The New American Tories: A Critique of Nixon's Welfare Program

...Lindsay's mini-Heller plan would have allocated permanently to the localities 27.5 percent of the state's receipts from the personal income tax...

...Although responsible conservatives do not deny the existence of social problems, they try to cope with them as inexpensively, grudgingly, and slowly as possible...

...Since we may have to live with it or in spite of it for some years, we may as well take a look at contemporary conservatism...

...I referred earlier to the irony of Republican theft of liberal notions...

...But conservatives will think they have done well if they gain local control over welfare and job training and the gradual pruning of centrally-directed social programs in favor of revenue-sharing...

...In our time conservatives have been a good deal more realistic than liberals about the sort of public policy that increases their own welfare or promotes causes they value...

...Insofar as revenue-sharing comes partially or completely to replace categorical grants (as many conservatives have openly hoped will occur), the power of the states in relation to the central cities will increase and the nation's capacity to pursue a concerted assault upon urban ills will decline...

...The training and employment hedges around welfare benefits can be readily interpreted to benefit white, middle-class employers of household help and low-paid service and factory workers...

...Although I have seen little notice of the omission, the Heller-Pechman requirement of compliance with civil rights and labor laws has been dropped...

...Only categorical grants for specific purposes administered according to national criteria can give direct aid to the cities...

...Government is based on the potentiality of coercion...

...At their May 6, 1795, meeting in the district of Speenhamland the justices fatefully decided that subsidies should be given to the honest and deserving poor, whether or not they were currently employed, on a scale related to the price of bread...

...Nevertheless, as every radical ought daily to remind himself, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were on domestic issues considerably more enlightened than even the most liberal of recent Congresses, and these Congresses were in turn usually in advance of the bulk of their constituents...

...Here are obtained contracts, benefits, franchises, and all manner of good things, usually quite out of sight of the national media which occasionally blow the whistle upon thievery on a continental scale...

...ROBERT LEKACHMAN poachers, thieves, and prostitutes extorted it by intimidation...

...As promulgated in 1964 by two inveterate Democratic economists, Walter W. Heller, then still chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Joseph Pechman of the Brookings Institution, federal revenue-sharing with the states was designed to cope with the "fiscal dividend"— then about $10 billion and now about $15 billion each year to be anticipated from the normal growth of the economy and the equally normal increase of federal receipts from corporate and personal income levies...

...Not much has been accomplished but still less would have been achieved in the absence of federal pressure...

...What Mr...

...and these men, being employed by compulsion on him, were beyond his control—worked or not as they chose—let down the quality of the land, and disabled him from employing the better men who would have toiled hard for independence...

...As any student of the Mayor and the Governor could have foretold, Mr...

...The big cities do not like Mr...

...Nixon...

...the farmers were compelled to take double the number, whose wages were paid partly out of the rates...

...As in 19th-century England, the administrators of the scheme will be local officials...

...One response was that of the justices of the peace of Berkshire who decided to deploy some of the statutory powers over wages and prices which the still-operative Elizabethan Poor Law confided to them...

...The welfare program does far more for the mean Southern states who usually pay substantially less than the proposed $1600 than for comparatively humane jurisdictions like New York and Connecticut which tactlessly preferred Mr...

...Rockefeller, a fervent Hellerite nationally, ignored the Lindsay initiative, proving yet again that what is sauce for the gubernatorial gander is not necessarily sauce for the mayoral goose...

...The New York situation differs only in scale from city-state relations throughout the nation...

...In part this is bad economic luck for the Republicans...

...But with time, it has become increasingly plain that the suburbs, which gained most from reapportionment, have found more in common with rural voters than with the big cities from which many suburbanites quite deliberately escaped...

...Good conservatives attempt sufficiently to confuse or bribe their opponents so as to stave off open mutiny...

...To obtain their share the brutal bullied the administrators, the profligate exhibited their bastards which must be fed, the idle folded their arms and waited until they got it...

...periodic audits of state disbursements out of the grants were to be required...

...The presence of John Mitchell, Mr...

...As a sharp-eyed and fluent 19th-century observer, Harriet Martineau, put it in her History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace, The poor had become public spoil...

...Carr that reapportionment would gradually diminish the inequity of city-state relations...

...There was a brief moment of hope after the Supreme Court's ruling in Baker vs...

...In Mayor Stenvig's Minneapolis, Mayor Yorty's Los Angeles, possibly in Mayor Procaccino's New York, standards of administration may well shift closer to the Southern model than to the humane, sociologically sophisticated conduct of such professional experts as New York's Mitchell Ginsberg...

...The minimum, subsistence wage rapidly became a maximum...

...If this is the way things go, the emerging Republican majority will be as evanescent, to borrow Daniel Moynihan's language, as the morning clouds over San Clemente...

...Economic necessity as well as altruism compelled some sort of official action...

...As the public declaration put the new commitment, when the gallon loaf .. . shall cost 1 shilling, then every poor and industrious person shall have for his support 3 shillings weekly, either procured by his own or his family's labour, or an allowance from the poor rates [italics added], and for the support of his wife and every other of his family, 1 shilling, 6 pence...

...It has been hard enough to get even spotty compliance with civil rights statutes, even when the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare has been empowered to cut off the funds of violators or the Department of Justice has been able to institute court enforcement proceedings...

...All the same, it is hard not to recall Speenhamland and its demoralizing effects upon the morale of the rural labor force in the wake of the misguided chorus of praise which has greeted the disastrous Nixon welfare "revolution...

...It can only be interpreted as another discouraging symptom of the ideological disarray in which many liberals find themselves that even qualified noises of approbation have emanated from the throats of such veteran liberals as Hubert Humphrey and Max Lerner...

...Let it here be recorded that my admiration for the efficiency of federal bureaucracy is only a trifle larger than my confidence in the liberalism of Congress...

...Even the farmers who paid such pitifully inadequate wages did not necessarily benefit because in their second role as ratepayers they were forced to provide the wage supplements necessitated by their own policies...

...The revenuesharing formula implies that the President reciprocates the emotion...

...The concept and the scale were widely copied and until the drastic Poor Law Act of 1834 English welfare policy was dominated by the Speenhamland model...

...most important, states were to be held to compliance with the civil rights acts and the labor standards statutes...

...Coherent conservatism is practical about the sources of its own support and the identity of its constituency...

...In Mississippi and Alabama, mayors and councilmen will define available jobs, suitable training, and appropriate behavior...

...Nixon—allegedly influenced by his adviser Daniel Moynihan's discourses on the Tory welfarism of 19th-century England and his own reading of Robert Blake's recent biography of Benjamin Disraeli— proposes to do can be shortly summarized...

...Federal legislation, Washington pressure for compliance, national standards, and Depart THE NEW AMERICAN TORIES ment of Justice litigation have been the major counterweights to Southern intransigence, blue-collar resistance to job, school, and housing integration, and rural reluctance to assist the great cities...

...The justices of Berkshire were practical gentlemen of humane inclination...

...This was, if you like, an early version of a guaranteed income...

...But if confusion and corruption falter, conservatives are prepared to employ vigorously the repressive tools of state power...

...when the gallon loaf shall cost 1/6, then 4 shillings weekly, plus 1/10...

...Accordingly they expect great things from their choice...

...ignorant boys and girls married upon it...

...Given a cold shoulder by Lyndon Johnson who had other things on his mind, revenuesharing was quickly taken up by Congressman Melvin Laird and by Charles Goodell, at the time a still markedly conservative member of the House of Representatives...

...Lacking incentives to efficient performance, laborers became progressively more demoralized...

...Since rural laborers were plentiful, farmers could and did pay below living wages in the justified confidence that public funds would come to the rescue...

...Every business group knows about local control of complaisant and frequently corrupt legislatures and city governments...

...No wonder President Nixon is reportedly astonished at how well his proposals have been received...

...In the main the President's new policies confer benefits on groups and localities where their sponsor did well in 1968 and hopes to fare still better in 1972...

...Businessmen overwhelmingly preferred Nixon to Humphrey...

...The city badly needed state help...

...Humphrey to Mr...

...Although they probably thought that they had reconciled the necessities of the poor with the labor requirements of rural employers, events worked themselves out in unexpected directions...

...One source of confusion is the horribly ambiguous notion of governmental decentralization and local democracy which has won so many adherents on the Left...

...Governors have consistently favored and mayors as consistently opposed unrestricted federal grants made directly to the states...

...Here again Mr...

...Thus, Instead of the proper numbers of laborers to till the land...

...The answer possibly emerges when a close look is taken at the actual proposal which President Nixon sent to Congress on August 13, just before that body departed for its ill-earned summer recess...

...on every penny which the bread price raises above 1 shilling he shall have 3 pence for himself and 1 penny for the others...

...It will be these worthies who divide the federal bounty between white and black citizens...

...Revenue-sharing is as much a triumph for ROBERT LEKACHMAN the states over the cities as for segregationists over integrationists...

...If my gloomy guess is accurate, a good many of the unyoung and unblack members of that majority will cease to be unpoor and soon afterwards will become unRepublican...

...For the time being, the need to restrain inflation does justify some measure of federal construction restraint and some continuation of high interest rates...

...Nixon deserves a high grade...

...In the present administration plan, the pass-through formula simply freezes existing inequitable state practices by requiring that states pass on to localities the same percentage of new money as their existing aid formulas now confer upon cities and towns...

...Heller and Pechman claimed as additional virtues of their scheme relief to hard-pressed states and localities compelled to cope with mounting costs out of a tax system that responded only sluggishly to increases in general prosperity...

...Law and Order as Newsweek's cover story dubbed him, in the key office of Attorney General and the Su preme Court appointments of Warren Burger and Clement Haynesworth are Presidential assurances that the administration of justice and the maintenance of public order will be firm, unburdened by humanitarian sentiment, and not unduly attached to individual rights—a "charge" made by Mr...

...Respectable opinion divided its concern between the wild French revolutionaries, their possible impact upon discontented Englishmen, and the soaring domestic price level...

...Congress had taken action to increase New York's public assistance and medicaid burdens...

...Liberals may protest that the unrestricted grants should merely supplement older categorical grants...

...This time the Mayor had an idea about the shape in which the help should arrive—"Urbanaid...

...There is a symmetrical irony on the Right...

...P P RESIDENT NIXON, I suppose, deserves credit for composing the first even plausibly coherent conservative program since the simple days of Calvin Coolidge...

...Since conservatives tend to be skeptical about government's power to alter human attitudes or behavior, their agenda for public action is likely to include little more than protection of property, maintenance of public order, defense of the realm, and highway construction...

...The fashion in the White House these days is to salute the emergent Republican majority...

...The episode drearily confirms every body's judgment that the states shortchange the cities and state legislators have scant sympathy for the Sodoms and Gomorrahs within their jurisdictions...

...Moreover, the cause of equity would be served if more money were raised from the mildly progressive federal tax system rather than from the definitely regressive property and sales imposts which are the major revenue sources of cities and states...

...Conservatives see and are grasping the chance to weaken social programs which since New Deal days have drawn their sustenance from Washington...

...The indictment of Speenhamland was not always internally consistent and Miss Martineau undoubtedly exaggerated, although out of better motives than those of some American critics of welfare mothers and relief chiselers...

...Urbanaid, proclaimed the Mayor, "would apply within New York State the fundamental principles of the so-called Heller-Pechman plan for state and local sharing in federal revenues...

...Nobody seems to have worked very hard...

...Bread, the staple diet of English working-folk, was so expensive that industrious farm laborers were unable to feed their families...

...Signs of the new regime are abundant, among them the Department of Justice's preventive detention scheme, its proposed barbaric schedule of penalties for drug violations, its systematic harassment of the Black Panthers, and its breathtaking claim to wiretapping autonomy in so-called national security cases...

...There is no dodging the conclusion that the severely-flawed crusades of the 1960s toward racial equality, open educational opportunity, wider distribution of health care, and the elimination of poverty achieved their small successes only because Washington overrode local opposition in state capitols and city halls...

...Mr...

...In those innocent days before Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war, liberal tax sharers were dreadfully worried that Congress would take the fiscal dividend as a pretext for tax reduction...

...Speenhamland, in Karl Polanti's judgment, "precipitated a social catastrophe...

...Squires and other landowners increased their already great power over the rural proletariat...

...No THE NEW AMERICAN TORIES body in his right mind expects the federal government to shrink to the insignificance of the prenuclear age...

...A A MONO RADICALS the rage for local control has operated to disguise the realities of the large amount of local control already in existence...

...Standards of life, possibly even standards of humanity, are higher in 20th-century America than they were at a poorer time in a poorer country...

...Why did they and other conservatives welcome an idea whose parents were notorious liberals...

...Revenue-sharing, a second plank in Nixon's New Federalism, is a convenient example of the generalization...

...Mitchell against his predecessor, Ramsay Clark...

...country justices lavished it for popularity, and guardians for convenience...

...If it did so, education and other good causes could expect no fiscal benefit from the economy's growth...

...Nixon last year...

...The President wishes to commit the national government to support of a family of four at the less than magnificent level of $1600 per year, substantially less than half the poverty line minimum of $3550...

...Heller and Pechman did attach three strings to these otherwise unrestricted grants: use on highway construction was prohibited...

...Mayors generally write to governors around budget time and the plight of the city was, as usual, grave...

...Omission here is tantamount to an invitation to states and localities to spend federal funds in any fashion they choose, however unfair to blacks this may turn out to be...

...Like the Eisenhower presidency before it, the present administration is prone to stress the limitations of federal revenue sources, the many claims upon these revenues, and the desirability of attaining budgetary surpluses as high employment is neared...

...According to a calculation made for New Jersey Governor Richard Hughes only 9 percent of the revenue-sharing funds will reach cities over 250,000 in population...

...These better men sank down among the worst...

...As usual it was worse to be poor and unrespectable...

...The grants are to be available only to families that accept employment when it is offered and training when it is not...

...Cities like New York which taxed themselves heavily were to get more per capita aid than communities whose tax effort was smaller...

...Even if the cities do not explode anew as black unemployment soars, sales and profits will surely shrink and the business commu nity become disenchanted with their hero...

...What a pity it is that the nation's needs occur most pressingly in the places and among the groups in which these clients are so scarce...

...But it is quite likely that the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson will turn out to have given business far more tax breaks, insisted upon much less antitrust activity, and supplied a climate more friendly to high profits than the Republicans promise soon to furnish...

...The President has counted his clientele and tried his level best to please them...

...If, as is everywhere the case, state education, health, and highway formulas discriminate against the big cities, the new scheme will leave the discrimination untouched...

...The combination of frugality, suspicion of new social spending, and morbid fear of inflation is likely to return us to another spell of Eisenhower economic sluggishness...

...It is what follows that is disquieting...

...On inspection it resembles the traditional models...

...The gap between estimated receipts and projected expenditures was $440 million...

...Two years ago, on December 22, 1967, John Lindsay wrote an exceedingly plaintive letter to Governor Nelson Rockefeller...

...Of this fact conservatives at least have been aware, as their crusades against federal standards on everything from unemployment insurance to billboards along highways amply demonstrate...

...the rate paying cottager, after a vain struggle went to the pay table to seek relief...