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

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 99-129

  O'connor, Alice ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84906211655     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600005546     Document Type: Article

References (138)

1. Alice O'Connor, “Neither Charity Nor Relief: The War on Poverty and the Effort to Redefine the Basis of Social Provision,” in Donald T. Critchlow and charles H. Parker, eds., Always With Us: A History of Private Charity and Public Welfare (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).
2. This theme has by now become a perennial in welfare reform, as Daniel P. Moynihan reminded economist David Ellwood, who was appointed Clinton's Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS in 1993. “So, you've come to do welfare reform,” Ellwood quotes Moynihan as saying at the time, “I'll look forward to reading your book about why it failed this time.” Ellwood, “Welfare Reform As I Knew It,” American Prospect, May-June 1996, 22.
3. Richard M. Nixon, Television Address, 8 August 1969.
4. For estimations of cash programs, see James T. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1994 (Cambridge, 1994), 171
5. Robert J. Lampman to Arthur F. Burns, “The Recent Increase in the Number of AFDC Recipients,” Burns Papers, Box A32, Folder 10, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
6. On in-kind benefits, see Laurence E. Lynn Jr., “A Decade of Policy Developments in the Income Maintenance System,” in Robert H. Haveman, A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs: Achievements, Failures, and Lessons (New York, 1977), 55–117
7. Gary Burtless, “Public Spending for the Poot: Trends, Prospects, and Economic Limits,” in Sheldon H. Danziger and Daniel H. Weinberg, Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn't (Cambridge, 1986), 22–23.
8. Lynn, “Income Maintenance,” in Haveman, 85
9. Burtless, “Public Spending for the Poor,” 21.
10. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (New York, 1973), 17.
11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Crises in Welfare,” The Public Interest (Winter 1968): 13.
12. The Public Interest, 13–14.
13. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 90.
14. “Welfare Out of Control,” U.S. News and World Report, 8 February 1971, 32.
15. “Welfare–The Shame of a Nation,” Newsweek, 8 February 1971, 23.
16. Lampman, “AFDC Recipients,” 5
17. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 178.
18. On the history of migration to the cities, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York, 1991)
19. Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York, 1992), 205–265
20. Joe W. Trotter Jr., “Blacks in the Urban North: The ‘Underclass’ Question in Historical Perspective,” in Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993), 55–84.
21. For a review of the sociological literature on migration, poverty, and welfare, see William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, 1987), 177–180.
22. See also Jacqueline Jones, “Southern Diaspora: Origins of the Northern ‘Underclass,’” in Katz, ed., Underclass Debate, 44–45.
23. The question of whether differential welfare benefits stimulate migration has also been a subject of continued debate and shifting views in the literature. While several more recent studies find support for the proposition, research in the early 1970s generally found no evidence that benefit levels were causing migration. Larry H. Long, “Poverty Status and Receipt of Welfare Among Migrants and Nonmigrants in Large Cities,” American Sociological Review 39 (February 1974): 46–56.
24. For a more recent view, see Paul Peterson and Mark C. Rom, Welfare Magnets: A New Case for a National Standard (Washington, D.C., 1990).
25. Newsweek, 8 February 1971, 23–24.
26. Newsweek, 22.
27. Martin Rein and Hugh Heclo, “What Welfare Crisis?–A Comparison Among the United States, Britain, and Sweden,” Public Interest (Fall 1973): 65–66.
28. Gilbert Steiner, “Reform Follows Reality: The Growth of Welfare,” The Public Interest (Winter 1974): 47–65.
29. Arthur Burns to Nixon, 11 February 1969, Burns Papers, Box 32, Folder 10, Ford Library.
30. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 6.
31. Nixon, State of the Union Address, 22 January 1971.
32. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 80
33. Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kan., 1996), 215.
34. Moynihan, “The Case for a Family Policy,” reprinted in Coping: Essays in the Practice of Government (New York, 1973), 76.
35. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 82–84.
36. Moynihan, quoted in Arthur Burns memorandum to President Nixon, February 11, 1969, Burns Papers, Box A32, Folder 10, Ford Library.
37. Edward C. Banfield, “A Memorandum on the Welfare Problem,” Burns Papers, Box A32, Folder 11, Ford Library
38. Time, 8 February 1971, 22.
39. For Banfield's proposals for dealing with the “underclass” problem more generally, see The Unheavenly City (Boston, 1970)
40. The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston, 1974).
41. Newsweek, 8 February 1971, 26.
42. For more on the welfare crisis as the result of a strategy employed by the NWRO, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1993), 330–338.
43. Gilbert Steiner, “Reform Follows Reality,” 64.
44. Lampman, “AFDC Recipients.”
45. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 179.
46. Steiner, “Reform Follows Reality,” 65.
47. Rein and Heclo, “What Welfare Crisis?” 66.
48. On welfare and the urban crisis, see also Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York, 1986), 280–283.
49. Rein and Heclo, “What Welfare Crisis?” 63–64.
50. “What Welfare Crisis?”, 75.
51. For a review of trends in single parenthood, see Irwin Garfinkel and Sara S. McClanahan, Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (Washington, D.C., 1986), 45–85.
52. This new image of poverty, sharply different from the “other America” that informed the War on Poverty, was largely the result of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a longitudinal survey of households beginning in the late 1960s, that by the early 1970s was publishing the results of its first wave of surveys. See also Lynn, “Income Maintenance,” in Haveman, 98–99.
53. Moynihan, “The Crises in Welfare,” 15.
54. 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, forthcoming), chap. 6.
55. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 93.
56. On the ideological and gender dimensions of the contrast between social insurance and welfare, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York, 1994), 145–207.
57. Gilbert Y. Steiner, Social Insecurity: The Politics of Welfare (Chicago, 1966), 18–47.
58. Carl Brauer, “Kennedy, Johnson, and the War on Poverty,” Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 95–119.
59. Steiner, “Reform Follows Reality,” 55–56
60. Social Insecurity, 141–175.
61. Joel Haveman and Linda E. Demkovich, “Making Some Sense of the Welfare Mess,” National Journal, 8 January 1977, 44.
62. Harold Watts, Statement before the Fiscal Policy Subcommittee of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, 13 June 1968, Institute for Research on Poverty Archives, Madison, Wis.
63. 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.
64. Robert Haveman, Introduction, in Haveman, ed., A Decade of Anti-Poverty Programs, 17.
65. Watts, JEC Statement.
66. National Journal, 19 October 1974, 1565.
67. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962)
68. Christopher Green, Negative Taxes and the Poverty Problem (Washington, D.C., 1967).
69. Friedman, quoted in Green, 58–59.
70. Office of Economic Opportunity, “National Anti-Poverty Plan, FY 1968–1972” (June 1966), vii.
71. Shriver Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.
72. “National Anti-Poverty Plan,” iv.
73. Robert Levine to Sargent Shriver, 6 May 1967, IRP Archives.
74. Levine to Theodore Berry, 7 June 1967, IRP Archives.
75. Alice O'Connor, “Social Research as Social Policy: The New Jersey Negative Income Tax Experiment,” paper presented at the APPAM meetings, November 1995
76. Walter Williams, The Struggle for a Negative Income Tax: A Case Study (Washington, D.C., 1972).
77. The results of the experiments are reported in Harold Watts and Albert Rees, eds., The New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment (New York, 1977).
78. On Johnson's resistance to the idea, see Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement, 161.
79. Moynihan, T/ve Politics of a Guaranteed Income, 218–220.
80. 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 daycare 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, 162–164.
81. Vincent J. Burke and Vee Burke, Nixon's Good Deed: Welfare Reform (New York, 1974).
82. Moynihan quoted in Newsweek, 8 February 1971, 26
83. Nixon quoted in Jill Quadango, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994), 123.
84. Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement, 216–218
85. Quadango, The Color of Welfare, 117–34, Nixon Televised Address, 8 August 1969
86. Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New York, 1969).
87. Nixon quoted in Laurence Lynn and David Whitman, The President as Policymaker: Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform (Philadelphia, 1981), 18.
88. For a discussion of Nixon's reorganization plans, see Richard Nathan, The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency (New York, 1975).
89. Hugh Heclo, “OMB and the Presidency: The Problem of ‘Neutral Competence,’” Public Interest (Winter 1975): 80–98.
90. Time, 1 February 1971, on Nixon's speech.
91. 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.
92. Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 28–29.
93. On southern opposition to FAP, see Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 26
94. Quadango, The Color of Welfare, 129–131.
95. Williams, The Struggle for a Negative Income Tax, 20.
96. O'Connor, “Social Research as Social Policy.” On Senator Williams and the “notch” effect, see Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 26.
97. Elliot Richardson and James Hodgson to Nixon, 2 June 1972, Needham Papers, Box 6, Ford Library.
98. 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.
99. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, “Income Supplement Program” (Washington, D.C., 1974)
100. National Journal, 19 October 1974, 1559–1566.
101. National Journal, 19 October 1974, 561.
102. The evolution of these models is discussed in detail in Kenneth L. Kraemer et al., Dataware: The Politics of Modeling in Federal Policymaking (New York, 1987), 38–62.
103. Watts and Rees, The New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiments, vol. 2.
104. Lynn, “Income Maintenance,” in Haveman, 116.
105. Secretary Weinberger to President Gerald R. Ford, 20 December 1974, White House Operations Collection, Cheney Files, Box 13, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
106. Lynn, “Income Maintenance,” in Haveman, 117.
107. Weinberger to Ford, 7 January 1975
108. Kenneth Cole to Ford, 15 January 1975, both in Needham Papers, Ford Library, Box 6.
109. 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
110. W. Allen Moore Papers, Box 4, Ford Library.
111. U.S. News and World Report, 22 Decembei 1975, 17–19.
112. For a discussion of the movement in the 1970s for expanded labor market and employment policies, see Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs (Princeton, 1992), chaps. 4–5.
113. Frederick Doolittle, Frank Levy, and Michael Wiseman, “The Mirage of Reform,” The Public Interest (Spring 1977): 67.
114. For a review of changes in income-maintenance programs up to the mid-1970s, see Lynn, “Income Maintenance,” in Haveman.
115. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 176
116. Garfinkel and McClanahan, Single Mothers and Their Children, 118–119.
117. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 117–119.
118. Doolittle et al., “Mirage,” 63.
119. “Mirage,”, 63.
120. For an earlier case for the incrementalist approach, see Henry Aaron, Why Is Welfare So Hard to Reform? (Washington, D.C., 1973).
121. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 110; 123–25.
122. Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 49–51.
123. Kraemer, Datawars, 126–143.
124. 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.
125. On the “monster memo,” see James T. Patterson, “Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform,” in Gary Fink and Hugh Graham, eds., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence, Kan., forthcoming).
126. Lynn and Whitman, The President as Policymaker, 36–40.
127. 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.
128. HEW, Report on the 1977 Welfare Reform Study, May 1977.
129. HEW Press Release, “Welfare Reform,” 6 August 1977, IRP Archives
130. James R. Sloney et al., “The Better Jobs and Income Plan: A Guide to President Carter's Welfare Reform Proposal and Major Issues” (Washington, D.C., 1978).
131. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 127–128.
132. Linda E. Demkovich, “Welfare Reform: Can Carter Succeed Where Nixon Failed?” National Journal, 27 August 1977, 1328
133. Sheldon Danziger, Robert Haveman, and Eugene Smolensky, “Welfare Reform Carter Style: A Guide and a Critique,” report prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, 10 October 1977.
134. Demkovich, “The Numbers Are the Issue in the Debate over Welfare Reform,” National Journal, 22 April 1978, 633.
135. New York Times, 16 November 1978, A23.
136. Schulman, “Slouching Toward the Supply Side,” 28.
137. Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford, 20 December 1974, with attached “California's Blueprint for National Welfare Reform,” September 1974, Cheney Files, Box 13, Ford Library.
138. “Reagan Trips over Sally on Welfare Queen,” Washington Star, 4 February 1976, photocopied in Needham Papers, Box 5, Ford Library.