AMERICA
Mr Nixon's welfare revolution
WILLIAM JANE WAY
When Richard Nixon swore the presiden- tial oath seven months ago, he took over as receiver in bankruptcy for America's frus- trating commitments from Vietnam to Har- lem. For some six months, too, he acted like an official receiver—and as one of the more cautious and conservative sort at that. But during the past two weeks the Presi- dent has moved from evaluating the assets and liabilities he inherited to taking crucial decisions: where to liquidate and where to innovate. At home, he has begun with the welfare system, as bankrupt politically as it is socially and financially.
The sprawling, paternalistic tangle of programmes which Nixon proposes to re- form root and branch lust growed' like Topsy during the long generation since FDR made the Federal government ultimately responsible for the welfare of Americans. The philosophy underlying the welfare sys- tem has been to provide funds for specific purposes—aid to dependent children, school meals and so on—rather than to provide the poor with funds to help themselves. In line with this approach, the people who have the problems have been deliberately segre-
gated from the wage-earning, tax-payin society that supports them: low-inco housing projects expel families which begi to earn themselves out of the welfare pi mothers who are receiving aid for the' children are cut off without a cent if father returns to the home; all recipien are means-tested within an inch of the lives. The welfare system has, in fact, come a crucial link in the 'cycle of poverty that dominates the lives of the poor. A one glance at the child mortality and m nutrition statistics shows that it often d not even provide its clients with subsisten let alone with a chance to break out of embrace.
During the last ten years, this welfa system—barely tolerable for those livi under it—has ceased to be tolerable f those who pay for it. Because the cyst is federally organised, poor southern sta can set welfare levels far below those set the richer northern states; consequently southern poor—white and black—ha demonstrated admirable rationality by m ing in droves to Chicago, Detroit, or N York. Because the system actively disco ages attempts to escape from the pone cycle, the numbers on welfare have pi up with astounding speed: New York gone from 200,000 on welfare to a mill in less than a decade. To top it all. American economy has been deprived desperately needed skills, while the s less unemployables in the ghetto have caped into heroin ('opium is the opium the people'), producing an enormous crease in big crime rates, or have awak to fierce m;litancy against the system
both supports and condemns them. The result is a political and social nightmare.
Mr Nixon's welfare-reform proposals meet both the social and political crises head on. The heart of the plan is that any and every head of a family will have the right to a guaranteed income—for a family of four the figure is set at $1,600. But in- stead of being means-tested, the recipient will be encouraged to work because each dollar he earns will lead to a cut in his basic income of only half as much. Thus, a man could begin by receiving his guaran- teed $1,600 to support himself and three dependents; if he then got a job which paid another $1,600 he would lose only half his basic income, leaving him with a total of $1.400. Finally, there is the 'kicker': the guaranteed income will only be available to men and women who either accept 'appro- priate' employment or enrol in a job-train- ing programme.
The President's proposals, therefore, are diametrically opposed to the present sys- tem: they aim at integrating the poor into the society and the economy, not segregat- ing them. (In this, they follow the insight of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the creatively un- orthodox sociologist who is the President's urban affairs adviser.) Moreover, if the wel- fare-reform programme looks like being good sociology, it surely is good politics: 'make 'em work' has become the cry of the backlashers on Mr Nixon's right.
But his initiative represents no easy presi- dential diktat. Even in its present tentative form it stands as a major personal victory —in a sense, against his own administration. Big government has become so big that it runs on its own inertia, and on precious little else. Bureaucrats responsible for the machine—and Cabinet officers who repres- ent the interests of their departments—act as an enormously immobilist influence on any President, quite regardless of what may be his own ideological orientation or that of his subordinates. President Kennedy used to complain that he could not even 'find the government' in Washington's overgrown maze, let alone make it do his bidding. Mr Nixon has earned full marks for both find- ing his government and fixing it on a path of fundamental domestic reform (despite some well-publicised internal opposition) in only seven months.
All this said, there is need for some per- spective. First, the proposals made during the past two weeks are not going to become funded legislative programmes for some time —certainly not this year. As befits such radical innovations, they will be subjected to the full congressional treatment: hearings, debates, amendments. And this Process will not begin at once; no date has yet been set for the White House even to submit formal legislation to Congress. No doubt the welfare crisis will get worse in the meantime. But the British experience With instant legislation—SET leaps to mind —offers ample cause for welcoming with something more than resignation the de- lays that will be entailed by giving a hear- ne to all interested parties: sociologists, Welfare administrators and workers, and, tot least, the poor themselves.
Again, the figure of $4,000 million KsIgned as the cost of the new programme s little more than notional. The White House has made clear that it intends no one 1410 qualifies for the guaranteed income to k worse off than at present, but on its pro- )osals recipients in forty-seven out of fifty totes will still remain below the govern- sent 's official poverty-line. In addition to the increases in the basic guaranteed income that can be expected, the proposed expan- sion of existing job-training facilities by only 150,000 is bound to be escalated. Moreover, a number of present programmes earmarked for the scrapheap—such as cer- tain food hand-outs—could well be kept going by Congress.
Finally, taking the fate of the poor out of the hands of Washington bureaucrats and giving the poor the resources to cope with their own problems makes fine sense—ex- cept for the problems, such as institutiona- lised white racism, which the poor lack the muscle to deal with. For, widespread as poverty remains among white Americans, it is the overlapping of the poverty crisis with the colour crisis that has largely fuelled the political explosion over welfare. Federal paternalism has certainly reinforced the poverty cycle for many of the poor, but it has also broken through other barriers, most notably (and most explosively) in fin- ally forcing a measure of desegregation in southern schools. To the extent that reform reduces the number and the scope of Fed- eral programmes, with guidelines devised and enforced by Washington, there will be that fewer levers potentially available for shifting established patterns of discrimina- tion and deprivation. Nor should it be for- gotten that this aspect of the reform pro- posals adds substantially to their political allure.
But beyond the social and political specifics, Mr Nixon's welfare-reform pro- posals have one overriding significance in the short run: they underline his progress to the lake-charge' position, as the man who is making the moves and setting the terms of the continuing political struggle. The President has now taken the initiative vis-à-vis the Russians by his visit to Buch- arest, he has taken the first steps towards disengagement from Vietnam, he has made friendly overtures to China, and now—by producing a radical domestic programme— he has demonstrated that he is running his own Administration on a course that is res- ponsive to America's domestic discontents. The initial fumbling over the ABM and over tax reform suddenly seems far away. Even given the extraordinary political bonus of Teddy Kennedy's destruction by public sus- picion and personal prevarication, Mr Nixon has earned the 71 per cent job- approval rating the polls have just given him.
Nohetheless, there still remains one joker in the political pack. The President's econ- omic managers are still running their own show; the credit squeeze is biting ever harder and the American economy is that much closer to a financial panic that would knock all Mr Nixon's hard-won achieve- ments and imaginative initiatives into the same cocked hat: a Republican recession. or worse. Until the President gets his money men under control, he will not be master in his own house, free to move towards mast- ering the crises he has inherited. In the past month he has shown that he has both the will and ability to go a long way towards reaching that blessed state.
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