Nixox's Good Deed: Welfare Reform

...A Two-Tier Proposal for Welfare Policy Even so, some will object to the "work bonus" on the grounds that it treats those who work and those on relief separately...

...Would the enactment of FAP have created a system that could help those in need without encouraging dependency...

...The President's Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) had traced urban riots to the racial divisiveness of American institutions, of which welfare seemed a prime example...

...It breaks up homes...

...It has done almost nothing for the world in years, save for providing an incredible spectacle that would be humorous were it not a slap in the face of decent and civilized men everywhere...

...Public assistance would be replaced with a wholly new system that would contain incentives for family stability and self-support...

...It created a "work bonus," a small income supplement only for the families of low-paid workers...

...If the result is somewhat uneven, Nixon's Good Deed should nonetheless help to redress any impression that the White House has, for the last six years, been solely a place of eavesdropping, corruption, and petty burglary...

...The Burkes know the issues and, even more, the personalities...

...Far from discouraging work, there is now reason to think that AFDC's liberal definitions of work expenses and similar items (which are not counted in determining a client's grant in order to encourage employment) may make working more attractive than necessary...

...The real choices seemed limited either to abolishing AFDC altogether—an option oddly neglected even by the redoubtable Arthur Burns—or replacing it with something like FAP...

...Decentralized administration makes for a crazy quilt of varying regulations, benefit levels, and services...

...the net effect might easily be self-defeating and discourage self-support...

...It differs from FAP primarily by defining need in terms of hours worked rather than income...

...Just as tax-paying families obtain the benefit of children's tax deductions, those with incomes near or below the tax threshold —and thus, with little or no tax liability—will henceforth receive a special grant through the Internal Revenue Service...

...Its essential feature was the extension of eligibility to intact families and to those with a full-time breadwinner...

...The successfully-enacted Supplemental Security Income program, the "guaranteed income" for the elderly and the disabled which the Burkes and most other commentators have regarded as a major step forward in American welfare policy, was basically a federalization of existing assistance programs for these groups...

...But surely we have reached the point where our continued memberhip, much less our support, should no longer be taken for granted as a given of United States foreign policy...

...In practice, this may mean, for the employed, not only efforts to increase wages or decrease taxes, but also extension to the lowliest jobs the perquisites of the better ones: health insurance, sickness benefits, pension schemes, and the like...

...The most important disincentive in AFDC is the much smaller grant to families containing fathers who are unemployed...

...The "deed" was welfare reform—specifically, the proposal of the Family Assistance Plan in 1969...

...One question, however, goes beyond Moynihan's criticisms: Namely, at what point should this country simply say "Enough" ? The UN today is fairly described as an assemblage of cynical, hypocritical, blathering, and obnoxious representatives from all the corrupt, dictatorial, and pretentious little regimes that dot the globe in this enlightened age...

...It is little more than an abusive platform for every charlatan in a dashiki or a kaffiyeh who wants to excoriate the United States for the edification of the multinational multitude...

...Not only could such an arrangement further complicate an already confusing array of programs, but it might also lead to a "two-tier" system, with assistance for the dependent poor inevitably becoming less generous than that for the "deserving" workers...

...Social purposes, alas, do not always coincide with social reality...

...And it grows...

...Food stamps, the nation's largest assistance program—it is used by more than seventeen million people—provides aid solelyon the basis of need, as do, to a lesser extent, public housing and medicaid...

...Our mere participation in this assembly of petty tyrants degrades us...

...That we further legitimize such hijinks by footing over twenty-five percent of the annual bill is but an additional foolishness...

...where FAP provided the most aid for people who earned nothing, and reduced benefits as they earned more, the "work bonus" increases its assistance as wages rise for most of the low-income range...

...At that level of income, however, most families are paying taxes...

...At the very least, the record of the mob in Manhattan in recent years should shift the burden of persuasion to those who advocate further affiliation with this institutionalized affront to honesty and dignity in human affairs...

...Much of the critical opposition to the proposal in the Senate Finance Committee stemmed from doubt that it would...

...Whatever else the welfare reforms in California, New York, and other states may have taught, it is clear that a diligent government can facilitate this process of exit...

...Yet from the perspective of the White House, a comprehensive treatment would have been costly and time-consuming, at a time that radical surgery seemed imperative...

...Since the alternatives to work are either charity or starvation, it is not surprising to find that families do, in fact, shuttle between relief and employment (and some combine both...

...To have some three million young families relying on publiccharity for their subsistence may not be a healthy state of affairs nor one without implications for the stability of the nation, but it is not a situation attributable in large measure to a particular form of assistance...

...The simple truth is that the poor who generally work and the poor who usually receive public assistance do come from different populations and have rather different prospects...

...Perhaps there is merit in the United Nations that I have overlooked...

...To the Burkes, the latter may have seemed the more appealing feature of the plan, but there is considerable evidence that the President's oft-repeated desire to replace welfare with workfare was more than just window-dressing for conservatives...

...Last year, in overconsuming meat which wasted the cereals that could have saved them, we ate the little children of the Sahel, of Ethiopia, and of Bangladesh...

...In Defense of AFDC "It often penalizes work...

...perhaps the organization is yet salvageable for some purpose or other...

...Suggestions for Reform If AFDC does not discourage work, break up homes, destroy dignity, or grow, there may yet be cause to replace it with a more rationalized system...

...Each group may need nothing more than money, but unless part of a general attempt at redistribution, programs to aid the working poor might better aim at maintaining a particular level of earnings, while those for the dependent poor should be designed to replace income, perhaps for a prolonged period...

...The Nixon Perspective A pre-inaugural task force had recommended the expected, but in its way bold, program of greater federal financing of public assistance, with the implication that more effective national standards should follow...

...FAP would have removed any compulsion for a father to desert, but so long as some help is likely for the family, there can be no deterrent...

...Whatever the stigma traditionally associated with the "poor law," it is now the case that some ninety percent of all families eligible for AFDC are estimated to be receiving benefits...

...When asked what was to be gained by proposing FAP, the President, according to the Burkes, confided to an aide, "We don't know whether this will work, but we can't go on with the present system...

...The Burkes offer a play-by-play account of how this extraordinary proposal became the major item of domestic legislation of a Republican President and how a coalition of conservativesand liberals twice managed to prevent its enactment...

...And it ,grows...

...The emphasis, however, is on telling a story and it is done with admirable conciseness, if not always with accuracy...

...Han Suyin, another heartfelt sympathizer with Third World aspirations, suggests that to solve this problem, "we have to begin by sharing now everything, and that means that a lot of people with a lot of private property, for example, should divest themselves immediately of it in favor of the poor...

...Was President Nixon right...

...What of the working poor, however, that group of hard-laboring people who can neither earn a sufficient wage nor partake of the generosity of existing welfare programs...

...One consequence of this high proportion is that national 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 AFDC rolls have ceased to grow (although prolonged unemployment will predictably add families who have exhausted other forms of compensation...

...Treating both groups as if they only had the same need—money—cannot help but result in programs which assist neither one very well...

...Moreover, other welfare programs, for which the same family might be eligible, are likely to be run by different agencies and with different rules and regulations...

...FAP, instead, proposed to emphasize the commonality of need and thus was not simply a guaranteed income nor just a reform of AFDC, but rather a plan for national reconciliation...

...Book Review/Leslie Lenkowsky Two Cheers for FAP • In this post-Watergate year, a book entitled Nixon's Good Deed perhaps deserves appreciation more than review...

...To view them as yet another impoverished group is both the compassionate and necessary thing to do, but whether aid is to come through a single system of relief or the more traditional forms of job-related compensation will have consequences both for the recipients and the economy as a whole...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 21...

...What is most characteristic of the working poor is that they tend not to be poor very long...

...Women in higher-benefit areas do tend to work somewhat less than women in places that pay lower benefits, but the difference is small and complicated by factors such as local job markets, ages of children, and availability of child care...

...But it may not be a good model...

...In the hallowed tradition of the national press corps, internal memos and minutes of private meetings form a sizable portion of the documentation, giving perhaps too Nixon's Good Deed: Welfare Reform by Vincent J . Burke and Vee Burke Columbia University $8.95 much prominence to the work of those unsurpassable leakers, the bureaucrats...

...Occasionally, they consider broader issues of governing suggested by the events as well as other aspects of the Nixon Administration's domestic proposals, particularly food stamps and the Supplemental Security Income plan, which provides a guaranteed income for the aged and disabled...

...FAP would have created a single system of aid, thereby acknowledging not only this functional relationship but also a social concern of utmost import...

...With social services, job training, and work requirements included in the package, the Administration expected that FAP would reduce dependency at the same time that it alleviated poverty...

...Moynihan suggests, and wisely so, that it is past time the US began to oppose this nonsense—by trumpeting the achievements of "liberal processes," by asserting "that inequalities in the world may be not so much a matter of condition as a matter of performance," and by ceasing our maddening passivity in the United Nations...

...This program, adopted during the Kennedy Administration, seems to encourage part-time (less than 100 hours per month) employment, so that a recipient could combine welfare and earnings...

...Initially conceived as a conservative alternative to FAP by Senator Russell Long, the "work bonus" ingeniously avoids the problem of work incentives...

...one-fifth of new cases are closed within a year and the likelihood is that two out of three families who leave the welfare rolls will not return...

...Since the proposal of FAP, however, it has become possible for a full-time worker and his family to obtain welfare benefits...

...This two-tier approach to welfare policy is doubtless more complicated and less elegant, and probably more costly, than a single comprehensive scheme such as FAP...

...The chronic poor are the elderly, the disabled, and those who live in female-headed families, precisely the groups which are aided by the existing welfare system...

...their incomes fluctuate with their health, age, ability to work full shifts, and normal demographic changes...

...As far as it went, this was an accurate judgment, reflecting the best available knowledge of the causes and consequences of the growth of AFDC caseloads...

...It breaks up homes," he would say...

...Up to an annual income of $4000, the benefit will equal 10% of earnings...

...The wealth of information about American welfare dredged up largely in the wake of the President's proposal confirms the view of critics of FAP that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to design a new system that combines adequate benefits with a financial incentive to work...

...Nonetheless, Nixon's Good Deed offers fascinating glimpses of how men such as Robert Finch, Daniel P. Moynihan, Arthur Burns, and John Ehrlichman debated the issues and how the President ultimately became convinced that FAP was the right course of action...

...The single most appealing feature of FAP was that it was not AFDC, a program regarded as so bad that virtually any reasonable alternative was worth trying...

...they do not hesitate to pass judgment on the deeds and motives of the latter, with particular animus reserved for leading Democrats and labor unionists...

...after much debate within the Administration on the details, this idea emerged as FAP...

...On taking office in 1969, the President and his aides encountered a problem which had the earmarks of a crisis...

...I waive consecutive translation and await a response...

...beyond $4000 it declines at the rate of one dollar for every ten earned until, at $8000, it disappears entirely...

...With the enactment of the "work bonus" the United States has at long last recognized what every other industrial country has known: that a viable welfare program rests ultimately upon its treatment of those who are not dependent...

...This would have occurred, however, chiefly in areas where wages were low or unemployment high, suggesting that the availability of comparable alternative support, not simply the condition of eligibility, facilitates break-ups...

...But, if anything, the Nixon Administration was not bold enough, addressing only one of the several programs that seemingly make dependency the more desirable condition...

...Much the same sentiment accounts for its approval on two occasions by the normally cautious House Committee on Ways and Means...

...In 1969, however, the ardent desire of virtually every state official, including the ex-governor of Maryland, was that welfare, if it was not going to wither away, would at least grow on someone else's vine...

...The cost of welfare had tripled in that time and now approached—and quickly passed—twelve billion dollars per year...

...Although the final results of a negative income tax pilot test in New Jersey demonstrate that such programs do not much weaken the Protestant ethic, they offer no grounds either for expecting that those already receiving welfare will convert to the religion of self-support...

...Following any of these suggestions would yield a welcome contrast to what one sees today...

...But it was to these sorts of administrative difficulties that the recommendations of the Nixon pre-inaugural task force were addressed...

...As the Nixon Administration had understood, the rapid growth during the 1960s reflected liberalized administrative rules, higher utilization, and, especially, greater numbers of eligibles due to demographic changes and more generous standards of need...

...It robs recipients of dignity...

...While one may quarrel with their interpretations or question their selection of events, the Burkes have produced a reasonably informative rendering of policy making in the Nixon White House and have done so without once referring to the Central Intelligence Agency or the "plumbers...

...In Nixon's first year in the White House, the increment in the welfare rolls—some 750,000 families—was almost as large as The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 19 the total number who had beep receiving assistance when he left Washington in 1961...

...The book's main author, Vincent J. Burke, was one of those rare Washington journalists who knew something about the isues he reported, and his untimely death left to his wife the task of completing his most important story...

...By supplementing the incomes of people at work, moreover, FAP would provide an incentive to stay employed in areas where existing welfare benefits were competitive with or even exceeded low wages...

...Need would thus have become the sole criterion for obtaining assistance, a departure from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the major existing public assistance program, which required the main source of support for the family to be dead, disabled, unemployed, or absent from the home before the aid was given...

...Though initially attractive, this plan was eased aside, partly due to the work of a group of holdover appointees whom the Burkes call a "conspiracy for the poor," but chiefly because the President's aides were interested in a more aggressive approach...

...That is, of course, precisely the case for FAP...

...Simply federalizing AFDC would not help them at all, and might encourage some, especially in the South, to quit work altogether...

...For the Burkes, FAP was a "gooddeed" because it recognized that wages and welfare, and the users of each, went together...

...At a time when bookstores are (or soon will be) glutted with the confessions of sundry ex-convicts, who happen to have been in the employ of the White House, testimony that the Nixon Presidency had its constructive and virtuous moments is almost self-evidently valuable, like a respected character witness at a trial...

...At the World Food Conference, the Indian food minister added a grace note to this composition by pointing out that whatever the United States does to help in this area should be viewed not as "charity," but as "deferred compensation" for years of capitalistic, imperialistic exploitation...

...The number of families receiving public assistance was increasing rapidly with a consequent rise in expenditures—particularly at state and local levels of government—that seemed out of control...

...Indeed, it is even truer now than in 1969 that the generosity and administrative rules of American welfare make it an attractive alternative to low-wage labor...

...Having a first child, for example, may move a family temporarily into poverty not only because there is an extra mouth to feed, but also because the family is without the mother's earnings for some period afterwards...

...In some quarters, any act of charity towards the poor is inherently virtuous, although no small share of the opposition to FAP came from groups such as the National Council of Churches and other "do-gooders...

...Inquiries about family dynamics are no less emotive than when Daniel P. Moynihan first broached the topic in 1965, but with each report from the Census Bureau, it is increasingly apparent that the single-parent family makes up a larger proportion of all poor families and therefore, of those who need welfare...

...With welfare apparently begetting ever greater dependency, one could perhaps try to salvage AFDC, but this was the preferred strategy of the Great Society and there was little reason to think it could be successful...

...For those not in the labor force, public policy should continue to improve existing aids, such as AFDC, and also pay more attention to the problems of transition from work to welfare and back...

...Whether AFDC, in turn, contributes to family-splitting remains a matter of inference, but one recent study concluded that a ten percent rise in welfare benefits would have produced a three or four percent increase in female-headed families...

...It is a flexible mechanism—the benefit can be increased by simply raising the proportion of income paid to the wage-earner—and by being confined only to people who work full-time enables them to obtain some of the help available to the person who is not...

...This expansion carried with it an "overtone of social disintegration...

...Yet it was also a flawed perception, shaped by years of inattention to welfare on the part of federal, state, and local officials...

...moreover, the knowledge about welfare generated by the proposal of FAP has qualified the President's indictment of the system...

...Six calmer years later, it is easier to see that this view of AFDC as a social disaster was exaggerated...

...If the first part of the decade was concerned with the dependent, the second half is already vexed with the unemployed, a group lacking neither experience in the labor force nor the wherewithal to earn a decent wage...

...Nonetheless, one-fifth or so of all AFDC mothers are either working or in job-training programs...

...FAP was, in that sense, surely a "good deed...

...This is an astounding proportion for a program which requires families to apply to a public agency and undergo a screening process...

...In presenting the case for one program, the Nixon Administration provoked a long overdue debate on the nature of American welfare policy...

...Although too long neglected and mismanaged, AFDC could have been improved...

...The existing system of public assistance, he had concluded, was harmful...

...It often penalizes work...

...it reflected an increasing number of single-parent families and was especially concentrated among certain ethnic groups and in the core neighborhoods of large cities...

...No one, in fact, really knew much about AFDC, and those who did—mainly social welfare professionals—seemed at times primarily concerned with protecting their clients' or their own interests...

...If rationalization is the goal, then FAP is not the only means and for political reasons may, in fact, not be the preferable one...

...Yet, in a society as complex as the United States, whether simplicity is a virtue may properly be questioned, especially since the issues of welfare policy will almost certainly shift during the next few years...

...Indeed, on rereading staff memoranda of the time, it is remarkable just how accurate the analyses of the President's Council on Urban Affairs were...

...In truth, there was no way of being sure then, and not much more evidence now...

...Though there is still no convincing evidence that these encourage migration to more liberal states, one may object to the prospect of equally needy families in different jurisdictions receiving different kinds of help...

...But the most significant addition to American social policy—indeed perhaps one of the most important changes since the New Deal—was contained in the recently enacted tax legislation...

...Although the Burkes account for how the deed occurred, their book is weaker in telling us why the proposal of FAP should be considered a "good" deed...

...it would have guaranteed all families—working or not, united or not, deserving or not—a basic grant ($1600 was proposed for a family of four with no other source of income) and reduced this amount by 50 cents for each dollar earned in order to maintain the incentive to work...

...I have already had occasion to show that the rich white man, with his overconsumption of meat and his lack of generosity toward poor populations, acts like a true cannibal, albeit indirectly...

...FAP was a type of negative income tax...

...But this is not the standard the authors use in evaluating FAP, nor is it the way in which the Nixon Administration judged their proposal...

...By doing none of these things, FAP would presumably do good...

...Moreover, the AFDC population is not static...

...It robs recipients of dignity...

...Doing something about welfare was almost as inevitable for the incoming Administration as doing something about Vietnam, not least for the potential advantages in both cases of discrediting ill-managed Great Society programs...