A Minority Report Makes Good
Feulner, Edwin Jr.
they deserted while in the military to avoid fighting in Vietnam." What are the facts? Well, the fact is that the U.S. government places the figure of verified deserters and draft dodgers in...
...Nearly thirty persons have been deported . . ." That's quite a performance...
...It is diffi- cult if not impossible for even a presi-dent's closest advisers to know what in- fluences a presidential decision, but if there were no data to suggest that in 1969 we had a welfare problem or that a program of income maintenance might solve that problem, it is reasonable to assume Nixon would have chosen a less radical alternative...
...Quoting Swedish Director of Im-migration, William Leth, last November Hugh Wyatt of the News wrote: "He (Leth) said that from 1967 to 1970, of the 585 Americans allowed to enter the country, 110 were involved in major crimes, citing the following: 36 thefts...
...That he is representative of the view of the vast majority of Americans cannot be questioned when one analyzes public opinion polls...
...President Nixon, sometimes known for PERSPECTIVE: Tom Charles Huston The Nixon Monument In this month's edition of PERSPEC-TIVES we feature two differing images of the Family Assistance Plan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the Nixon White House...
...His views were his own because even such other conservative stalwarts as Messrs...
...First, 7,000 to 10,000 seems a more honest, justifiable estimate of the actual Canadian contingent of draft dodgers and deserters than the 70,000 to 100,000 we have been constantly fed...
...On that situation, Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post reported two weeks ago: "Sweden, gen- erally believed to have the next (after Canada) largest number of American Edwin Feulner, Jr...
...Tom Charles Huston, who wrote the ]ollowing essay, served as Associate Council to the President up until the summer of 1971...
...For example, Landgrebe is a "gut con-servative" who believes that certain things are right and when they are right they are worth defending even if you are in a minority...
...Moynihan most certainly thinks not...
...To hell with the totals, we are told, the young men who fled to Canada and Sweden "rather than fight in this im-moral war" are still, in Milton Viorst's phrase, "the guardians of the national conscience...
...Therefore, all the guns were pulled out when the President sent up his Vocational Rehabilitation veto message...
...Outside Canada and the United States it estimates an additional 1,200...
...Ashbrook of Ohio, Huber of Michigan, and Kemp of New York did not join him, and also because he had the good sense to file a substitute bill...
...Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, for example, admitted after the key Senate vote that "the Pres- ident's in the driver's seat...
...He retained his committee assignments which included a ninth ranking out of sixteen among the Republicans on the lunatic Education and Labor Committee...
...As a small businessman who owned and operated his own truck line, Landgrebe came to the House without many of the silly misconceptions of so many new members of Congress...
...Official Canadian statistics do not con- tradict U.S...
...He was first elected in 1968 to succeed Charlie Halleck, the former Minority Leader of the House...
...Between 1960 and 1964, before Vietnam became an American war, roughly 1,300 U.S...
...Then the battle of the budget began...
...The sensible people among the thirty-seven members of the committee never totaled more than twelve and on many issues could be reduced to five or six...
...This, I think...
...What do these statistics say...
...The Landgrebe substitute was then no- ticed by a group of freshmen senators, when it became apparent that the Senate would be the testing ground of the Pres- ident's veto...
...This attitude gave him a number of problems back in Indiana, including a well-financed primary in 1972, where he almost became a political casualty to Indiana Republican feuding...
...Yet, detailed and com-prehensive as it is, the story is incom- lete and, to a certain extent, misleadg. , It is misleading because Moynihan con- tends that Richard Nixon's decision to recommend the Family Assistance Plan Io Congress is evidence of the manner in which social science can make possible "fundamental" as opposed to qncremental" social change...
...Moynihan's recounting of the politics of income maintenance is misleading on another account...
...In either event, however, value judgments were first required: governmental objectives are rarely de-fined in exclusively quantitative terms and problems are inevitably a decision that a particular condition is unac-ceptable to the moral or political perception of the decision maker...
...Hubert Humphrey took to the floor on a frequent basis and with weeping and gnashing of teeth talking about how this program which had existed since 1920 was being eliminated and how thousands of people were going to be abandoned to a fate not readily determinable -since there were no fewer than five other competing Federal programs overlapping in the same areas and the Landgrebe alternative still provided The Alternative June-September 1973 for an increase in funding over the last fiscal year...
...But how do you count that cost...
...government places the figure of verified deserters and draft dodgers in Canada at just under 4,000...
...These young turks, led by Jesse Helms, (R.-North Carolina) intro-duced the Landgrebe substitute as their own bill on the Senate side and received wide backing for it...
...Again, it should be noted that Landgrebe was the only member to offer an alternative bill at this point...
...For example, Moyni- Ran admits that no one knew why the welfare caseload rate was escalating or The Politics of a Guaranteed Income by )aniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Convince Nixon he 7...
...l Minority Report Makes Good Earl Landgrebe is a little known Re- publican congressman from the Second District of Indiana...
...Leth is telling us in a nice way is that in one three-year period, 20 percent of our Stockholm Brigade was involved in major crimes...
...Fourth, that some U.S...
...However, as Moyni-han notes, Nixon was anxious for a bold domestic initiative...
...The point to be remembered when the battle of the budget of the 1970s is re-corded for future generations is that it was a lonely voice from Valparaiso, Indiana, Earl Landgrebe, who had the courage to stand up for principle and to fight for what he believed in despite its apparent unpopularity...
...The type of "good data" Moynihan had available was certainly valuable for the purpose of determining whether ex-isting programs were doing what they were intended to do...
...A count made last fall said there were 602 deserters in Sweden...
...Is it susceptible of calculation'merely in terms of income, of years of schooling, of access to private baths...
...And that be has won the first several battles is certainly clear from the words of even the Democratic leadership...
...The substitute they would have been considered an em- barrassment by Crazy Joe Gallo and the Brooklyn Mafia...
...The President indicated that anything that came to him from the Congress that was over his budget would be subjected to a presidential veto...
...Needless to say, Landgrebe's role as a fundamental conservative on Ed-ucation and Labor placed him in a min- ority...
...His claim ~s not extravagant, it is merely that the ~vailability of data which was far more :eliable than it used to be provided de- ~ision makers in the Nixon White House with a rational basis for formulating Overnmental policy...
...From this the Nixon Administration has in fact begun a whole new direction in its dom- estic legislative programs...
...What Mr...
...New, more rigorous criteria have been established for all of the programs...
...Where public deci-sions are involved, ethics is a more im-portant disciplirie than social science...
...In the first place, the Senate, the body that unquestionably is more liberal with the taxpayers' money, upheld the first presidential veto of the current round of budget battles...
...Secondly, that, because of an ideological bias, otherwise competent American newsmen have engaged in inexcusably sloppy journalism, swallowing whole without inspection bogus statistics fed them by Canadian based antiwar groups --when a few phone calls and a little arithmetic would have shown the number almost certainly outlandish...
...Palme's regime and the enterprise of the New York Daily News, we have an idea what the Stockholm crowd is up to when not guarding the national conscience...
...if it had not been in the area of welfare, it most certainly would have come on another issue...
...Moynihan insists that the most important fact about welfare "is not what it costs those who provide it, but what it costs those who receive it...
...the Selective Service puts there the "bulk" of the roughly 450 "fugitives" outside the United States and Canada...
...He implies that Nixon's decision was largely the result of the influence of the social science findings .made available for his review...
...Whether it is the Occupational Safety and Health Act which is driving hundreds of small businesses out of exist- ence, the latest minimum wage proposal which has the primary effect of driving black teenagers out of productive em-ployment, the Elementary and Second-ary Education Act, which has done more to erode local autonomy and diversity in school systems than any other single piece of legislation, or any of the dozens of others, the word "lunatic" is used advisedly and appropriately...
...Those statistics seem not only a trifle high for "guardians of the national conscience...
...This squares with official U.S...
...Walz located 40,000 in Toronto alone...
...Good data, then, is like a good psychia- trist at a criminal trial: it should be on tap but not on top...
...Nonetheless, Landgrebe believed in his principles and, therefore, when the committee voted and then filed a report on the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 he not only voted against it but he also had the audacity to file a minority view of one on it...
...The military places 237 "deserters at large" in Sweden...
...Landgrebe's action gave the United States Senate and the President himself the peg to hang their hat on in this opening round the 1973 battle of the budget...
...The President is a congenital grandstander, always anxious to please and constantly concerned about his place in history...
...To attempt to do so in terms of the way in which the recipient views himself -a sort of Richter scale of self-respect --necessarily involves the way in which the tabulator believes the recipient should look at himself...
...government estimates...
...seven robberies...
...Nixon was ripe for a radical program that could be suitably packaged to pacify his conservative sup- porters, and to the credit of the man, only Moynihan had sense enough to recognize the fact...
...deserters or war resisters, does maintain an official count of deserters...
...Surely this is the basis of the gulf between those who adhere to the "work ethic" and those who rhetoric, nonetheless has indicated that he intends to chart a new course in do- mestic policy which will require stricter evaluations and a generally leaner bud-get...
...he Alternative June-September 1973 why welfare dependency appeared no longer to be linked to the availability of employment...
...The magnitude of this victory can be seen by the fact that when the President called Hugh Scott, the Senate Minority Leader, to con-gratulate him, the President is alleged to have admitted to Scott that the White House congressional liaison staff was so convinced that the veto would have to be upheld in the House rather than in the Senate that they had already written the congratulatory letters to the House members, and not to the senators...
...journalists and politicians have been characterizing as the "best of our younger generation" and the ~'guardians of the national conscience" a collection of draft dodgers and de-serters whose statistical profile and performance in exile show them to con- tain more than the customary comple- ment of malingerers, opportunists, criminals, and cowards...
...By taking key leadership roles, these members of the Senate were able to round up the neces- sary votes to sustain the President's veto in the Senate...
...Moreover, no one knew if work incentives actually worked or if the tripling of the income of h~lf the people in a rural southern community would create social, economic, or politi- cal problems of a magnitude greater than those allegedly existing...
...To hear the boys who ran away to Toronto and Montreal and Stockholm lionized as "moral heroes" is --obscene...
...figures...
...Incrementalism goes against his political grain...
...males between the ages of 15 and 29 annually became "landed im-migrants" in Canada...
...10 percent jailed, and 6 percent deported...
...Furthermore, the liberal leadership in both the House and Senate found itself in total disarray and has to retrench, regroup, and rethink its position on the key question of budgetary priorities...
...Third, that for two years some of the nation's principal news organizations have thus grossly misled the American people about the magnitude of the problem they confront in the matter of amnesty for runaways...
...If one concedes that every single American male, over 14 and under 30 --above that annual average --who became a "landed im- migrant" in Canada between January 1965 and January 1972 was either a draft dodger or a deserter --an obvious impossibility --even then the official total for all of Canada could have come to no more than 17,000 at the very time Mr...
...Assuming that at the time the Great Society programs were implemented there were clear ob-jectives in mind, it was possible to some extent to determine quantitatively whether those objectives were being met...
...regard such moralism as totally anti-quated in our post-industrial society...
...He has a compulsion to seek to translate the most trivial event into a happening of historic proportions and his instinct for overstatement is a con-stant source of embarrassment to his political friends (recall his declaration that the landing on the moon was the greatest event in the history of mankind since the Creation...
...Moynihan's estimate of his man was virtually flawless...
...Lobbying pressure grew...
...I suspect the thing that riles the working man most about welfare is the suspicion that those on the receiving end simply don't believe that a person should have to work...
...The trouble with ~ven this modest assertion is that in the ~ourse of the development of FAP there ~vas no doubt "good" data available, but there weren't any demonstrably re-liable answers to the critical questions :hat in most cases were and in other :ases should have been asked about the problem of welfare...
...Of the 2,533 "deserters at large" outside the United States, the Pentagon places about 1,800 plus in Canada, while of the 2,400 "fugitives" from draft law indictments, the Selective Service places just under 2,000 with our neighbor to the North...
...The Senate liberals, while usually preoccupied with grooming candidates for the next presidential election, nonetheless realized that if the battle of the budget were to be won, it would have to be won by an override of presidential vetoes and that this could most likely occur on politically popular and sensitive votes such as the Vocational Rehabilitation renewal...
...Thanks to the statistic-mindedness of Mr...
...Nonetheless, he was re-elected by 54.7 percent of his constituents and was sworn in as a member of the Ninetythird Congress on January 3, 1973...
...This is especially manifest after watching the genuine heroes of our age and time debark at Clark Field...
...I Daniel P. Moynihan's chronicle*of the struggle for the mind of the President fan the question of welfare reform is by r the most incisive analysis of the ~vorkings of the Nixon White House yet Io be published...
...How, then, do we measure the cost...
...Well, the second most popular sanctuary for the "over the hill" army has been Sweden...
...What about the "55200 in other coun-tries" friend Lerner was concerned with...
...49 drug-related cases including pushing . . . Leth said that 52 deserters were jailed but declined to say how many are still there...
...The long-range implications of this vote and action by the Congress are truly remarkable...
...It was also possible to use this "good data" to determine the existence of new problems...
...would have cut back the funding level, kept the focus on vocational re-habilitation rather than medical treat-ment, consolidated the bureaucracy, and was within tim President's budget limit- ations...
...The word "lunatic" here is used advisedly because of the madness which passes for normalcy in this body...
...The groups most directly affected had represent-atives in wheel chairs and wearing leg braces moving about the Capitol button- holing legislators and engaging in a very intensive and emotional lobbying cam-paign...
Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9
