in Fink and Graham, Carter Presidency.

96. HEW, Report on the 1977 Welfare Reform Study, May 1977.

97. HEW Press Release, “Welfare Reform,” 6 August 1977, IRP Archives; Sloney, James R. et al. , “The Better Jobs and Income Plan: A Guide to President Carter's Welfare Reform Proposal and Major Issues” (Washington, D.C., 1978).Google Scholar

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100. Demkovich, , “The Numbers Are the Issue in the Debate over Welfare Reform,” National Journal, 22 April 1978, 633.Google Scholar

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102. Schulman, “Slouching Toward the Supply Side,” 28.

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104. “Reagan Trips over Sally on Welfare Queen,” Washington Star, 4 February 1976, photocopied in Needham Papers, Box 5, Ford Library.