Reagan's 'Way' to Nowhere
Agran, Larry
The Presidential hopeful from California keeps tripping over his own hard line on welfare Reagan's 'Way' to Nowhere LARRY AGRAN In his eight-year career as a professional politician, Ronald...
...H.R.I provided further incentives to assure that all the benefits—the basic $130 grant plus the state supplement—would no longer be sent out by local welfare offices but instead would become the responsibility of the Federal Social Security Administration...
...Ironically, it is Reagan himself who has supplied the necessary ingredients for that advancement: a penchant for confrontation...
...These demeaning and regressive proposals, and others like them, were a throwback to the Elizabethan Poor Laws and conflicted directly with the pioneering principles which made H.R.I such an attractive and progressive piece of social legislation...
...Showing the Way is a slick publication, laden with bogus claims of success, suggesting that Reagan has been responsible for enormous welfare savings in California...
...Reagan needed the costly bill to avoid the even costlier Larry Agran is a Los Angeles attorney who served as legal counsel to the California State Senate Health and Welfare Committee from 1970 to 1973...
...Now, as he prepares to run for President in 1976, Reagan is dusting off some of the old cliches, readying himself for a national anti-welfare campaign calculated to win the Republican nomination and then the Presidency...
...Reagan no doubt figured he could do much better in a pre-Christmas special session of the legislature...
...Through the spring and summer, Reagan was locked in struggle with the Democratic-controlled legislature...
...In its place, the Congress provided for a program of Supplemental Security Income, guaranteeing each of these needy individuals an income of $130 per month, beginning January 1, 1974...
...In his 1970 campaign for re-election —four years after he had become governor on a promise to roll back welfare spending in California—Reagan was still campaigning against what he termed "this cancer eating at our vitals...
...Pointing to the $80 million price tag on the bill, Reagan would have no part of it...
...In mid-1971, Reagan and the legislature's Democratic leadership engaged in marathon welfare negotiations and agreed upon the controversial Welfare Reform Act of 1971...
...He writes a column for The Los Angeles Times...
...But the curious fact remains that the Reagan years have yielded the most significant economic advancement for California welfare recipients in history...
...Instead of agreeing to a reasonable and relatively inexpensive $80 million bill in September, Reagan is now saddled with a $122 million measure...
...All this is not meant to suggest that California has become a poor people's haven...
...The governor was forced to approve a bill which raised average monthly benefits from roughly $200 per month to a new level of more than $235...
...The obvious question was never answered by the governor: What possible justification could there be for any aged, blind, or disabled person getting a lower grant as a result of the changeover to the new Federal program...
...At the eleventh hour he ended all hope for a compromise when—reminiscent of the pre-Watergate Nixon—he directed his health and welfare secretary to make the wild assertion that his administration could implement the new Federal program without any state legislation whatsoever, relying on "inherent authority" to issue administratively all the regulations necessary...
...The administration claim, which essentially told the legislature to get lost, had its intended effect...
...a belligerent attitude toward the legislature...
...When these serious personal shortcomings produce major policy reversals, Reagan's sophisticated public relations machinery takes over...
...Indeed, Reagan's national anti-welfare campaign will somehow have to finesse the fact that during his years as governor of California, welfare grant levels have been boosted by amounts unprecedented in the state's history, outstripping any increases experienced in other large industrial states...
...One proposal would have placed a lien on a recipient's property so that the state could recoup its supplemental outlay upon the death of the recipient...
...He defeated incumbent Governor Pat Brown by more than one million votes...
...Beyond this, the most critical matter in Reagan's proposed bill was the grant structure...
...Reagan had snared himself, and the Democratic leadership knew it...
...The court decision and the subsequent legislative action mark the third time in two years that Reagan, in his stubborn efforts to deprive the poor of even the most modest economic gains, has backed himself into huge new welfare costs...
...In October 1972, when Congress passed H.R...
...What he overlooked was his old nemesis, the Federal OEO Legal Services in California...
...The Presidential hopeful from California keeps tripping over his own hard line on welfare Reagan's 'Way' to Nowhere LARRY AGRAN In his eight-year career as a professional politician, Ronald Reagan's stock in trade has always been a relentless attack against "welfare...
...they also persuaded the Court to rule that in the absence of any new legislation, existing state law had the effect of automatically triggering vastly increased benefits to the aged, blind, and disabled on January 1. Faced with this multi-million dollar court order, with virtually no chance for a reversal on appeal, Reagan called the legislature into a pre-Christmas special session, but this special session was not at all like the gathering he had envisioned last summer...
...effects of a whopping $324 million court decision on welfare benefits which he lost in November...
...When it was all over, Reagan, who had publicly promised a billion dollar welfare rollback, signed a bill into law that actually cost an additional $100 million in new welfare benefits in its first full year of operation...
...Early last year, Governor Reagan unveiled his version of a bill to put the new Federal law into effect...
...Just the opposite is true...
...Following the twin debacles of 1971—the court-ordered AFDC grant increase and the costly Welfare Reform Act—the governor ordered the preparation of a nationally distributed document entitled Welfare Reform in California . . . Showing the Way...
...It held in line fifteen Republicans in the forty-member state senate, enough to block the two-thirds majority needed to pass the implementing legislation...
...Because, as skilled as he is at public relations—and Reagan is one of the best around—the record is replete with proof that he has been an utter failure at bringing about the promised welfare rollback...
...Recognizing that such a monthly grant would be terribly inadequate in most parts of the country, Congress built in incentives to encourage the states to add funds of their own beyond the $130 basic Federal grant...
...In a special session last December, the California legislature voted a $122 million increase in benefits for the state's aged, blind, and disabled welfare recipients—an overall grant increase of more than twenty per cent...
...As a result of Reagan's action, Legal Services attorneys sued in both state and Federal courts and finally secured a twenty-one per cent AFDC grant increase—in the end costing more than $165 million annually...
...In 1970, he helped kill a Republican-authored $30 million bill designed to provide for a Federally required cost of living increase for welfare families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC...
...1, the 1972 Social Security Amendments, it junked the existing welfare system for the aged, blind, and disabled...
...It was a shabby grab bag of punitive and regressive proposals...
...In addition, the bill included further benefits for persons with severe disabilities or special needs...
...The Reagan administration publicly admitted that the $221 per month figure would mean a grant cut for at least eighteen per cent of all recipients transferred to the new program...
...Far from it...
...In a matter of days, these advocates for the poor put together what was soon to become a winning law suit against the state of California...
...The details of this latest setback tell us a good deal about this man who wants to be President...
...and a stubbornness that causes him to reject compromise while risking multi-million dollar setbacks in the courts...
...Another would have continued the odious practice of requiring the adult offspring of aged recipients to make monthly payments to the state to offset the cost of the state supplements...
...To those familiar with the hard evidence regarding his welfare record in California, it seems incredible that Reagan could view welfare as "his issue...
...Campaigning for governor in 1966, Reagan went up and down California pandering to a widespread anti-welfare sentiment...
...The Reagan bill would have supplemented the basic $130 Federal grant with $91 in state funds, for a total grant of $221 per month for an individual living alone—with no provision for cost of living adjustments...
...A revised edition of Showing the Way is probably already in the works...
...Taken together, the provisions of the new Federal program represented some long overdue movement toward a more dignified pension-type program for the nation's three million low-income aged, blind, and disabled...
...This is not the first time Reagan has taken a drubbing on welfare...
...On the final day of the legislative session, Democrats made a last-ditch effort to reach an accommodation with the governor by agreeing to vote for a bill providing a grant level of $230 per month—less than $8 per day...
...A more reliable legislative staff estimate revealed that nearly fifty per cent of all recipients would be worse off under the Reagan proposal than under then current law...
...Not only did the poverty lawyers persuade the Third District Court of Appeals to rule illegal Reagan's claim of inherent authority to implement the Federal law on his own...
...Now, stung by his third major welfare reversal in two years—this time a grant increase to the aged, blind, and disabled—Reagan is sure to demand that his public relations staff come up with a rationalization suitable for a national campaign for the Presidency...
Vol. 38 • June 1974 • No. 6
