The False Dawn of Poor-Law Reform: Nixon, Carter, and the Quest for a Guaranteed Income

In August 1969, President Richard M. Nixon approached the American people with a radical proposal to do what the federal government had never done before: guarantee a minimum level of income for every American family unable to provide one for itself. Eight years later, in August 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced a similar proposal for a federal guarantee of income, this time along with an expansion of public works jobs. Like Nixon before him, Carter soon abandoned his bill, and with it the quest for a federal income guarantee. Thus, inconclusively, ended a decade-long struggle to replace the nation's uncoordinated, incomplete collection of welfare programs with a single, comprehensive system of federal relief. This struggle took place against a backdrop of economic stagnation and demographic change that sent social spending soaring and made existing poor-relief arrangements seem increasingly obsolete. It also tapped into growing taxpayer resentment and a rising tide of popular animosity toward welfare. In part for these reasons, the quest for a guaranteed income marked the end of an era of liberal government activism against poverty, and ushered in a new era of poor-law reform. Welfare, not poverty, was the social problem of the 1970s. And the idea of a guaranteed income was the solution embraced by a new, more chastened and conservative, ideological center.