Nixon Proposed - And House Approved - A Guaranteed Minimum Income

In which we once again salute Richard Nixon, Marxist warrior

BY WELDON BERGER, ON JUNE 29TH, 2011

40 years ago this month, on June 22, 1971, Richard Nixon’s historic plan to provide a guaranteed income for every American family sailed through the House of Representatives.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when somebody on an email list in which I sort of participate mentioned the flak George McGovern took from all sides (including his chief rival among the Democrats, Hubert Humphrey) for the guaranteed income plan he tinkered with during the 1972 presidential primaries and on into the general election. But it wasn’t the idea of a guaranteed income for all Americans—Nixon’s plan had already passed the House by the time McGovern’s woes began—so much as it was the permutations through which McGovern put his version during the primaries and on into the general election.

The remark about McGovern reminded me of Nixon’s effort, something I’ve mentioned from time to time as among the Nixon positions that demonstrate the depth of Barack Obama’s conservatism. Nixon’s plan ultimately died in the Senate because of opposition from liberals concerned that it might erode benefits in some Northern states where financial aid for impoverished families was higher than the guarantee amount proposed by Nixon, and from some conservatives on the usual grounds (didn’t do enough to punish impoverished people).

McGovern at one point proposed a substantially higher amount than did Nixon (he was for it before he was against it) and, later, Gerald Ford. But all three, along with a majority of the country’s federal legislators, were on board with the idea. One feature common to all the plans was the removal of the penalty imposed on households with unemployed adult males, whose presence disqualified families who were otherwise eligible for welfare benefits. All of them included welfare-to-work programs as well.

Intentions were mixed but for the most part the proposals were aimed at building upon the platform created by Lyndon Johnson to expand the social safety net and federalize social welfarestandards to eliminate gaps, duplicated efforts, and disparities between the levels of benefits in programs administered by the states.

Unfortunately, Nixon’s measure was eviscerated rather than improved in the Senate. By 1973, the legislation resided in what two economists reviewing Daniel Moynihan’s book on the subject said, in a play on the “benign neglect” policy toward impoverished black communities that Moynihan proposed simultaneous to becoming a guaranteed income evangelist, was “a state best described as malign neglect.”

The takeaway isn’t that it ultimately failed, but that an effort to institute a genuine effort to improve the social welfare system ultimately attracted wide support, including from a president who was reviled by liberals.

Contrast that to the willingness among the majority of performers in the current fiscal responsibility circus to cut benefits designed to help current and future generations of impoverished people and senior ones, some of which politics and finances are already eroding on the state end of the equation.

Contrast that to the support Obama continues to enjoy from a large subset of people who describe themselves as liberal or progressive.

This isn’t to say that Nixon was a treat; he was paranoid, bigoted and malicious. If he had a conscience, it wasn’t ever in evidence. His attitude toward those blowing the whistle on the state was every bit as malevolent as Obama’s is now—Nixon had Ellsberg, whom he may briefly have considered assassinating, while Obama has Manning, who has been physically abused, and others he has subjected to abusive prosecutions. One cringes, thinking about what Nixon would have got up to if he had the national security state technology that Obama now deploys, or if he had enjoyed the current crop of timid and illiberal Democrats now running the show stage right, or an even more compliant, petty and self-satisfied institutional press.

Nixon never met an act of state-sponsored violence by the US or a US ally that he didn’t like, a trait Obama echoes to an increasing degree but hasn’t fully internalized. Neither has Obama seemed to wholly embrace Nixon’s insistence that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” although he appears to be open to the concept on a case-by-case basis (assassinating US citizens; Libya).

Nixon was, somewhat peculiarly, less a friend of big business than is Obama. Although he threatened to veto a tax cut package that in his view included too many cuts for the middle class and the poor and not enough for business, he also imposed wage and price controls that he thought would curb inflation and make space for a Keynesian stimulus program to reduce unemployment, which at the time had skyrocketed to more than 4%. That didn’t work out so well, in large part because almost no planning went into it, but it was a classically leftist, market-scorning “fuck you” to purveyors of free-market crack.

And if the banks had crashed the economy during his time in office—unlikely, as their pre-Depression license to loot had yet to be restored (took a Democrat to get that done; thank you very much, Mr. Clinton)—he would have thrown some motherfuckers in jail if for no other reason than they made him look bad.

Unlike our current president, Nixon was all content and action. He had a good speaking voice but he was neither physically attractive nor lyrical; whatever he accomplished, for good and for ill— and there was a lot of both—he accomplished without benefit of good looks and charisma.

Obama offers kind words for Arab protests against authoritarian regimes, other than those which are key to this country’s imperial presence in the Middle East. Nixon went to China. Nixon only wanted to kill US citizens without due process. Obama is actually trying to do it. Nixon never got his own health insurance reform package passed; 40 years on, Obama passed it for him.

Presidents are always getting away with stuff. It was Nixon’s misfortune that someone acting on his behalf was clumsy enough to expose a thread that led to a fabric into which were woven crimes much worse than the ones for which he’s best known. I’m not even a little bit sure that those crimes would lead to impeachment in these times, never mind conviction, when torture hasn’t and wouldn’t. Gerald Ford took a licking when he pardoned Nixon; if it happened today, Nixon might never have needed that pardon and Ford might never have been in the position to provide it.

Nixon was never awarded a Nobel prize, but he was a party to the most darkly comic moment in the Nobel committee’s history when the blood-drenched Henry Kissinger won in 1973 (his co-winner, North Vietnamese general and politician Le Duc Tho, refused the award). Obama’s award ranks second in the pantheon of comical prizes; he will always be the only man to win for not being someone else, and likely the only one to deliver a rousing defense of preventive war in his acceptance speech.