The Politics of Pat Moynihan

...As sociologist, he taps updated research and sophisticated insights to fortify and footnote his commitments...

...Now that they have his credo in hand?that [Federal] government is best that governs least"-they don't really need him at hand with his "guaranteed incomes...

...While the debate over FAP revolved around its merits per se, the real question should have been whether FAP was a part of or a substitute for the welfare state...

...It gets the Feds out of services, turns the initiative over to what Nixon calls "grass root government," and reduces the total involvement of government in the process of social progress-thereby recognizing "the limited capacities of government to bring about social change...

...Daniel Patrick (Pat) Moynihan has shown himself to be a man of many parts: enthusiast, moralist, Talmudist, sociologist, publicist...

...Underlying these precepts was a philosophy of politics asserting "the limited capacities of government to bring about social change...

...the family would lose Medicaid, or rent subsidy, or low-income housing, or day care for the kids-items worth hundreds or thousands of dollars...

...If a man is able to work, if a man is trained for a job, and then he refuses to work, that man should not be paid to loaf by a hardworking taxpayer in the United States of America...

...But the income strategy that preceded Moynihan's FAP by more than a full generation was never viewed as something contrary to a services strategy...

...a system that "will abolish poverty for dependent children and the working poor...

...since "in most states a family is denied welfare if a father is present-even though he is unable to support his family...

...In practice, the rich neighborhoods would raise funds to provide for their services while the poor communities would continue to languish in poverty...

...In plain talk: Give them that $1,600 and knock out those useless services-like Headstart, etc...

...Nothing in the bill would have significantly touched the top 2 per cent who own about 40 per cent of the wealth, about 75 per cent of the privately held corporate stocks, about 85 per cent of the bonds, and about 99 per cent of the municipal bonds...

...The base guarantee was originally $1,500, but if the head of the family refused to take a job or job training the family was to be penalized $300, reducing the base to $1,200...

...In his 1969 TV broadcast Nixon also indicted the present welfare system because its unequal standards in different areas lure "thousands more into already overcrowded inner cities as unprepared for city life as they are for city jobs," and because it creates "an incentive for desertion...

...Nixon added his voice: "Many of the problems of poverty are traceable directly to early childhood experience...

...it would provide no serious incentive to work...

...it would not check the flow from rural poverty to urban dependency...

...For an incoming Republican Administration inclined to undo the Federal programs and agencies built up by Democratic Presidents from FDR to LBJ, the Moynihan thesis was singularly useful: Here was a statement from a certified liberal proposing to dismantle the "welfare state" in the name of "redistributing wealth and power" to the people...

...By dressing up FAP as a grand plan to "abolish poverty" through "income redistribution," though...

...Is that correct...

...that was an income strategy...

...Patricelii: That is correct . . . Williams: They are penalized $19 because they go out and earn $5,500...

...The services strategy became a vital ingredient of income strategy, for there was no point in giving a family money to buy services it could not afford even with a few added bucks...

...Reviewing Moynihan's book in the New Republic, Ribicoff notes that the author "left at half time," and that if he had "stayed for the third and fourth quarters of the game?or even chronicled it-he would have seen that it was the failure of support from President Nixon that sealed the doom for welfare reform...

...Since Moynihan proves convincingly that raising the base would have escalated costs prohibitively...

...Under Nixon, however, revenue sharing became a substitute for categorical grants supplied by Washington to the states for a wide range of defined projects, like education, housing and social services...

...His first motif is that FAP-a "quantum leap" in social policy-was killed by a coalition of people with mean motives...

...Nixon had set the tone in his August 8, 1969, nationwide television address: "What America needs now is not more welfare but more workfare...

...proved while quizzing a star White House witness, Robert Patricelli, in many instances the more a FAP recipient earned, the less he or she would get...

...In fact, everything came out topsy-turvy...

...As enthusiast and publicist, he calls it "the purest embodiment of income redistribution...

...Conservatives did not want to pamper the undeserving poor...

...The work-or-starve provisions of FAP, he says, were more lenient than existing regulations written as amendments to the Social Security Act in 1967...

...If income went beyond a given "notch...

...The emphasis made sense: If mothers were to go to work, some provision had to be made for their children...

...As for bringing families back together, Moynihan reports that "under FAP, no less than with AFDC, 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 welfare...

...In view of the way it was to be funded, FAP was far less a means of redistributing wealth than of reshuffling poverty...

...Thinking Aloud THE POLITICS OF PAT MOYNIHAN BY GUS TYLER In the course of serving with distinction in the subcabinets of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and the Cabinet of President Richard M. Nixon...

...Senator...

...On March 2. 1973, a headline in the New York Times reported: president formally drops plan for guaranteed annual income...

...Petricelli: That is correct...

...This should not come as a surprise to Moynihan, though he would probably point the finger at some of those around Nixon rather than at the President himself...

...it would only establish a minimum (about $1,500 for a family of four) and mandate states paying above that level to maintain existing standards...

...He maintains that both Nixon and he knew exactly what they were doing: The President was selling the idea to the Right-wing ("boob-bait for the conservatives" is what William F. Buckley Jr...

...Only 10 weeks after Nixon took office, Moynihan sent him a memo suggesting how FAP could be used as a strategy to reduce other services: "The Family Security System would enable you to begin cutting back sharply on these costly and questionable services, and yet to assert with full validity that it was under your Presidency that poverty was abolished in America...

...Quite appropriately, Moynihan's ADA speech was reprinted by Melvin Laird in The Republican Papers...

...Moynihan was selling it to the Left-wing...

...He is pushing a policy on how to deal with the problem of the poor and dependent...

...Heller has denounced the Nixon proposals as "an excuse for a fiscal cop-out...

...But the battle was resumed in the 92nd Congress, under the leadership of liberal Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff...

...2) The initiative for social policy should be shifted from the Federal government to the cities and states, the source of "a preponderance of social programs...

...there was "money in poverty" and "power . . . through control of community agencies...

...The conservatives saw it as payment for nonwork while some liberals saw it as "forced labor...

...Given that the FAP ceiling "would have reduced benefits to some welfare families...

...FAP "guaranteed" an income of only $1,200 for a family of four...

...In reality, Moynihan abundantly demonstrates, FAP would do nothing of the kind...

...And it runs like a pedal point through the present opus, giving the entire work durable dimensions for debate that range far beyond the relatively narrow, limited flap over FAP...

...Yet, if that is what FAP was all about, the Nixon Administration totally misrepresented the proposal to the American people...

...I oppose it now and I will continue to oppose it...

...Presumably, while Moynihan knew about these FAP finks, Nixon did not-or, knowing, Nixon did nothing to correct the misimpres-sion his aides were spreading...

...It had passed the House with the full support of the liberal Democrats-a fact that almost gets lost in Moynihan's account because of his general animus against liberals...

...Indeed, these top holders were granted even more than their usual tax privileges through Administration-sponsored business "incentives...

...The press took its cue...

...These get-tough rules had not been effective from 1967-70 and were hardly likely to succeed at a time when the unemployment rate had-under Nixon-nearly doubled...

...As Talmudist...

...Section 7a of the NIRA...

...In the process, it would give the impoverished a greater say over their own destinies by getting the Federal bureaucrats off their backs...

...If so, they do him (and others of his tendency) an injustice, for he began to evolve a Nixonian concept of public policy for the '70s prior to Nixon's first election...

...I will put it very bluntly," Nixon said in 1970...

...This is what I would put my emphasis on...

...This group did not really make itself heard on Capitol Hill "until FAP, wholly unexpectedly, passed the House...

...If what the poor lacked was money, giving it to them directly was, on the face of it, a reasonable response: direct, efficient, and immediate...

...Using Moynihan's phraseology, the New York Times noted: "The so-called 'service approach' to ending poverty is being abandoned but the 'income approach' is not being launched...

...It was originally proposed by Democrat Walter W. Heller when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, as a way of using the Federal taxing power to aid hard-pressed local governments...

...Southern Democrats did not want to emancipate their poor from economic exploitation or political intimidation...

...To those acquainted with New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society programs, the idea of an income strategy is not new...

...But he did not merely suggest a coalition that would preserve order against disorder...

...And it is this allegedly revolutionary aspect of FAP-its jump to a galaxy of nonincremental policies, to something different-that makes Moynihan's book much more than the discussion of a legislative proposal Nixon once made and soon forgot...

...The overriding "irony"-a favorite Moynihan word -of this contrapuntal composition is that "good guys" come out looking bad and vice versa...

...In other words, if some subdivision "raised" more, it would be given more...

...The 1966 Coleman Report on education convinced him that monies put into Headstart, Compensatory Education, or even the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 were a waste-much input with no measurable output...

...After deductions for Social Security taxes and other costs incident to a job, Milton Friedman calculated, the earner would end up with no more than 28.5 cents out of every hard-won buck...

...In a press conference, HEW Secretary Casper Weinberger explained why by echoing "a comment made by John D. Ehrlich-man," who holds Moynihan's old job as Nixon's chief domestic advisor...

...This seemingly incontrovertible idea is the keystone to what Moynihan calls his "income strategy...

...Praising an early Republican proposal for revenue sharing, Moynihan observes that it was superior to the Democratic version in that the GOP would provide for "an automatic pass-through of Federal revenues to cities and counties and subdivisions...

...Testifying on FAP before the House Ways and Means Committee, then Labor Secretary George Schultz gave day care top priority: "If somebody asked me what is the most important thing in this whole plan, I would say it is the idea of quality child care...

...According to Moynihan, the widely publicized workfare-not-welfare line was pure hokum, a sales pitch to peddle FAP to the country, especially to conservatives...

...The earnings "incentive" (keep 50 per cent of what you earn) was equally phoney...

...He set down the programmatic precepts for a new (Disraelian...

...579 pp., $10.00), his book on the rejected Family Assistance Plan (FAP), Moynihan reassembles this impressive array of talents to compose an intriguing political fugue with two central themes interwoven in startling counterpoint...

...In short, as advertised by the White House and the media, FAP was a plan to turn shirkers into workers...

...in the 20th century...

...FAP, he claimed, would check the flow of dependent families into cities with higher welfare benefits and would reunite broken families...

...To claim that this small lift would have effectively ended poverty is a bad case of delusion...

...Such a formula would guarantee to affluent subdivisions that they would be rewarded in line with the Biblical injunction: "To them that hath shall be given...

...Up to then, the White House had been expecting the bill to lose, which would allow the Republican President to claim credit for his "liberal" proposal and blame the Democratic House for its defeat...

...His solution is simple: Give them money...

...More recently, Moynihan carried his philosophy one step further by declaring that New York City "must permit communities to levy some taxes...

...The liberals were not expected to believe Nixon but to support FAP as a guaranteed income scheme...

...As moralist, he is prone to identify his allies with virtue and his opponents with vice...

...Even George McGovern was more interested in wooing blue-collar votes for his Presidential ambitions than in caring for the politically apathetic poor...

...As for Moynihan, he began to turn his back on the services strategy long before he joined the Nixon Administration...

...Although he knew that FAP was politically risky, he was still bent on going ahead with it, courageously "leaning toward FAP not least because of the risks involved...

...And as publicist, he is a sheer genius in promoting his plans-and himself...

...Nixon could buy his place in history as the noblest warrior against poverty at bargain rates...

...Holmes Alexander wrote: "This means in plain language that the poor may have to work-or-starve, and that 'dependent children' will no longer be the excuse by nonearning parents...

...Moynihan's second motif is that standing against these unholy uglies was Richard Nixon, whose "attitudes were much closer to those of welfare recipients themselves," who "proposed to spend more money for the direct provision of the needs of low-income groups than any President in history" and who was determined to "fulfill the promises of the 1960s...

...If you did not work on a job or take job training, you would be punished by the withdrawal of funds...

...conservatism: (1) Though the Federal government is a handy device for "redistributing power and wealth," it is a "highly unreliable device for . . . providing services...

...if dependency was not to become self-propagating, quality care for youngsters would be needed at some point to break the poverty cycle...

...Each unit of local 'general purpose' government would receive an amount 'based on its share of total local revenue raised in the state.' Once again there would be a reward for extra effort...

...The idea was to make more money available...

...The beneficiaries at the bottom would have received their crumbs of redistributed "wealth" almost exclusively from the nonwealthy...

...The rest of the cost would have been picked up by the nonpoor, near-poor, and not-so-poor who bear the major burden of the Federal tax load...

...Patricelli: There is none...

...To meet these crying needs, the government had to provide schools, housing...

...Now, in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (Random House...

...Liberal Democrats did not want to give a credit line to a Republican President...

...Militant black mothers of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), the "aristocracy of welfare recipients," did not want to share their goodies with the less fortunate poor...

...Either way?1,200 or $1,500 or even $1,600-that family would still be living in painfully abject poverty on its $23 or $30 a week...

...if we are to make genuine, long-range progress, we must focus our efforts much more than heretofore on those few years which may determine how far, throughout his later life, the child can reach...

...regardless of whether or not he was willing to work...

...FAP could only have helped a little...

...The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees did not want to lose jurisdiction over numerous welfare bureaucrats...

...As practiced by Nixon, revenue sharing is quite consistent with the philosophy Moynihan outlined in his 1967 ADA speech...

...part of the money would have come from other families presently on welfare...

...Actually, as former conservative Senator John J. Williams (R.-Del...

...The conservatives were supposed to be taken in by Nixon's rhetoric and thus back the bill...

...Is that not correct...

...The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, setting Federal minimum wages at 25 cents an hour, was an income strategy...

...The New York Daily News got the message: "Day care centers would be set up, where mothers at work or in job training could leave their children to be cared for during working hours...

...The tremendous cost of the poverty program comes from services...

...This was to be achieved by stick and carrot...

...They would finally have a share of the wealth and power...

...Williams: What possible logic is there to it...

...called it...

...as a substi-tute-for it is a bitter hoax...

...Simultaneously, in speaking to social workers and other liberal groups, Moynihan argued that FAP was really a guaranteed income plan intended to redistribute wealth in America...

...Medicare and Medicaid, legal services, employment offices, day care, etc...

...Robert Finch, the then Secretary of HEW, reinforced the President's disclaimer: "The most widely discussed question is whether Family Assistance is really in fact a 'guaranteed annual income' and to this question I can emphatically answer 'no.' . . . Under Family Assistance, income is not provided regardless of personal effort or attitudes...

...he spins syllogisms to suggest an eternal inevitability to his sometimes transient conclusions...

...To Nixon, at least in his public statements, it was not: "This national floor under incomes for working or dependent families is not a guaranteed income...

...Able-bodied unemployed fathers on relief," editorialized the New York Daily News, "and mothers of school-age children on FA rolls would be required to take work or job training...

...Apparently these people-that "nebulous group"-are firmly in the saddle, and Pat is off in faraway India...

...encouraging collective bargaining to raise the wages of employees above the floor level, was an income strategy...

...When the National Recovery Administration organized whole industries to set a floor on wages in 1933...

...In other words, as "welfare reform" FAP was blatant huckstering: It could not force people to work...

...Although Moynihan's book gives the impression that it is the full story of the battle over the Family Assistance Plan, it is really only a truncated presentation...

...To Moynihan, it was a "guaranteed income...

...As the President publicly and repeatedly explained it, FAP was a way to get the welfare loafers off their unethical duffs...

...In addition, Moynihan is too knowledgeable a sociologist to ignore the fact (although he mentions it only in passing) that the great flood of the uprooted from soil to city in post-World War II America was brought on by a "green revolution" in agricultural productivity which, combined with a Federal policy of subsidizing curtailment of production, forced some 20 million rural Americans to choose between starvation and the city...

...The cost is not very great," counseled Moynihan, "because it is a direct payment system...

...The same logic holds for revenue sharing, a concept Moynihan repeatedly describes as part of the income strategy scheme...

...The original FAP combined income with a services strategy...

...In his crusading role, of course, Nixon had the spur and savvy of Moynihan...

...Perhaps meant to be an apologia pro vita sua (1969-71), the book will no doubt reinforce the conviction of many liberals that Moynihan is another "lost leader" who left them just for a ribbon to pin on his coat...

...Moynihan's explanation is that the political exigencies surrounding FAP required the White House to present the proposal as welfare reform (which it was not) and deny it was a guaranteed income (which it was...

...So were unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, aid to the blind and handicapped and, most relevantly, aid to dependent children...

...Above all else, he saw FAP as a form of income redistribution, designed to move more money downward to the poor...

...The Family Assistance Plan was Moynihan's attempt to apply his philosophy...

...I opposed such a plan...

...it would not help hold families together...

...The disincentives to work inherent in FAP were dramatically revealed during a crucial exchange between Williams and Patricelli before the Senate Finance Committee: Williams: If they increase their earnings from $720 to $5,560 under this bill, they have a spendable income of $6,109, or $19 less than if they sit in a rocking chair earning only $720...

...It runs to the end of the 91st Congress, where the bill was killed in the conservative-minded Senate Finance Committee...

...The effect is that the Administration has cut-and-run from the War on Poverty...

...Concretely, wealthy Scarsdale or Beverly Hills would receive more per capita than Bedford-Stuyvesant or Watts, not because of their "extra effort" but because of their added riches...

...Within the White House, and the Administration," records Moynihan, "there developed a group that wished to see FAP defeated...

...What is new-and a booby-trap for the poor-is substituting it for a "services strategy...

...When the House "unexpectedly" passed the measure, this "somewhat nebulous White House group did have an impact among senators who wished to believe what such persons would intimate, namely that the President's support for the legislation was waning, or even that he had never really supported it to begin with...

...Social workers did not want to lose their pay or prestige...

...What, then, was FAP all about...

...As early as 1967, addressing an audience with established liberal credentials (Americans for Democratic Action), Moynihan argued warmly for a liberal-conservative alliance to check the lunacy of the New Left...

...Under the guaranteed income proposal, everyone would be assured a minimum income, regardless of how much he was capable of earning, regardless of what his need was...

...As a part-of it has great merit...

...Yet when Congress did pass a comprehensive child care development bill, with a meager $2 billion appropriation that included day care centers, the proposal was vetoed by President Nixon on the grounds that it was substituting "communal" for familial forms of child-rearing...

...Work and make-work projects, like the FERA, WPA, PWA, CCC, CWA, were all devices to put income into the hands of those who did not have it...

...He sees FAP as a "quantum leap" not because of the sum involved (estimated at only $4 billion the first year and less later on), but because it is "nonincremental...

...As a glandular enthusiast, he likes to be in the thick of things and prefers to believe where he is is where it's at...

...if you earned money on your own, you would be allowed to hold on to 50 cents of every dollar you made, up to a set sum...

...Despite the genuine merits of FAP, in truth it would not have come anywhere near ending poverty and was a burlesque of income redistribution...

...Many people in this Administration were never really comfortable with the idea...

...Robert Wood, former Secretary of HUD, calls it a "shell game," in which whatever "shell you look under, the Federal funds you thought were there have vanished...

...There were just too many services that low-and middle-income families could not purchase, despite steady and higher incomes: items such as education for their children, decent housing, medical care, job training, legal counsel, job placement, or adequate protection against discrimination...

...Moynihan is not simply indulging in an understandable exaggeration...

...The Full Employment Act of 1947 was a sweeping resolve to provide incomes to everyone who wanted to work by making jobs available to all...

...The claim that FAP was serious income redistribution is equally illusory...

...Moynihan, however, is not content to portray FAP merely as a form of guaranteed income-a cause in which he, as moralist, has earned well-deserved kudos...

...On the face of it, this sounds democratic: "power to the people...

...It would not end the unequal welfare payments from state to state...

...A vital part of the proposal was a major service-the day care program...