Welfare Politics: Finally Getting Nothing At All

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN now has the dubious honor of being ambassador to India, a post that is apparently a far cry from his previous work on the Urban Affairs Council. His latest appointment confirms his double role of academic savant and government servant--he has served the Federal government's executive branch nearly continuously since 1961. Like his predecessor, John Kenneth Galbraith, the most visible member of the Economics Department, Moynihan has added New Delhi to the well-tread Cambridge-Washington route. If he follows Galbraith's lead as the art collector by bringing back more Indian miniature paintings from his jaunt, the Fogg will welcome him home.

In India Moynihan must deal with the Malthusian problems of population and food supply, but in Washington he faced an equivalent problem for a developed country--the so-called issue of poverty amid plenty.

After his many years as Washington counsel, Moynihan presents, in The Politics of A Guaranteed Income, a detailed account of Nixon's first-term proposal for a guaranteed family income. The president's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) was a failure, but it was a curious failure and Moynihan's reportage and analysis is helpful in deciphering the long story. Moynihan was the FAP's chief architect and he tells its history as only an intimate expert can, yet his personal stake in the plan gives him an obvious bias in its favor. His familiarity with government is an asset in writing the book. But his ties to this particular proposal seem detrimental. His snideness in describing opponents of the program is only irritating. One blatant instance of it is his denigrating description of some particularly adamant opposition: "The most determined opponent of the bill when it reached Congress was to be Senator John J. Williams, Republican of Delaware, a chicken farmer." Williams, a U.S. Senator since 1946, once sold grain for chicken feed in his hometown of Millsboro, Del., but to classify a fourth term senior senator as a chicken farmer is surely carrying a grudge too far.

THE FAMILY ASSISTANCE PLAN rolled a guaranteed annual income and a negative income tax into one structure. The $4 billion plan, involving only families, started with a base payment of $1600 (to a family of four) and added increments for additional children. The negative tax was set up so that every dollar over $720 earned by the family reduced the income subsidy by 50 cents--a 50 per cent marginal tax rate. The plan would most benefit the working poor who were not covered under Federal Aid to Dependent Children. Combined with existing programs--food stamps, medical payments, and public housing--the new base income of most families was to assure that "poverty" would no longer exist in America.

Moynihan's book has two aspects--the journalistic and somewhat biased one, and an equally questionable analytic one. The Politics of a Guaranteed Income is interspersed with terse commentary such as: "Men who counsel caution in a president do him no disservice, but they do not add much to his day. At the very top of government there ought to be some occasional moment of high spirts, of brave abandon." This may be true, but when?

Moynihan proposes two main theses: Nixon's FAP was radical reform, and only a conservative executive could institute such a liberal program. He repeats these themes over and over until the reader is praying to be just simply left alone.

THE FAP FAILED because people in the Senate saw it as basic welfare reform, which it was not. Moynihan correctly says that FAP was a major program. But by itself FAP would not have reformed a badly mangled welfare system except by adding more millions of people to the welfare rolls. Senator Williams torpedoed the bill with his charts and graphs, showing that the total welfare system includes work disincentives which the FAP would not correct. When Nixon presented the FAP to the nation in August, 1969, he stressed that the plan would make work compulsory: "Anyone who accepts benefits must also accept work or training provided suitable jobs are available," he said. But people who refused to work were only penalized $300--not much of a work incentive. The negative income tax was to provide the rest of the incentive because there was no final threshold for welfare payments. But when Williams inspected the charts calculating medical and food stamp payments (which are subject to threshold effects), it was clear that there was still no real work incentive. The facts and figures pointed to a Friedmanesque solution for redistribution: give away money through a straight negative income tax and abolish all other programs.

Moynihan's second thesis--that a conservative Nixon co-opted the liberals by proposing a reform plan--rests upon the assumption that all Congressmen should have supported the FAP. The liberal Democrats have always favored welfare reform and could be expected to propose a guaranteed income of their own (McGovern did); the Republicans could be expected to go along with their president's program on principle; and the conservative Dixiecrats were counted on to back the plan because their states would receive the most benefits. But the plan failed and it failed from the left. Liberals were heard saying, "It's not enough," and finally complaining that it accomplished nothing. The FAP lost its momentum because Nixon did not expect to be attacked from the left and he had no defense prepared. It was obvious--and Nixon noted this--that adding more benefits would require a complete redefinition of the role of the Federal government because a huge percentage of the populace would be receiving benefits.

THE NAGGING DOUBT about welfare is the issue of dependency: the more that welfare is increased, the more people will rely on it. If the government becomes a paternal guardian, there is less necessity for people to plan their own lives or protect themselves against misfortunes like broken homes and illegitimate children. In suggesting an increased welfare plan, Nixon was perhaps caught advocating a system of additional dependency that offended his own sense of values. Possibly this doubt about the president's depth of conviction led people to examine the plan more closely and finally to defeat it.

In the end, it is curious that the Family Assistance Plan was defeated not by individuals, but by the decision--making process itself. When an able backer like Wilbur D. Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, guided FAP through Congress, it passed easily. It failed only when the forces of struggle and counter struggle couldn't decide if it was too much or too little. And so we finally got nothing at all.