Underlying but largely unaddressed in this internal debate were deeper issues about work-based public assistance and labor markets. Who should carry the burden of assisting the working poor—the government, through an effective wage subsidy (such as FAP or the EITC), or employers, through higher wages? What was the combined impact of wage subsidies and work requirements on the low-wage labor market itself? Would the supply of workers from the welfare rolls, combined with the wage subsidy from the government, artificially sustain and even increase the number of low-wage jobs in some local labor markets? Would these policies help construct and fuel an oversized low-wage labor market?
The Battle over FAP
Despite opposition from many in his administration and his party, Nixon ultimately approved the proposal, and administration advocates rolled up their sleeves to decide how to pitch and promote the initiative on Capitol Hill and in the press.38 FAP’s political legacy began to take shape with the strategic choices the Nixon team made.
On August 8, 1969, Nixon presented his new plan in a nationally televised speech. The president might have made many different arguments to promote FAP. Canadian leaders in the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, defended similar programs on the merits of aiding workers and meeting the needs of the poor through universal assistance programs.39 In the U.S. context, this would have meant constructing a welfarist argument for extending public assistance to an entirely new needy population. But Nixon elected to build his case for FAP on the failed record of AFDC, and to try to convince liberal welfarists and conservative workfare advocates alike that his plan was better. The president began with a broadside attack on the existing AFDC system, calling it a “colossal failure,” a small Depression-era program that “has become a monster in the prosperous sixties.”40
Nixon captured the objections of both conservatives and liberals to AFDC, saying, “It breaks up homes [a shared concern of conservatives and liberals]. It often penalizes work [conservatives]. It robs recipients of dignity [liberals]. And it grows [conservatives].” The president’s attack on AFDC then merged seamlessly into a new argument about the working poor.
The present system often makes it possible to receive more money on welfare than on a low-paying job. This creates an incentive not to work; it also is unfair to the working poor. It is morally wrong for a family that is working to try to make ends meet to receive less than the family across the street on welfare. This has been bitterly resented by the man who works, and rightly so—the rewards are just the opposite of what they should be. Its effect is to draw people off payrolls and onto welfare rolls—just the opposite of what government should be doing.41
Honest labor and the working poor were thus honored as morally superior to cash assistance and the welfare poor. The solution? Pass FAP, and under the president’s plan, “the program now called ‘Aid to Families with Dependent Children’—the program we normally think of when we think of ‘welfare’—would be done away with completely.”42 Criticism of AFDC had echoed through Washington for years, but never had the program been so condemned at the core by the nation’s leader. Nixon’s decision to use the presidential bully pulpit to excoriate AFDC in order to promote FAP would have a lasting impact: although FAP would collapse, AFDC would never recover.
In contrast to AFDC, the president emphasized, FAP would include working families: “For the first time, the government would recognize that it has no less of an obligation to the working poor than to the nonworking poor; and for the first time, benefits would be scaled in such a way that it would always pay to work.”43 FAP’s work requirement was underscored for the benefit of conservatives, in part to distinguish between FAP and other guaranteed income schemes that conservatives loathed. What would FAP mean, Nixon asked, for those “who can work but choose not to? Well, the answer is very simple. Under this proposal, everyone who accepts benefits must also accept work or training provided suitable jobs are available.”44 The sole exceptions would be those unable to work and mothers with very young children. In fact, FAP’s work requirement was hardly rigorous (as administration officials were quick to point out to liberals). Even if an able-bodied parent refused to work, the rest of the family would continue to receive benefits.
The core elements of Nixon’s strategy thus emerged in his opening speech. He would promote FAP as a “solution” to the existing welfare crisis and sell the proposal using the language of work promotion and enforcement. Nixon believed that the plan’s work requirements and incentives, along with the promise of fiscal relief, would appeal to business, to moderate and conservative policymakers, and to state and local officials. He expected the measure’s new national standards and guaranteed support for the poor to appeal to a broad liberal coalition, including labor, the social work community, welfare rights activists, and civil rights leaders, particularly those concerned about conditions in the South. But political support would prove elusive.45 In the short run, Nixon’s strategy would fail, contributing to FAP’s defeat. In the long run, the strategy would reconfigure welfare politics, strengthening the drive for a vision of workfare defined not by FAP supporters but by its opponents in Congress.
Few signs of FAP’s fate were evident in the initial glow of public reaction following President Nixon’s address, however. Ninety-five percent of editorials nationwide were “favorable” toward FAP, according to an HEW survey, and nearly all of the major newspapers in the nation’s twenty-five largest metropolitan areas were “enthusiastic.” The New York Times described FAP as “a bold attempt to transform” the welfare system. Business Week said that FAP “is far more than just an ingenious compromise of opposing viewpoints. It is a new and promising approach to a problem that never could be solved in the framework of the old system.” And The Economist said, “President Nixon’s television message on welfare reform and revenue sharing may rank in importance with President Roosevelt’s first proposals for a social security system in the mid-1930s, which were the beginning of America’s now faltering welfare state.”46
Public opinion seemed to echo the editorial sentiment. Indeed, the permanent staff at the White House could not remember any domestic issue drawing a public response so enormous and unanimous. Some 2,757 letters and telegrams arrived between August 9 and September 10. More than 80 percent voiced unqualified support, and only 9 percent expressed flat opposition. A favorite among the White House staff was the telegram that read simply: “TWO UPPER MIDDLE CLASS REPUBLICANS WHO WILL PAY FOR THE PROGRAM SAY BRAVO.” Gallup began polling public opinion a week after the president’s speech. The results reflected strong bipartisan support for “President Nixon’s welfare reforms.” Of those familiar with the proposal, 65 percent were favorable toward FAP; 20 percent were not.47
On closer examination, however, an unmistakable pattern emerged. Press reports and polling data revealed that the strongest expressions of support focused on the president’s promise that FAP would replace the existing welfare system—not on the reform measures contained in the plan. The enthusiasm was less a vote for FAP than a vote against AFDC and related welfare programs: FAP had been packaged, presented, and received as a “solution” to the perceived welfare crisis. The Detroit Free Press editorial expressed a prevailing sentiment: “The status quo is no answer—so the President’s attempt, complicated and controversial as it is, is a better way to go.” Similarly, the focus of the positive telegrams pouring into the White House was almost exclusively on FAP’s promise to reform current welfare policies. “FAP was an extraordinary departure in proclaimed public policy, for which there was virtually no public demand, and with which there was no familiarity,” Moynihan later observed. But “the president had one large advantage: he was proposing to supplant the existing welfare system, which was widely regarded as a failure and about which something had to be done.”48 Nixon’s strategy played to this advantage. His pitch for FAP ensured that it arrived on the public agenda and seized the spotlight not on its merits as an innovative plan to aid working as well as welfare poor families, but as an alternative to an unpopular welfare system.
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