The Politics of Welfare

...Drawn from several departments, the planners worked through the new structure of the Urban Affairs Council, mostly in subcommittee, and without complete awareness of conservative and fiscal ambuscades lurking outside their doors...

...So, after straining at their $2 billion checkrein and taking several deep breaths, the subcommittee members recommended a rudimentary approach to the Negative Income Tax—the idea of simply giving money to people in need and, as an incentive to work, charging only a part of rising earnings against the minimum guarantee...

...But by responding to pressure, the Administration clearly lost the initiative in the war on hunger...

...And that would include mothers, for whose children day-care centers would be provided...

...The Administration's welfare reformers were working with one hand tied behind their backs...

...The argument for fss is that it would turn the emphasis of assistance from dividing families to uniting families...

...It concluded that the most dramatic—and most easily manageable—segment of the poverty problem was the stark fact of malnutrition...

...chairman of the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, supported by 30 other senators, swiftly introduced an ambitious bill to provide an additional $1.5 billion a year to give free food-stamps to the five million neediest Americans...

...And, finally, in his message to Congress on April 14: "America needs a new direction —not a turning away from past goals, but a clear and determined turn toward new means of achieving those goals...

...Assistance would be keyed not to a man absent, but to a man present...

...The conflict between these two plans goes beyond modalities to philosophies...

...Except that in the case of fss, the initials appear only in confidential White House papers, and the upheaval is pent up within the Nixon Administration...

...But the struggle over the concept involved in fss could determine the whole tone of the Administration's approach to the poor, as well as the balance of power between conservative traditionalists and moderate activists in the President's official family...

...Missing, though, were the vaunted new departures...

...fss stands for Family Security System...

...Arthur Burns...

...The Burns plan accepts the $40-$65 national welfare standards, but not the direct Federal financing...

...The Finch subcommittee waited for the exciting moment when it could explain all this to President Nixon in a full-dress session of the Urban Affairs Council, but that moment was several times postponed...

...Finch, the youngest member of the Cabinet, whose outward breeziness conceals inner intensity, was given a rapid tour through the Federal welfare maze...

...It is the name applied to a modest, yet trail-blazing proposal in the field of guaranteed income for the poor, sponsored by Robert H. Finch, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (hew), and Dr...

...This indecisiveness did prevent the premature dismantlement of the existing antipoverty structure...

...Finch and Moynihan, who have found support among some thoughtful Cabinet members, such as Secretary of Labor George Shultz and Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin, speak for the academic community, for the reformers who are convinced that the only way back from public assistance is a better public assistance system...

...obtained vigorous assurances that he was not being asked to preside over the liquidation of a waning agency...

...In the face of a critical evaluation report, the preschool Head Start was maintained, although its vulnerable summer program was sharply reduced...

...That is, welfare recipients deemed able to work would be threatened with loss of Federal assistance unless they accepted work or training...

...Fiscal stringency was cited as one reason...

...The hope is that fss would come to supplant Aid to Dependent Children on a sounder and healthier premise...

...It was the fruit of a mighty effort by an Agriculture-hew task force, working as a special subcommittee of the Urban Affairs Council...

...They concluded early that the most urgent need was a national welfare standard to reduce the enormous disparities that produce such extremes as Mississippi's $8.50 and New York State's $71.50 monthly for a dependent child...

...The Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) was preserved relatively intact—at least in its essential function of riding herd over a thousand local community action programs...

...He has many allies in the Administration—and in Congress, where Mills told me that an income maintenance plan is "contrary to my basic position about the responsibility of government in dealing with people in need of assistance...

...Now the Administration's last chance for a brave showing against poverty lay in tackling the Welfare Mess...

...At the outset, while mainly preoccupied with foreign policy, Nixon nevertheless talked broadly of innovative, domestic programs to come...

...By March, he was telling me that a drastic new approach to welfare was required, and that studies were being made of the costs of a guaranteed income system...

...The Burns plan also draws on some of the coercive ideas laid down by Representative Wilbur Mills (D.-Ark...

...The Family Security System, as they decided to call it, carefully choosing words with semantic appeal, would be available only to families ("No Hippies or hobos," as one official put it...

...For a cautious President this would be an easy choice, were it not that Finch, Moynihan and the more liberal faction of his Administration have committed themselves so deeply, fss may yet go the way of the antihunger program, but not without some unpleasant repercussions for the President...

...But deeper conflicts were involved, as became clear when resistance solidified behind an opposition plan eschewing any thought of income guarantees, presented April 29 by the President's counselor, Dr...

...Burns, outside the Urban Affairs Council, read its papers and wrote some of his own, which he did not share with the Council...

...It had narrowed its sights and settled on a proposal that would start with a modest $100 million in the first year and build up to $2.5 billion by 1973...

...Senator George McGovern (D-S.D...

...Daniel P. Moynihan, the President's Urban Affairs Assistant...

...Very low, but in one variant $500 in food-stamps would be added, eking out hew's $2 billion with some Agriculture money and making a bow to the war on hunger...

...The proposal was formally submitted to the White House on March 14...

...There is no breath of guaranteed income in the Burns plan...

...Any wholesale conversion of welfare to an income maintenance system would cost from $3 billion in Professor Milton Friedman's parsimonious Negative Income Tax Plan, to $40 billion in some of the more ambitious schemes...

...It was soon perceived that revenue-sharing with the states and tax incentives for business investment in the ghetto were easier slogans than programs...

...Some programs were shifted to old-line departments...

...The group had received estimates that an additional $3 billion a year would be needed to extinguish hunger in America...

...The plan is embodied in a draft message to Congress on welfare reform which seemed on its way to being embraced by Nixon when he told Congress, in his mini-State of the Union message on April 14, that "tinkering with the present welfare system is not enough" and that "we Daniel Schorr, cbs News specialist in urban affairs, is a frequent contributor to these pages...

...Since then the momentum behind the scheme has been checked, first by questions from the Budget Bureau about cost estimates, then by the Supreme Court decision April 21 striking down state residence requirements for welfare, cited as altering the statistical premises of the plan...

...It may seem surprising that the President, on record in his campaign as sternly opposed to income maintenance, would even consider venturing into these uncharted seas...

...It was the more embarrassing because Democrats in Congress were all too eager to pick up gauntlets dropped by faltering Administration hands...

...Instead, the standards would be linked to a revenue-sharing scheme, with the states obligated to use some of the Federal tax money to maintain the welfare standards...

...This would concentrate on shifting from the unsatisfactory commodity distribution to a liberalized food-stamp program, intended to reach 11.5 million persons at its peak...

...He speaks for the enraged hard-working, tax-paying citizens who resent seeing others supported by the government...

...Another was that, come to think of it, the answer to improver-ishment was not food distribution but a more rational system of money distribution...

...Something similar had been recommended by Richard Nathan's Republican task force...

...The Job Corps, a primary target of Nixon's campaign attacks, was ordered to close half its centers, but was not dissolved...

...A family of four would be guaranteed a Federal income of $1,500 a year...

...In addition, if the teachings of our social scientists and economists are true, a family with an economic floor under its DONALD RUMSFELD feet would be better able to improve itself...

...Two weeks later, it was no longer under active consideration...

...This much had been expected...

...But Finch and Moynihan and their ardent technicians went to work...

...Our new programs will be vigorous and innovative...

...The subcommittee agreed on a formula that would provide a national Federally-financed minimum of $40 monthly for dependent children and $65 for adults...

...Lacking the President's concentrated attention, however, they had no clear idea about goals or limits...

...When Senator McGovern called Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin before his committee to spotlight the Administration's inactivity on the hunger front, President Nixon switched signals again and decided after all to add $275 million to the $340 million in next year's budget for food distribution...

...His planners were encouraged to plan...

...On this score, a President who says he abhors empty promises felt sure enough to make some early public statements...

...In fact there was an antihunger program...

...Still, a number of significant developments have occurred during his initial few months in office...

...One example is hunger and malnutrition...

...But this would do nothing to break the cycle of dependency, to check the alarming expansion of the welfare rolls...

...need a complete reappraisal and redirection of programs...

...Another was that the hunger problem had been overestimated (apparently also by the President back in February...

...Their mandate from the President was to develop a new system that would not add more than $2 billion to current Federal costs...

...The President, presumably on the advice of counselors outside the Urban Affairs Council, had decided against it...

...Burns stands for the conservative belief that money should not be handed out for not doing anything...

...And the states would be expected to supplement Federal assistance...

...chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in the 1967 Social Security amendments, whose operation have so far been postponed with his consent...

...The abrupt switch was embarrassing to a President who had taunted previous administrations with "the failure of past efforts...

...As his most important ally Moynihan gained the President's good friend, Secretary Finch, who was put in charge of this exploration as chairman of the Urban Affairs Council's welfare subcommittee...

...Nixon has made a point of presiding over most of the sessions of the full Council, but these have mainly focused on stopgap measures (such as diverting money to rebuild riot-torn ghetto areas), or on inexpensive administrative reshuffles (such as regrouping minority business efforts in a new office in the Commerce Department...

...At hew on February 20, he promised "new approaches...

...Bigger policy decisions, which would tell planners how realistic their schemes were, have been repeatedly postponed by a President not yet able or willing to come to grips with them...

...And for a frustrated Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with little thus far to show for his gamble on a Republican Administration, it was a climactic opportunity for a breakthrough in the area he knew best and cared most about...

...Visiting the Department of Agriculture February 3, he said, "We are going to work on this problem," which he called "an exciting opportunity...

...Then the Council learned that Burns had submitted an alternative plan to the President...

...The failure of past efforts to combat these problems has been made shockingly clear...

...And the new director of the oeo, Representative Donald Rumsfeld (R.-Ill...

...It was presumably still in the President's mind when he sent his message to Congress on April 14?though no longer planned to start in the coming fiscal year...

...Meanwhile, the Budget Bureau shook its head and asked for a review of cost estimates...

...The Administration badly needed a visible demonstration of concern for the poor...

...In his first weeks in office he would bridle at questions about welfare, saying he also had responsibility for Health and Education and had no intention of turning hew into a "Department of the Dole...