Lately I’ve been writing about the relative virtues of basic income and child allowance proposals to counteract poverty and inequality. These seem like novel ideas on the American scene today. But in fact, there was a time when both of these ideas were seriously proposed on Capitol Hill. After forty-five years of lost faith in government, we are simply rediscovering the ambitions we once held.
In August 1969, President Richard Nixon unveiled a basic income scheme for needy families with children called the “Family Assistance Plan.” (FAP) Under Nixon’s FAP, a family of four would receive $1,600 annually from the federal government, or about $10,500 in 2016 dollars. For families deriving income from work, the FAP would gradually phase out above a certain level. Indeed, FAP included a work requirement for most “employable” individuals.
Nixon’s FAP drew on proposals for a negative income tax from economists like Milton Friedman. It also drew on work done by the Office of Economic Opportunity in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. A Johnson administration commission produced a report recommending a basic income, but Johnson rejected it out of hand in favor of an anti-poverty approach focused on skills training and education.
Nixon announced the FAP in a nationally televised address. He saw FAP as an opportunity to upend the web of New Deal-era welfare state programs and to leave a conservative mark on anti-poverty policy.
The FAP passed the House, but was attacked from both the right and left. Conservatives fretted that the FAP would expand public dependency and expanded the size of government. Liberals, on the other hand, thought that the basic income was too stingy and the work requirement to be punitive.
As an alternative, Senator (and future Democratic presidential challenger) George McGovern proposed a child allowance, which he called a “Human Security Plan” (HSP), on January 20, 1970 in a speech in New York City. McGovern’s HSP would have provided at least $50 per month ($310 in 2016) for every child in the nation. This entitlement would be paid for by eliminating the dependent tax exemptions, which today are worth up to $4,000 per child in reduced taxable income. McGovern’s plan also included guaranteed employment, including government-provided public service employment of last resort if no private sector jobs were available.
McGovern hoped that a child allowance would “very nearly wipe out poverty among most families with children [and] would also provide a critical boost in the income of middle American families.”
McGovern evidently anticipated that the HSP would be criticized for incentivizing people to have more children at a time when many worried about overpopulation. Indeed, the child allowance came into prominence in Europe for that precise reason: to serve pro-natalist population restorative purposes. As Tony Judt explains in his European history Postwar, “[f]amily allowances were a key element in plans to increase the birth rate,” particularly in countries that suffered heavy death tolls in World War I. Belgium introduced a child allowance in 1930, and was quickly followed by France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and others.
America in the 1960s had the exact opposite concern, fearing that out-of-control population would soon cause mass starvation and suffering. McGovern tried to allay these fears by pointing out that the United States was then (and now) one of the only advanced countries without a child allowance, and that in most countries, the policy had in fact been implemented without causing birth rates to explode.
McGovern’s HSP went nowhere in Congress, but served as a prelude to his presidential run. In January 1972, McGovern rolled out his own basic income proposal, which he called a “demogrant.” More generous than Nixon’s proposal, the demogrant would have provided $1,000 per person as a minimum annual income, or $4,000 for a family of four. This would replace the personal income tax exemption.
Liberals and conservatives revolted against McGovern’s demogrant plan. In the Democratic primary, Hubert Humphrey warned that McGovern’s plan would have caused substantial tax increases on the middle class and ballooned government spending. Others worried that the reach of the proposal would cover a large fraction of the country with new benefits. In the general election, the Nixon campaign ran an ad blasting McGovern’s demogrant for leaving “47 percent of Americans” dependent on “welfare.”
Under pressure, McGovern ultimately scaled back his plan. In the summer of 1972, McGovern dismantled his universal basic income proposal by “proposing a new categorical plan and by emphasizing the importance of work,” according to Brian Steensland’s The Failed Welfare Revolution. McGovern’s new plan was a “system of national income insurance” built upon work and public service jobs. “The best incentive is a job opening,” McGovern said. “The best answer to welfare is work.”
McGovern’s scaled back approach had three still fairly ambitious components: more generous Social Security, an employment guarantee for those capable of work, and income assistance for those who could not work, including mothers with children, at $4,000 for a family of four.
It’s not clear why McGovern did not revive his HSP child allowance plan when he retrenched from his universal basic income proposal. But his compromised version reflected the tendency for liberal welfare state expansions to hew toward categorical means-tested approaches instead of universal citizenship-based entitlements.
McGovern lost in a landslide to Nixon in November, shortly after Nixon’s FAP was unceremoniously killed in the Senate in September 1972. Nixon ultimately dropped the idea entirely by his 1974 State of the Union address as he battled mounting calls for impeachment. Congress eventually enacted a narrower version of the negative income tax concept underlying FAP, providing an Earned Income Tax Credit to top off the wages of the working poor.
The late 1960s and early 1970s arguably mark the zenith for American liberal policy imagination. During the course of the Nixon administration, the United States came tantalizingly close to enacting a universal basic income scheme, a universal government-run childcare system, and universal healthcare. It came less close to enacting a child allowance, but the idea was at least on the table.
Government was bold and full of ambition on the heels of the civil rights revolution and the War on Poverty. The public trusted government to act in good faith and competently solve big national problems. But the foundations were already cracking, and the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate crippled public trust in government for generations, even still today.
We’re fitfully trying to pick up the pieces and restore a government to meet the needs of the twenty-first century, drawing inspiration from the audacious plans floated forty-five years ago. But for now, the close of the 1960s seems to be the high-water mark for lofty public policy, too — one more place where, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it, “the wave finally broke and rolled back.”