Nixon's FAP: Near-Hit or Near-Miss?

Basically, a Negative Income Tax scheme with a lot of moving parts but certainly simpler than the bloated welfare bureaucracy, President Richard Nixon floated a Family Assistance Plan to the Unistatians on TV, August 8th, 1969, 49 weeks after the police riot in Czechago.

Nixon had been poor as a kid. He understood poverty. Also, anyone who's studied him knows he was a very complex man, and probably qualified as a sociopath of some sort. He believed black people were genetically inferior to whites. (In 1982, Nixon told Ehrlichman he thought "yellow" Asians were genetically superior to caucasians, at least in terms of intellect.)

"Talking about welfare reform with Moynihan out of the room, Nixon told Haldemann and Ehrlichman: 'You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to...' In private he would assert that there had never in history been a successful or adequate black nation. 'African is hopeless,' he told Ehrlichman. 'The worst is Liberia, which we built...'" -p.110, President Nixon: Alone In The White House, Richard Reeves.

Reeves thinks Nixon thought it didn't matter what he personally thought about poverty; in a bit that feels ultra-Machiavellian to me, Reeves writes that for Nixon it was important for a President like himself to appear to care about equality: "The appearance of public equality, he had concluded, was essential to the public order - particularly in maintaining peace in urban black ghettoes - and the appearance of domestic calm and concern was essential to his own political standing." (Reeves, 110)

(Historical context: lots of urban riots in Unistat, 1965-69.)

Most of his cabinet was against this new Family Assistance Plan. Nixon lobbied hard to get it before giving up during his run for re-election in 1972.

Basically, this is what it was: a welfare family of four would receive $1600 from the federal government. States could supplement as they wished. The Aid for Families of Dependent Children program would be cut, as would Food Stamps and Medicaid. Welfare was seen as an inefficient bureaucracy. Under the FAP, if you worked, you could keep up to $60 a month that you earned, and 50% above that. There were other ideas about families of five or seven, and as Reeves writes, "Working poor families would also receive direct federal payments calculated on a complicated scale."(This complexity is one of the main reasons I prefer the Universal Basic Income ideas as advocated by Philippe van Parijs or Guy Standing: everyone gets a certain equal amount, period.)

Let's look at the $1600 in 1969 terms and 2013 terms. If I go HERE and plug in 1600 and convert it to what it's worth in 2013, we get $10,348.

Nixon told the nation on TV, "A third of a century of centralizing power and responsibility in Washington has produced a bureaucratic monstrosity, cumbersome, unresponsive, ineffective...a colossal failure."

Everyone who would receive benefits would have to accept work or training.

Nixon actually worked hard to do something like give a family of four $10,300 in cash for a year. He loved the drama of working for this idea. As Reeves writes, "Nixon had long ago decided to propose dramatic welfare reform - and the drama was more important than the specifics of reform or the possibility of enactment." (Reeves, 111) With Nixon's mindset in my mind, I find it interesting that there's a slang term that's arisen relatively recently: fap.

There were moments when it looked like it could pass, but it never did, obviously. The FAP (which was called the FSS or "Family Security System" before the name change) was unpopular with many middle-class workers, who perceived that they would be working to subsidize loafers. Social workers of course hated it because they were afraid it would put them out of their jobs. Organized labor - and yes, kiddies, there was such a thing - didn't like it because they saw it as a threat to the minimum wage. (!) Welfare advocates and other leftists thought it wasn't enough money. And of course conservative objected to it because it was giving money to people who weren't working. It seems the Welfare advocates and leftists were the group I most agree with here...

The background to Nixon's idea came from some Negative Income Tax ideas from the economist Milton Friedman, who had written about it in the early-mid 1960s, as an alternative to Welfare. One of Friedman's ideas, extrapolated to 2013 would have given a family of four $24,000 to $30,000. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had read of Friedman's novel ideas and had floated them to Nixon, urging Tricky Dick that if he could get it passed, he would be seen as some sort of American hero. (Moynihan...a bit of a trickster himself?)

What did happen: the Earned Income Tax Credit, which only applied to those who had jobs.

I ask The Reader to ponder the political landscape of ideas in 2014 Unistat (or idea-lack thereof) and try to decide, if an idea to give $10K and change to families of four arose from some congressentity today, where would they be seen along the political spectrum? Almost every Sixties and early Seventies radical saw Nixon as an absolute monster, and with good reason.

"You can't be neutral on a moving train." - Howard Zinn

"It only takes twenty years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." - Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminati Papers, p.111