GUS TYLER
Gus Tyler replies: Edward C. Banfield and Leslie Lenkowsky assume that I and the ILGWU were opposed to the Family Assistance Plan. We were not; we are not now. How, then, did they get the idea?...
...1 back higher wae^s and therefore don't like the Nixon Administration's opposition to an mcreased minimum v age?and its extension to the millions now excluded, c J and young...
...That is why I disagree with Banfield when he suggests that "one supports direct grants instead of, say, Headstart, because one gets more for one's money that way...
...Out of my many years of political action, I find it difficult to share the professor's credulity about the President's credibility...
...In rereading Banfield and Lenkowsky, I sense that while they are ostensibly defending Pat, they are really defending Nixon...
...The labor movement, however, favored FAP-even under Nixon-and the bit about Cohen fearing ILGWU opposition is a pure fantasy spun out of an impure falsity...
...Given the relationship between Pat's current thinking and the thrust of the Administration, that is as it should be...
...Working people, especially the poor, have too many problems that cannot be solved with a few extra dollars-they are no substitutes for decent systems of child care and education...
...In the same breath, Moynihan notes that in a statement submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, the ILGWU and the ACWA reiterated their traditional opposition to Federal funds for on-the-job training in the needle trades (because they are used by nonunion garment employers looking for subsidies to set up runaway plants in the South...
...Banfield appears to have accepted not only Moynihan's innuendos but also one of his book's major themes: Those who did not see things Moynihan's way were people of mean motives...
...Yet, just as I do not wish to blame Pat for all of Dick's sins, so do I find it difficult to concur with Lenkowsky that the spirit of Moynihan lives on in bills like "the 20 per cent increase of Social Security in 1972...
...The public man's political bias is all there: Internationalists, socialists and militants are hypocrites...
...John Ehrlichman announced (Times, March 10): Nixon will veto a wide range of Congressional proposals "from flood control and rural electrification to airport security and veterans' burial benefits...
...showed little interest in it...
...Because I agree with the 1970 resolution of the AFL-CIO Executive Council?one of whose members is Louis Stulberg, president of the ILGWU-affirming that "while proposed benefits fall short of need, the program of Federal benefits to all families with children whose income is below poverty levels is a step in the right direction...
...It would provide no serious incentive to work...
...Section 235 (moderate income ownership...
...But these statements were merely a summary of Moynihan's own conclusions...
...I had a personal reason for being nice to Pat in my piece...
...It could not force people to work," I said...
...And I think we can afford both, since we subsidize the rich in the form of tax loopholes to the tune of about $40 billion a year...
...The plumbers were for this...
...But our differences go all the way back to 1967, when Pat began to formulate his new political philosophy...
...The Monthly Economic Letter of the First National City Bank (March) disclosed: The Administration is "impounding some $15 billion-the biggest chunk of which was for water pollution control...
...Lenkowsky quotes Robert Finch to the effect that "the typical FAP family of 5.6 members would have had an average total income of about $4,700, slightly above the existing poverty line...
...Banfield has provided the relevant quote: "The President had proposed to give money to the poor...
...On March 27, Nixon vetoed the bill to aid the physically handicapped...
...But the word "average" means that approximately half the FAP families would be below that figure, leaving millions in continuing need...
...Under FAP...
...Only out of such petty pique would I be critical-surely not out of principle...
...In refutation, Banfield quotes the President as saying that "the states and cities will get all the 'new' money they were promised...
...Section 236 (moderate income rental...
...Also halted were commitments for water and sewer grants, open space grants, public facility loans...
...I also agree with Lenkowsky that my observation about the President's "emphasizing an income strategy instead of the pattern of subsidies plus services identified with the welfare state is not to be denied...
...the other guys are okay...
...It showed Nixon with budget in hand, reading from it as if from a Bible, and officiating over the grave of "New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society?933-1973-i.O.U...
...The truth, of course, is that Meany was not speaking for the "plumbers," with whom he has held no post for half a century...
...Both refer to my having called FAP "a bitter hoax...
...The internationalist, socialist, militant unions were not sure...
...I thought he was wrong then and, in the light of what his new book reveals about his total point of view, I felt it appropriate to do a long essay as an opener for a public dialogue among liberals...
...Whatever Banfield and Lenkowsky may wish to believe, an official GOP periodical is proud to proclaim Nixon as the Great Undertaker of the "welfare state...
...You do not end poverty with a $1.3 billion expenditure-the amount originally envisioned...
...Maybe they were misled by my comment that the plan was not "welfare reform...
...Consequently, I have to disagree with Banfield that "FAP . . . represented an extraordinary continuity of policy from the Johnson to the Nixon Administrations...
...the FAP idea is good but there ought to be more of it...
...I favor both income and early instruction because, if we do nothing to break the cycle of poverty, we are doomed to be plagued by it forever...
...That is...
...On page 107...
...Perhaps Banfield and Lenkowsky think I was against FAP because I wrote that it would not end poverty and that, as income redistribution, it was a burlesque...
...Banfield accepts Moynihan's invention as gospel and builds on it quite imaginatively, stating flatly that HEW Secretary Wilbur Cohen rejected a family assistance plan "apparently because he feared opposition from the likes of the ILGWU...
...he was speaking for the entire AFL-CIO, including the ILGWU and the ACWA...
...Banfield opens with the suggestion that I had a mad on for Moynihan because he said a nasty thing about the ILGWU...
...he says, "any low income family with an employed head could substantially increase the cash flow through its various pockets and pocketbooks by the simple expedient of breaking up and putting the women and children on relief...
...The AFL-CIO listed FAP as Number Three in its "must" legislation...
...Yet what I actually wrote was: "The real question should have been whether FAP was a part of or substitute for the welfare state...
...Moynihan manages to suggest that whereas Meany wanted FAP...
...The sleight-of-hand is painfully obvious...
...So I was kind and did not mention his attempt to use the plumbers to leadpipe the "socialists...
...Indeed, his in-depth proof of this point is one of the major contributions he has made to an intelligent discussion of family assistance plans in the future...
...As a trade unionist I believe in an income strategy?the basic philosophy of unions beginning with the founding of the Republic...
...The New York Times reported (March 5): Nixon plans "to withdraw money for neighborhood mental clinics and regional medical programs...
...The phrase "when not actually opposed to it" implies that the "advanced" unions occasionally resisted FAP, an implication contrary to fact...
...The Wall Street Journal observed (February 26): "What's shaping up is a substantial-in some cases even massive?withdrawal of Federal funds from a wide variety of programs" such as subsidized housing, hospital construction and manpower training...
...Ibelieve the evidence is clear that Nixon has been trying to reverse the dynamic of the Democratic administrations from FDR to LBJ...
...The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing notes: The Administration moratorium has halted "such programs as public housing (conventional, turnkey, leasing...
...Nonetheless, Banfield concludes that the ILGWU and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers opposed it...
...He falls into the error because of a single paragraph in which Moynihan created this misim-pression-a paragraph that reveals a great deal about the politics of this nonpolitical "public man...
...Let me set that record straight...
...as a substitute-for it is a bitter hoax...
...So why, after Moynihan and I have collectively debunked FAP, am I for it...
...Out of Professor Banfield's years of political study, he undoubtedly has some reason for taking this statement as adequate assurance...
...What is more, the impetus for Social Security and its extension somewhat predates Pat-from Bismarck to, if you please, Congressman Wilbur Mills...
...As a part-of it has great merit...
...those who did, especially Nixon, were people of clean heart...
...it would not help hold families together...
...it would not check the flow from rural poverty to urban dependency...
...He then tells us that when Walter Reuther testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, he spoke about the need for full employment, as well as "for reordering national priorities and raising Social Security payments...
...That is why I want full employment and don't like the way the Nixon Administration doubled the jobless rate by "cooling the economy" in its first months in office...
...he gives me a very flattering footnote that would more than compensate my ego for any slights he might suggest in one slippery paragraph aboul certain progressive unions...
...I do not need lectures on how gooC ,t is for individuals to have income...
...For exampie, although Lenkowsky seems to believe that FAP would encourage greater "social stability" because fathers "would neither be compelled to leave home nor become unemployed for their families to receive assistance," Moynihan disagrees...
...He cites Alice Rivlin's belief that "labor union opposition might have killed the proposal...
...Consequently, I have to disagree with Ban-field's contention that "there are no grounds whatever for believing that the Nixon Administration had (or has) any intention of substituting an income for a service strategy so as to 'dismantle the welfare state.' " I do accept Banfield's view that it would be "childish" to think "the President seized upon a scheme by Moynihan and turned it into a plot against the poor...
...I still hold to those positions, and I see nothing in the responses from the Cambridge Circle that demonstrates otherwise...
...I agree with Lenkowsky that FAP (as it was being handled) "really was-or quickly became-a conservative replacement for the welfare state, an attempt to curtail the involvement of the Federal government in social policy...
...By this clever juxtaposition of distantly related events at different times and places...
...the "most advanced [labor] elements, when not actually opposed to it...
...On page 277 of The Politics of a Guaranteed Income Moynihan praises George Meany's commitment to FAP...
...Having manufactured a nonfact, Moynihan proceeds to draw a conclusion based on the fiction he invented...
...Nor, in a trillion dollar economy, do you seriously redistribute income with a $4 billion expenditure (a later figure), especially when that sum is to be raised by taxing the poor and the near-poor...
...The difference is as great as that between addition and subtraction...
...I hjve given t/ios: lectures myself, including several hundred on how Phases I, II and III have stolen money from millions of working families...
...But this brings us to the crux of the argument: We see this Administration differently...
...That measure was passed not while the Administration-as Lenkowsky puts it?withheld active support," but against the Administration's active opposition...
...Still, I would maintain that Moynihan's post-1967 philosophy-about "the limited capacities of government to bring about social change," and the need to shift the decision-making process from Washington to the states and cities—provides the rationale for liberals who want to go along with Nixon and the rhetoric for conservatives who want to quote certified liberals...
...I accept our ambassador to India's judgment that FAP was not welfare reform...
...Earlier in the month, First Monday, the publication of the GOP National Committee, reprinted a cartoon from the Richmond News Leader...
...But I also know that income is not enough...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 11
