Nixon and Universal Basic Income.

Ed Ayers: In 1516 the English philosopher Sir Thomas More published his treatise ‘Utopia’. In that treatise he envisaged a future in which the state paid its citizens a regular income. Today the idea of Universal Basic Income is gaining popularity with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Robert Reich, along with a clutch of noble laureates in economics. You probably wouldn’t associate that idea with the Republican administration, but you should think again.

Molly M.: So this is actually called the ‘Family Assistance Plan’, and it takes shape in 1969. It’s one of the first things that Richard Nixon proposes when he takes office in 1969, and it essentially established a basic floor of 1600 dollars. So not a lot, right, per year? Then there was essentially a work incentive built in. So you could get a little bit more through the tax code if you worked. It was kind of a basic income plus what we now think of as the Earned Income Tax Credits, or Refundable Tax Credit for folks that had income, but income that fell below a certain level.

Ed Ayers: That’s Molly Michelmore, Associate Professor of History at Washington and Lee University. She says that Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan came very close to becoming law, and it amounted to a Universal Income plan.

Molly M.: One of the things that sank this plan was that people who were actually on welfare at the time didn’t like it, because many people who were receiving aid to families with dependent children, which is the program we usually refer to as welfare, would actually lose money under this new proposal.

Ed Ayers: Was that the intention?

Molly M.: Well, there is some argument that it was, and that this Universal Basic Income, this Family Assistance Plan, would redirect federal money to people that Nixon liked. That is to say white working-class voters in the South, rather than to the primarily African-American voters in the North. So one of the arguments behind the Family Assistance Plan, and this is an argument articulated most strongly by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, right? Who people may know from authoring the famous Moynihan Report in 1964-

Ed Ayers: For his bow tie.

Molly M.: … for his bow tie, this was his idea. That this would be a way to essentially give assistance to two parent families, rather than simply to women raising children alone, because it would be available to everybody.

Ed Ayers: Is that kind of racially coded there?

Molly M.: I think so, right? And this is one of those things that historians have tried to get their head around. To try to figure out what it was that was in Nixon’s mind when he decided to go, really I think, all in on this in 1969 and 1970.

Ed Ayers: It sounds kind of like the domestic version of Nixon to China, meaning it seems so contrary to what we think of conservative thought being. I understand about the racial and regional, and the partisan rationale, but what was … I’m sure they had a larger explanation for why they thought this was a good thing to do.

Molly M.: Yeah. I think it comes out of … There is this sense in the late 1960s that welfare wasn’t working. So it didn’t please conservatives who thought that it was incentivizing all kinds of bad behaviors. Whether that’s non-work, non-marriage, illegitimate child bearing. It didn’t please liberals who thought that it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do in terms of rehabilitating the poor, reintegrating them into the mainstream of American society and American economy. Welfare recipients themselves hated it, because it required them to essentially lay bare their lives to social workers, to case workers. To lay bare their-

Ed Ayers: “Get off my case.”

Molly M.: Yeah.

Ed Ayers: Right? It’s kind of from that …

Molly M.: Exactly! Right? Their finances, their personal relationships, they had to open their homes, right, to case workers who wanted to make sure that they were raising their children right, that they were spending their grants correctly. So there was this sense that there was a crisis in welfare, and liberals had begun to toy around with the idea of income maintenance in 1967 or so. L.B.J. establishes an income maintenance task force which is sort of looking at alternatives to the existing welfare system. So there was this sense that the existing thing was broken.

Ed Ayers: That had kind of accrued over time, right? And gained lots of appendages and things so it’s time to maybe just start all over again.

Molly M.: Yeah. People had tried to fix this basic program by tinkering around the edges, or making it bigger, or making it smaller, or trying to put some work incentives in there, or trying to put some disincentives for non-marital child bearing, and none of it had seemed to work. None of it had made the program any better. None of it had made any of the stakeholders any happier with it. So there was a moment where there could have been a sort of reset, right? You could do a kind of unplug the thing, count to 30, plug it back in and see what you could do.

Ed Ayers: How close did this come to actually happening?

Molly M.: It came pretty close. It passed the House, but then it dies in the Senate Finance Committee.

Ed Ayers: Why is that?

Molly M.: Well, the Senate Finance Committee was Chaired by a guy named Russell Long of the Louisiana Longs. So he was related to Earl, and to Huey Long. Less flamboyant than them, but he took his job as Chairman of the Finance Committee quite seriously, and he hated welfare. He was not particularly fond of welfare recipients. There’s a moment in 19-

Ed Ayers: I’m guessing that that’s a real understatement.

Molly M.: It is a real understatement. There’s a moment in 1967 when the Finance Committee is considering amendments to the Social Security Act that would have penalized illegitimacy by cutting off support for women on AFDC if they had one more child out of wedlock after they’d been on AFDC. So a bunch of mothers from the National Welfare Rights Organization appear in the Senate Finance Committee in these committee hearings to testify, and he kicks them out. He says, “If you have time to protest, you have time to work”, right? He refers to them as “Broodmares”.

Ed Ayers: Oh, god.

Molly M.: So he was a racist, I think, and his antipathy towards these women and their mother work was fueled by his animosity towards Civil Rights, and towards African-Americans in general. So it gets through the House, it gets locked up in the Senate Finance Committee, both because Russell Long has a problem with it. The sort of idea of giving free money, right? To folks that don’t work, and because there were some more liberal folks on that Senate Finance Committee that thought that the 1600 dollars floor was simply too low.

Ed Ayers: Was this a missed opportunity? Would things have been better has we had Family Assistance?

Molly M.: I think so. The Family Assistance Plan was small, right? It wouldn’t have provided much assistance to a lot of those women with children who were dependent on AFDC in 1968 and 1969, but it would have created, I think, a sort of entering wedge for a more robust, a more stable system of income support in the United States.

Ed Ayers: How do we make sense of this in the context of the Nixon administration? I find that kids today just can’t imagine that Nixon was anything other than the Watergate guy, and that he didn’t seem to color inside the lines in the way that we would think people do on a partisan basis today. How do we make sense of this in the larger trajectory of Republican ideology and of Nixon himself?

Molly M.: Well, Nixon really thought as himself, and hoped that he would be a change maker in American politics. He wanted to be the Republican F.D.R. essentially, right? Historians talk a lot about the New Deal Order, the talk a lot about the Roosevelt Coalition, and Nixon really wanted to piece together a new Republican coalition, but he was often … He saw himself as the father of that new coalition. He referred to it as the ‘New American Majority’, right? It wouldn’t necessarily be liberal or conservative, or even Democratic or Republican, but it would be this new coalition of the silent majority voters that changed the direction of American politics.

Ed Ayers: So, after the failure of the Family Assistance Plan, and all of this recalculation, what do the Republicans do instead of that?

Molly M.: Taxes. They cut taxes, right? One of the questions is how are we going to give this group of voters who’s felt left behind, alienated by politics? How are we gonna give them something to get them into our coalition? So one of the things that happens is the Republican party abandons fiscal responsibility, and embraces the politics of tax cuts. This is what Jude Wanniski described in the mid-1970s, and Jude Wanniski is one of the publicists for Supply-side economics. He writes for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He calls this the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’. So liberals, Democrats, right, are the Santa Claus of spending, and then Republicans should remake themselves as the Santa Claus of tax cuts. Give them to everybody and to anybody, and that will a way of shoring up the kind of economic interests of those folks that you wanna bring into your coalition.

Ed Ayers: Today, does the idea of Universal Basic Income then belong to either party?

Molly M.: I don’t know that anybody has embraced it, right? Although there certainly is a lot of talk around this notion of providing a basic income to everybody.

Ed Ayers: So does this still have a Republican support?

Molly M.: I don’t think so. I haven’t heard anybody talk about it.

Ed Ayers: So now it sounds like Socialism most of the most on [crosstalk 00:51:51]

Molly M.: Yeah, now it sounds like Socialism, but we do need to remember, right, that this was Milton Friedman’s idea, and that it got furthest when it was pushed by a Republican administration. When it passed through the House of Representatives through a Ways and Means Committee dominated by a Southern conservative Democrat, and that this history of this legacy is far more complicated, I think, than the politics or at least the way we talk about U.B.I. now suggests.