Patrick Moynihan's Shipof Fools
Branch, Taylor
Patrick Moynihan’s Shipof Fools by Taylor Branch I never thought Pat Moynihan would interest me, much less convince me that I am a bigger fool than he is. My feelings about him were...
...Only the liberal Senate stood in the way of $6 billion in direct cash payments to the poor, the establishment by law of the principle of a guaranteed annual income, and a momentous social revolution in the rural South...
...The day before Nixon went on television with his original proposal, Wiley made his position clear: “This plan is anti-poor, and anti-black...
...The Senate conservatives lectured Administration witnesses about how the bill was not reform and would not curb abuse...
...The response in the press was overwhelmingly favorable, and the polls showed commanding public support...
...As most economists secretly envy a colleague who succeeds in the stock market, most political academics aspire to be someone whose theories might enable them to stand up to Mayor Daley or Wilbur Mills when the chips are down...
...FAP would be enacted “because it has to be done...
...Immediately before the vote, John Gardner of Common Cause laid plans for a massive lobbying effort in favor of FAP, but Wiley and the NWRO threatened to show up at every event with a couple of hundred welfare mothers to belittle their commitment and call them racists...
...You didn’t like to hear that stuff about how the military would gobble up the budget anyway, but it was especially galling to hear it from Moynihan...
...The next day it was over...
...George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO...
...His reputation among properly cynical people fit this image...
...It always seemed irksome to me that Moynihan, the poverty man, took it upon himself to make statements about the postwar military budget...
...He took the bill apart, studied it, and was gradually won over...
...never had been...
...Therefore, I am doubly interested in seeing you go up now with a genuinely new, unmistakably needed program, which would attract the attention of the world, far less the United States...
...Talk of a stunning rapprochement with the Soviets and the Chinese...
...Nixon’s Middle-American senators were beaten by a coalition of left and right, 10 to 6. Harris, McCarthy, Albert Gore, and Clinton Anderson were against the bill, along with Herman Talmadge, Harry Byrd, and four Republicans...
...By the time Moynihan finishes playing his flute on this theme, you have forgotten the Great Society antipoverty schemes and that frustrating, boring old battle against the ghetto and the shack...
...As presidential attentions go,” says Moynihan, “the arrangements were not inconsiderable...
...The reader becomes mentally seduced as Moynihan goes on making fuzzy distinctions between dependency and more familiar ills...
...John W. Byrnes, the ranking Republican on Ways and Means...
...Moynihan’s theory is that NWRO opposed the Nixon bill out of rather naked organizational self-interest...
...We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t’’ support FAP, said Rep...
...Random House, $15...
...If it were boosted to $5,500, for example, FAP would cover more than half the families in the United States, and the program would cost more than $70 billion...
...Unlike big foreign ventures like the trip to Peking, they cost money-and Moynihan hammered away at the theme that there would be precious little money...
...The most dramatic changes would take place in the small rural counties of the South...
...The Nixon proposal was always considered a niggardly application of this principle because the benefit levels were so low-a family of four with no income would receive $1,600 plus food stamps...
...Nixon did not reject the plan...
...Like Social Security payments and government salaries, the floor could be expected to rise regularly...
...With the Republicans in the White House focused on this revolutionary new threat to the family and to the entire social fabric, Moynihan was poised to strike with a program that simply gives money to people because they are poor...
...In the general debate several congressmen complained that welfare was so touchy that it was impossible to find safe ground...
...Even so, the scope of the initial proposal was, as Moynihan would say, not unimpressive...
...He persuaded Nixon to invite the six key senators on the Finance Committee out to the Western White House for a state dinner honoring the president of Mexico and a little chit-chat amidst the Grand Treatment from the President...
...Finch, Shultz, and Moynihan went before Wilbur Mills and the House Ways and Means Committee, where they painstakingly explained the bill...
...Still, he reserves his greatest contempt for the liberal senators, especially Harris, who wound up holding the balance of power...
...The lame-duck LBJ had wanted to propose some visionary legislation before he left office...
...The Senator was on firm ground, since most of the public thought of the problem in the same way...
...Moynihan cites one county in the Mississippi Delta with average family size of seven people and average family income of $1,538...
...All Nixon’s talk about “work- axy got the money: fare” didn’t impress these hard-nosed With astonishing consistency, middle...
...FAP was impossible to oppose outright unless you were engulfed in symbolic politics, which was precisely what was happening in the Senate Finance Committee...
...Moynihan was alarmed...
...magnificent diary of his efforts to get a guaranteed income proposed by President Nixon and then enacted into law...
...In mid-April he instructed his assistant, Martin Anderson, to write up a history of Speenhamland, a welfare scheme used in Great Britain about the time of King George 111...
...Under the 50-percent tax rate, the family would “owe” the Treasury $5,500, while the Treasury would “owe” the family its $5,500 guaranteed income...
...Burns understood that Moynihan was pushing a negative income tax with a lot of leafy words on it, and he said that he objected on grounds of conservative, Protestant principle: “We have been moving away from the concept of welfare based on disabilityrelated deprivation and need to the concept of welfare as a matter of right...
...You would be reduced to presiding over marginal increases in a whole host of programs that you don’t believe in and that aren’t yours...
...Moynihan and Laird kept making public statements about the “mythical” peace dividend...
...The Administration’s complicated answers seemed lame, although technically correct in their assertion that FAP would be a great improvement...
...As his income rises, the government would gradually reduce his payment until, above the poverty level, he would receive no payment at all and actually begin paying graduated income taxes to the Treasury...
...It soon became clear, to Moynihan’s horror, that all Long meant by welfare reform was dealing with the problem of the welfare Cadillacall the chiseling being done by the “brood mares,” in Long’s famous phrase...
...Instead, he let the opposing factions argue it out within the White House while he assumed a judge-like reserve, waiting to do his job, which was to Make Decisions...
...Mills studied it cautiously, calling Administration witnesses over to his committee room frequently for informal discussions...
...That would cost $6 billion, a fairly healthy chunk for a beginning...
...Nixon had just invaded and an outlet for their nobler inCambodia, and Agnew was beginning stincts, the whole package-a pleasant the scurrilous 1970 campaign against sense of self-denial for the cause withradiclibs...
...Once again many billion dollars were to be spent to aid the poor without giving any money to the poor...
...About 40 per cent of the population of Mississippi would begin receiving federal checks...
...I hope the Moynihan book sells a lot of copies, so he will at least get something for the struggle...
...One reason the Administration set the floor at $1,600 was cost: the operation of the negative income tax made the cost of FAP go up geometrically if the floor were higher...
...The glow wore off, and neither Nixon nor the Mexican folk dancers could take up residence in the chambers of the Senate Fin ance Committee...
...Moynihan began by sharply redefining the nature of the problem: “The issue of welfare is the issue of dependency,” he says in the first sentence of the book...
...The liberals, who did not understand the implications of the bill very well, saw Finch’s testimony as a confirmation of their suspicions about that tricky Moynihan...
...Those making above $11,720 would owe more than their guaranteed income, and they would begin paying taxes...
...Accordingly, the President declared that the Family Assistance Plan was not a ‘guaranteed income.’ ” The show was on, and the Administration could snatch almost any kind of FAP you wanted from its hat with but a moment’s notice for the speechwriters...
...Welfare was not such...
...California’s Governor Ronald Reagan had already announced his opposition to FAP on ideological grounds, and this worried all the political strategists in the White House...
...Three Democrats supported FAP: William Fulbright, Ribicoff, and surprisingly, Russell Long...
...This was important enough in itself, but it had the additional advantage of making the welfare floor an issue in congressional elections...
...Then off around the world, receiving great acclamation...
...He would have few chances, and here was one proposal worked out in such detail that it was standing up under criticism in an extremely hostile Administration...
...It’s a big win,” said Wiley...
...Nixon knew this, although, as Moynihan says, “Nothing required that a guaranteed income be called a guaranteed income...
...It is different from poverty...
...Welfare reform and revenue sharing seeped into the national press as subjects of great concern...
...States were required to pay the difference between the new national welfare floor and their current standards-so that no welfare floor would be lowered...
...More boldness was needed...
...It would also create an enormous demand for the services of educated middle-class persons certified as competent for dispensing “quality” early childhood training...
...And Nixon refused interest...
...Having waited until the House finished with FAP before deigning to look at it (protecting the dignity of the Senate), Russell Long made a widely publicized opening speech on the Senate floor...
...He had already decided,” says Moynihan...
...Politicians and journals of the right were similarly pleased, as was the Chamber of Commerce...
...Moynihan must have gone home to read Kafka...
...At the center of the storm it was very quiet,” writes Moynihan...
...But he had lost Friedman’s critical support, and he continued to be haunted by the legacy of the Great Society...
...The NWRO membership was drawn overwhelmingly from welfare families in the North-that is, from people who stood not to gain much immediately from the plan unless they could persuade the states to translate their revenuesharing savings under FAP into higher welfare standards...
...Fortunately, the ’weight of historical opinion came down in favor of Moynihan and against Polyani...
...Of course, the Family Assistance Plan did nothing about Long’s kind of welfare reform...
...It was probably also the case that as a Democrat and a complete newcomer to the President’s circle I represented less of a threat to other members of the President’s circle, who by contrast had to see Burns as a rival...
...He began by sizing up the new President: “Nixon in office was beginning to change...
...Patrick Moynihan’s Shipof Fools by Taylor Branch I never thought Pat Moynihan would interest me, much less convince me that I am a bigger fool than he is...
...The Family Assistance Plan passed the mossback House on April 16, 1970, by a vote of 243 to 155...
...FAP could not overcome these “notches” in poor people’s earnings...
...Speenhamland had “contributed to economic expansion,” he said, not to individual laxity...
...Moynihan pressed his advantage...
...They had 1972 to look forward to...
...He had spent two years of his life shepherding the radical idea of a guaranteed incomeb y-right through a conservative Republican Administration and the House of Representatives, only to have it shot down by a welfare organization and the only acknowledged populist in the U. S. Senate...
...FAP would have covered nearly 20 million people-more than half of them in the South, almost half of them nonwhite...
...The President was “satisfied” with his presentation and the debate shifted back to the computers and marital calculations...
...Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the closest thing to an FAP advocate on the committee, was very positive...
...but what they said they by dispensing rehabilitative services were doing was speaking from a superior knowledge about how to fight poverty, gained over a lifelong crusade that had provided many studies and much experience, if not success...
...Within two months of Nixon’s inauguration, Moynihan presented the President and the Urban Affairs Council (UAC) with a draft of FAP...
...The conservatives had made a real choice, with some conviction and intelligence behind it, and they were willing to live with the consequences...
...Much as earlier good was vital...
...Thereafter, Nixon described welfare reform as his “flagship,” “the warship from which his colors flew...
...Families would receive these payments no matter where the man of the house slept or what he did or didn’t do when he was awake...
...The Great Leap Backward In retrospect, Moynihan believes that the loss of conservative support was the turning point that killed the bill: “The very intensity of public feeling on the subject made it difficult to oppose welfare reform, but when first the committee staff, and then the ranking Republican Senator [ Williams] , succeeded in casting doubt on the assertion that Family Assistance was reform, the matter was lost...
...I don’t remember anyone saying it was part of his strategy to obtain the guaranteed income, which comes out clearly in his book...
...It’s a proud thing for university people to feel as hairy-chested and practical as those out in the real world...
...In the book, this introduction is merely setting the stage for the birth of FAP, but I think it was also part of Moynihan’s strategy...
...The programs of OEO were Nixon proposal when the Senate was quintessentially of this kind...
...But the Great Society task force on income maintenance rejected the negative income tax and the guaranteed annual income...
...Things were coming undone...
...Everyone was missing the cues that Moynihan had designed for them-the ones that worked so well in the House back when liberals hated Nixon less and conservatives went along with him in the first glow of his presidency...
...The magic seemed to work well: Gallup found that 62 per cent of American voters opposed a guaranteed annual income, and that 65 per cent simultaneously favored the Nixon plan to “clean up the welfare mess...
...the same family with a $3,000 income would get a $460 cash supplement...
...The Miracle Comes Undone Liberals were certainly subject to pressures against FAP other than their own self-interest...
...He needed a Magna Carta, a New Deal, a Common Market...
...He who is against dependency is for independence...
...Hence FAP...
...to say grandiose, liberal-sounding The heart of FAP’s “income stratthings about poverty or civil rights or egy” was to give money directly to any other chapter of the cause...
...The federal government, which had never set national welfare standards, was to nationalize the first $1,600 in welfare payments for a family of four with no income...
...His conduct was not unjustifiable, it was merely weak...
...Coincidentally, they were two of only four FAP supporters close to the President, the other two being Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch and Labor Secretary George Shultz...
...As Moynihan notes, every congressman and senator would face a large bloc of voters among welfare recipients and the working poor who would be focused on their representatives’ position regarding the family assistance floor...
...In effect, it makes work senseless and irrational, a situation which rankles conservatives to the bone...
...Most of what remains at the end of the book, however, is a collection of unmistakable facts...
...This caused concern in the Cabinet room...
...Once you have asked for it, you can resist the pressures endlessly to add marginal funds to already doubtful programs [emphasis added] , Nixon was interested...
...It came to be perceived as something of a risk for a Washington liberal concerned with credentials in civil rights circles to persist in support of FAP,” writes Moynihan...
...Moynihan thinks this was largely attributable to the unrepresentative make-up of the committee, which was composed almost entirely of Southern Democrats and Republicans from sparsely populated Western states with few welfare problems...
...The South ern er s , writ e s M oynihan, grasped what the bill would mean for their states: “Family Assistance was income redistribution, and by any previous standards it was massive...
...He could hardly afford to embrace a program put forth by Richard Nixon without yelling, “More...
...He didn’t seem to compromise his basic legislative principles to save the germ of FAP (as, for example, the Kennedy liberals did when they decided the only way to reach full employment was through defense spending), but he did employ a strategy that required simultaneous and contradictory deceptions of all sorts of political figures...
...Moynihan was flying high...
...Liberals call it “opportunity...
...It is a flagrant example of institutional racism...
...Everyone from congressmen to church groups was afraid that supporting FAF’ would be judged de facto evidence of racism...
...Maybe that’s too cruel a question, like asking Hoover why he didn’t prevent the Depression...
...He was musing, proofreading his chapter in some distant history book...
...Whereas Bums had lost behind closed doors on the same matter, Long went public and made the Administration very queasy about support on the right...
...This suited the FAP people, since there had always been an element of revenue sharing in the proposal anyway...
...On August 8, 1969, Nixon delivered a television address on his domestic proposals, with FAP at the heart of his message...
...Everyone agreed that this was inadequate for a family of four...
...He had to move quickly...
...There would be no Vietnam “peace dividend,” he said, and-forecasting what must have been ultimate horror for Nixon-Congress would put on relentless pressure to use up what little “new program” money there would be “on a sort of 1 0-percent across-the-board increase in all the Great Society programs each year...
...There was ample justification for attempting to mau-mau the Congress into raising the $1,600 figure, but not for fighting the bill altogether...
...hard-hats and old virtues because they In fact, the services strategy seemed to weren’t getting any tangible relief for have infected the whole Democratic their burdens at all...
...In about 16 states, mostly Southern, the FAP floor would have been higher than state welfare standards...
...Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) brought together two ideas that had been tossed about on the political fringes for years-the guaranteed annual income and the negative income tax...
...Moynihan contended for the nod of approval...
...senators’ who took deep class professionals-whatever their racial or breaths when Contemplating Nixon’s ethnic backgrounds-when asked to devise Place in history- WOrkfare merely ways of improving the condition of lowerincensed the liberals...
...How weak and undistinguished...
...The poor got showing that the bill would not force the services, which were generally people to work and Williams was considered ineffective, and the showing that it might not induce them middle-class professionals in the galeither...
...Taylor Branch is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Having lost one kind of welfare reform in FAP, the Administration is now “reforming” welfare chiselers, with fairly comfortable support from Congress...
...Burns had greater prestige with the President, Moynihan summarizes, but he also suffered from some tactical problems: I operated from the White House itselfan intangible but unmistakable advantageand through the UAC meeting schedule controlled a fair amount of the President’s time and that of his Cabinet...
...This is the price of getting the $1,600.’ ” A remarkable thing for a man like Nixon to say...
...The conservative appeal was badly wounded because Long was through the government...
...Some questions remain at the end of the book...
...It was difficult at Lenny’s to view the matter from the perspective of one of those families in the see-through Southern shacks where income would be tripled, or from the perspective of the 13 million working poor...
...Imagine that, Mr...
...Unlike the quiet and businesslike, if secretive, Ways and Means Committee, the Finance Committee i s a stage for symbolic politics and for grandstanding in public...
...FAP gave most of its help to a portion of the poverty population that NWRO was not...
...The current system was intolerable, but Nixon’s bill was also being criticized from every direction...
...Once again, the liberal Democrats beat down Moynihan’s proposal, which, Moynihan writes bitterly, “had it been put forth by one of their own, would surely have been hailed as the largest sbcial achievement of the second half of the century...
...And most people should kick themselves regularly throughout the book for not having seen the significance of what Moynihan was trying to do...
...Moynihan doesn’t give any attention to things he or Nixon might have done to save FAP despite the obstacles...
...You are concerned about how robust and dignified a poor family would feel under FAP, and the program’s impact on poverty is a pleasant, but rather insignificant, side effect...
...Of course, Wiley was also an emerging black leader whose reputation was not yet firmly established...
...Millions of families were included other than those who made nothing at all...
...Conservatives call that a “work incentive...
...The timing was right...
...As a person’s income falls, the government would gradually increase his “negative” income tax payment...
...He directs his in their tax breaks...
...The family would be even...
...Since liberals Party, which is one reason why the were too embarrassed to ask the guaranteed annual income kept government for anything themselves, getting shot down by Wilbur Cohen some psychic reinforcement of their and his colleagues in the Johnson role as patrons for the poor and the Administration...
...They were in their best election-year voices and their most pious Sunday moods about the vitality of hard work...
...An camaraderie for the Middle Ameri- income strategy threatened interests cans, who were the most crucial ele- associated with a services strategy,” ment of his new constituency (and writes Moynihan, “and this was a who needed to hear nice words about direct threat to Democratic liberals...
...Povertv’s New Name His first task had been to convince Nixon, and it was no mean trick to convince a self-made Quaker to throw money at people who would neither work nor vote Republican...
...And in the general optimism of the occasion it didn’t sound too alarming when Senator Long told the President that in his committee the only “objection is to paying people not to work...
...This was the worst possible atmosphere for the consideration of Nixon’s bill...
...An extra dollar of income would mean that the family would lose public housing assistance or Medicaid or a free lunch program or some other income supplement...
...The Nixon Administration’s attitude on welfare has regressed about 30 years...
...Moynihan doesn’t seem to give enough emphasis to dissension within the White House after Nixon made his original decision...
...In effect, the bill defined away all the moral questions about whether a person should work by looking strictly at income...
...The $1,600 figure was low, but it did not justify the fuzzy impression of many people (including me) that all poor families in the United States would be reduced to living on $1,600 a year...
...Also, the mechanism of the negative income tax-whereby benefits were reduced by 50 per cent of earnings after a $720 exemptionmeant that all poor families in the country would be receiving income supplements from the federal government if they earned less than $4,000...
...What been weaned on the New Deal-Great they were doing, he says, was covering Society strategy of helping the poor their asses...
...Why is it, he asks, that for the first time in American history the number of welfare cases is skyrocketing regardless of fluctuations in unemployment or poverty statistics...
...We ’re saved if we do and damned if we don”.’’ What the FAP, Pat...
...Moynihan was on his way...
...He was talking to himself...
...It is not a book about the melting pot, poverty subsystems, or any other sociological problem that purports to shed further light on life in the ghetto...
...Congress wouldn’t buy that, said Bryce Harlow, the President’s lobbyist...
...My feelings about him were captured in several memorable Washington Post photographs-Moynihan delivering a White House briefing, his pointer in the air as he struck a ballet pose, his eyes rolled upward while speaking as if enraptured by his next thought, his cherubic moon face perched on his bow tie as he elaborated on Nixon’s plans for the destitute...
...Also, Moynihan waxes a bit too eloquently on the necessity of cynicism and the cunning to sell something in politics...
...Friedman hates the welfare system because it reduces a poor person’s benefits by one dollar for every dollar earned...
...Peril in SDeenhamland His chief rival was taciturn old Arthur Burns, now Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and then the President’s chief economic counselor...
...Riding High with Wilbur The last Cabinet meeting on FAP took place at Camp David on August 7. Most of the Cabinet was opposed, and Moynihan recognized that the plan was so complicated that few of them really understood it, a continuing plague...
...Not a single member of the Finance Committee supported FAP in the hearings...
...Nixon pleaded his case, and the senators went home contented with the weekend...
...Meanwhile, Senator John J. Williams of Delaware, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, threw down a headlong challenge to Moynihan’s expertise on the issue of work incentives...
...FAP would be the difference between Lincoln and Eisenhower, as Moynihan summarized in a note to Nixon during the spring 1969 debate: If your extra money goes down the drain I fear in four years’ time you really won’t have a single distinctive Nixon program to show for it all...
...Using excerpts from Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation, Burns and Anderson suggested that FAP was just a big Speenhamland, which had been a disaster because the chimneysweeps and rabble lost their productive instincts and sat around all day amusing themselves and writing pamphlets...
...FAP would be toyed with and modified over the next two years before abandonment, but Moynihan judged rightly that the guaranteed income was dead...
...The President asked for a response,” writes Moynihan, who then “rushed to the historians...
...He contrasts the liberal rejection of FAP with the all-out support for another an ti-poverty measure- the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, the day-care bill that Nixon vetoed : It was to be more costly by far than Family Assistance, providing benefits to a much larger population, while finessing the issue of a “work requirement”-day-care centers for working mothers can only be of use to mothers who work...
...He wished to be both for the bill and against it...
...through government enterprise...
...But FAP nearly died in Speenhamland...
...The mood of the NWRO was described as “jubilation...
...About 13 million more people who worked but were still below the poverty line would begin getting a bonus-farm workers, migrants, marginally employed laborers, those scraping through on odd jobs...
...Ahead lay his reputation in American history...
...The largest initial benefits of FAP went to two groups: the working poor and welfare families in the South...
...The political constraints were off,” writes Moynihan...
...It was a necessary and massive threat to an established political order that already knew itself to be half-disestablished...
...As Nixon told the first meeting of the Cabinet members on Moynihan’s Urban Affairs Council, “We don’t want the record written that we were too cautious...
...The first President to visit Romania...
...All families of four earning less than $1 1,720 would receive income supplements from the federal government instead of paying taxes to it...
...It was then called the Family Security System, but the name was changed before the program was announced because Melvin Laird said that any title with “security” and “system” in it sounded too “New Dealish” and insufficiently Republican...
...Something had to be done about welfare, he said, and this bill was not just tinkering...
...Or so it operated in the case of family assistance...
...When in doubt there was always the liberal editorial assurance that the $1,600 floor was ‘grossly inadequate.’ ” The $1,600 floor was inzidequate, but several complicated factors about the bill made this not nearly so heinous as it seemed...
...Indeed, linking welfare recipients and the working poor to the same payment scheme would exert enormous pressure on these two groups to form a single poverty constituency for the first time...
...All Moynihan’s arguments were hitting the wrong targets, and he was caught in his own crossfire...
...Yet Moynihan’s new book, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income,* is a - *The Politics of a Guaranteed National Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan...
...The harried Finch came up with all sorts of thin sophistries in an attempt to show that the bill was not a guaranteed income and that it was a disciplined product of Nixon’s work ethic...
...Shrewdly, Moynihan realized that it would be a mistake to cut up a close friend of the President that quickly, whatever the temptation...
...The National Council of Churches backed so far away from FAP that people thought the Council was returning to theology...
...It was obvious that his ego had driven him to snuggle up with Presidents indiscriminately so that he could make pronouncements from high places and tinker with the poor...
...Instead of humiliating Burns, Moynihan saw that he should throw him a bone: “It became necessary, in a word, for Burns to get something...
...He pulled out example after exam,ple of hypothetical circumstances in which people would have no incentive to work at certain income levels, despite the exalted negative income tax principle in Nixon’s bill...
...Moynihan has been appointed Ambassador to India, where, like Chester Bowles, people go when they have good ideas that are unpleasant at the White House...
...As Moynihan notes, the guaranteed income was a notion born on the left, and its main thrust was that all citizens should be assured of a minimum income-whether working or not, whether disabled or not...
...He was already besting Burns regularly, “enough to cause trouble if the pattern became too evident...
...He was ideologically opposed, along with most of the voters, but the arguments he put in the President’s ear must have produced some of the most bizarre scenes ever enacted in the drawing rooms of any monarch...
...Moynihan saw that he would never sell the guaranteed income by appealing to Nixon’s sense of obligation...
...Nixon was there trying to hand out some cash-not a lot, but some-under a radical new principle, while most liberals were over at Leonard Bernstein’s cruising around the hors d’oeuvre tables, muttering about the outrages of incrementalism...
...There was nothing the President had to do about welfare, as, for example, on taking office he had to deal with budgets and taxes and armaments, and so on through the range of presidential subjects...
...The grandeur was gone...
...Milton Friedman, the father of the negative income tax, made the same point, observing that his idea had been ruined by all the little marginal costs that poor‘ people faced in going to work-a 50-percent reduction in FAP benefits, Social Security taxes, lost benefits in Great Society programs, and so on...
...It might make him look better, and it might reduce room for fresh, purely Nixon initiatives later...
...Moynihan detects several reasons There was money in poverty as long as other than political chemistry why the you avoided the kind of direct Treasliberals mustered little support for the ury payment the businessmen prefer Family Assistance Plan...
...In fact, it proposed no significant legislation in the fields of welfare or poverty, sensing political staleness there...
...So Moynihan copied the LBJ amendment, except that he exempted all welfare mothers with children under six years of age-a slight liberalization of existing law...
...He finally reported the bill out of his committee intact and sponsored it on the House floor, along with Rep...
...Long scheduled the vote for November 20, and on the two days preceding, Senator Eugene McCarthy sponsored “people’s hearings” at the request of the NWRO...
...FAP would have nearly tripled each family’s income, raising it to $4,493...
...A parade of welfare spokesmen denounced the bill as racist, repressive, and inadequately funded...
...It looked like it might work, as “in the ambience of military deference and splendor, of high diplomacy mixed with small courtesies, John Wayne and Mexican folk dancing, the senators found themselves asserting that of course a bill of some sort had to be reported out...
...Long put neon lights on the “moral issue...
...In doing so, he displayed a thorough, if somewhat petty, understanding of the bill...
...Over in the Executive Office Building, Burns began losing out in sessions with the President...
...The sky was the limit...
...It was impossible to Republicans had promised the masses trust, let alone go to the wall for, a prosperity through business enterman like Nixon, who bombed children prise, Democrats now offered security and reciprocated liberal contempt...
...Those making less would receive FAP benefits...
...The Cabinet said no matter...
...He returned breathing history, and Moynihan caught the euphoria...
...The arithmetic of the negative tax was always difficult for Moynihan to get across...
...Moynihan is fairly explicit about his battle with Burns to get his proposal up before Nixon without its being severely molested...
...Welfare became part of the fickle Washington mood...
...The staff work was done quickly, since virtually the same people had presented virtually the same program to the Johnson Administration only months earlier...
...Moynihan pointed out that Congress had already passed a work requirement in the welfare amendments of 1967, signed by LBJ...
...I don’t care a damn about the work requirement,’ said the President...
...Moynihan told Nixon that he would have very few chances for history-making domestic initiatives...
...For one thing, the $1,600 (plus about $800 in food stamps) was not the only source of welfare in the country, but rather the federal base under the state programs...
...If income was too low, it would be supplemented without scrutinizing whether the person was able-bodied, upright, or imbued with the Protestant ethic...
...Welfare used to go up only when unemployment went up, and now it rises independently...
...The guaranteed income and the negative income tax are lost for the next four years, and probably, as Moynihan predicts, until at least the end of the decade...
...The “working poor” would be eligible for payments for the first time-families of four would get some supplement if they made less than $3,920, families of seven would be eligible unless they made more than $5,720...
...How much reform, he asked, did the legislation in fact provide...
...Then FAP ran into the Senate Finance Committe, a carnival of egos and whims in which puffy senators bounce off each other randomly like big balloons in a crowded room...
...Gardner and other liberals were scared off...
...He went on from there...
...M o reo ver , Wi 1 li a m s demolished Moynihan’s image as the careful architect whose proposals could withstand detailed criticism...
...But there is evidence that powerful figures in the White House did do their best to scuttle FAP, that the President’s own enthusiasm wilted a bit under abuse, and that the Cabinet was forever confused or disappointed by the proposal...
...considering FAP in the summer of The professionals got money, jobs, 1970...
...Moynihan has to summon all his erudition and modesty to avoid gloating over his political prowess in the back-room intrigue...
...I know there must be a lot of readers like myself who will find regrets, lessons, and an unexpected, overwhelming respect for Moynihan-bow tie, pointer, and all...
...Under widely disparate state laws, families would become ineligible for all kinds of benefits by earning wages, so that they would lose money even though FAP would tax only a portion of their extra earnings...
...Second, it was an attempt to preserve capitalism by restoring incentives for the poor to work...
...Republicans would be much more comfortable fighting dependency, even if they didn’t know Precisely what it was or how it would be cured by boosting public-assistance payments...
...He found the President reading biographies of Disraeli and Lord Randolph Churchill...
...We can afford the Family Security System...
...He probably ascribes too much influence to this liberal vested interest in the defeat of FAP, but he writes with the incisive vehemence of one who has been converted...
...In addition, 13 million non-welfare, working people would begin receiving income supplements for the first time...
...First, it was anti-bureaucracy-dealing with cash instead of caseworkers, giving money directly to the poor without services or character examinations or any other missionary tasks performed by poverty bureaucrats...
...He theorizes about family stability, personal freedom, integrity, and so on, all in terms of dependency-“an incomplete state in life...
...Moynihan comes off not as a theorist but as a con man, selling the principle of income-by-right to its natural enemies, struggling to make liberals see through all the smokescreens he used on the conservatives...
...No sir,” said Mills...
...Dreaming of Disraeli While Moynihan was encouraging Burns’ genius in the revenue-sharing field, he went to work on Nixon...
...A former advocate of le t-a-thousand-programsbloom, Moynihan has turned on his old compatriots for persisting in their ways to the detriment of FAP-what was nearly his greatest achievement...
...Moynihan scorned liberals for not understanding the bill, but lamented that the conservatives did...
...He could keep at least 50 cents or so...
...For Southern politicians, there was nothing at all subtle about FAP...
...Who would want to go into the Nixon White House, as Moynihan did, to head the high-level Urban Affairs Council and then propose a massive, radical program to fight poverty...
...All those programs messed up the smooth curve Friedman needed in order to say that people would have reason to work...
...He moved into the White House and assembled a staff loaded with people who had been producing charts and graphs in support of a guaranteed annual income for years without success...
...So the book is a tragedy, but it makes you ponder the strange powers, and dangers, of deception in political strategy...
...Daniel P. Moynihan...
...What kind of reform is that, asked Williams...
...The New York Times reported that the emotional impact of the hearings may have switched the vote of Senator Fred Harris...
...All the states would pay less for welfare because of the FAP money from Washington...
...Moynihan accomplished his astute generosity by “giving” Burns revenue sharing, which was thereafter presented as a package deal with FAP...
...Fervor was sweeping through the committee room like the spirit of a Billy Graham testimonial...
...Therefore, says Moynihan, Wiley opposed it...
...The frustration was maddening, because the Administration knew that it had the votes to pass FAP on the floor of the Senate if the bill could just get out of the Finance Committee...
...Long “had chosen to take the Administration at its word and to view FAP as welfare reform,” writes Moynihan...
...The candidates would be reluctant to write off votes in such numbers...
...His attacks on the press and out any of the gritty problems of much other sour water had gone over sacrifice, like looking for a job in the the dam since Nixon had proposed crass Republican world of selfFAP a year earlier...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb of Brooklyn College spoke for the academics and provided much of the material for the rebuttal that Moynihan laid on Nixon’s desk...
...The first President to talk by telephone to the first men on the moon...
...Moynihan describes it as the “fate” of the bill .to emerge about the same time as Dr...
...the poor, drunk or sober, without Moynihan says that the President was straining it through the sticky-fingered saving all his “psychic benefits” and attentions of the government...
...What was remarkable was that his voice carried so much weight beyond his organization’s small membership...
...Milton Friedman’s negative income tax was an idea of the right, incorporating two old conservative maxims...
...The new national system would have totally replaced welfare programs in those states, saving them the money they had been spending...
...Moynihan could only reply that a 50-percent reduction was better than the current system of taking 100 per cent-a dollar lost in welfare for every dollar earned...
...But it was too late...
...The “welfare crisis’’ was a problem, but Moynihan judged that his best chance was to present it as an opportunity for surprising and dramatic leadership...
...Nixon remembered that Eisenhower’s dull stewardship had hurt his own chances in 1960, and he judged that Ike would be thought of as a nice President but not a Wilson or a Lincoln...
...This would be revenue sharing...
...The conservatives, who understood the bill, did not believe him for a minute...
...Everyone wondered what Nixon was concocting during the grace period at the beginning of his presidency...
...They didn’t want a Nixon welfare bill going to Congress without his own work requirement in it...
...Friedman wants to replace the traps of the welfare system with the kind of smooth income curve that economists like so much...
...Obligations are not exciting or risky, either to Presidents or historians...
...Kley, Harris, and Kafka With all arguments failing, Moynihan was reduced to a desperately pure attempt to con the bill out of committee...
...Senators were picking up on arguments designed for other senators, while ignoring or tearing apart the ones made for them...
...The current plan is to cut off federal funds from states that aren’t tough enough on the cheating problem...
...James J. Delaney...
...Excluding the $720 exemption, the $1 1,720 family would have $1 1,000 in “taxable” income...
...At no point would the poor person face the welfare dilemma that a dollar earned by sweat would immediately be slipped from his pocket by a poverty bureaucrat...
...President...
...class groups, would come up with schemes of which the first effect would be to improve the condition of the middle-class professionals, and the second effect might or Maximum Feasible Hypocrisy temperance to think kindly of any tlon of the poor...
...most bitter attacks against the whole Moynihan returns to this theme galaxy of administrators, legislators, repeatedly in the book, probably out intellectuals, consultants, journalists, of anger with what he considers the and low-level bureaucrats who had hypocrisy of liberal Democrats...
...All the devices he used to orchestrate the perceptions and misperceptions of the Family Assistance Plan failed, and the guaranteed annual income will not return anytime soon...
...Everyone was concerned that the draft legislation contained no “work requirement...
...The cautious, negative campaign was behind him...
...No welfare family’s income would be rednced, and millions (mostly in the South) would be raised...
...Harris had not,” writes Moynihan...
...Tory men and Liberal policies,” Nixon told him, “are what have changed the world...
...Nixon was distant from the frenzied, confused debate...
...They provided that any welfare recipient under Aid to Families with Dependent Children could be denied benefits for refusing to register for work training or for refusing to accept a “suitable” job...
...Finally, Arthur Burns’ cherished notion that people should receive aid only if the government determined them incapable of work would be wiped out in favor of a guaranteed minimum income based on earnings alone...
...To some degree, the NWRO was built on its opposition to FAP...
...It was, in short, a guaranteed income-a low one, but still a guaranteed income with the incentives of the negative income tax built in...
...Nixon still had his doubts when he went off to the Pacific in July, 1969, to greet the astronauts returning from the moon...
Vol. 4 • January 1973 • No. 11
