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Offering their own substitute for the poverty program, the G.O.P. has introduced in the House a bill that would strip all programs but Community Action from Shriver's "fuddle factory" and turn them back to departments already equipped to run them. A companion bill offers industry a 7% tax credit for initiating job-creating training programs. These measures, claim its cosponsors, Representatives Charles Goodell of New York and Minnesota's Quie, would "completely restructure the popgun war on poverty" and replace "the mangled mishmash of overlapping, conflicting and wasteful programs" with more effective ones—all at a saving of $200 million.
The Rag in the Bag. A more radical proposal is the "negative income tax" theory of University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman, a former Goldwater braintruster. He proposes that the Federal Government set a $3,000 yearly income as the minimum for a family of four, and pay a man 50% of the difference if he falls below that figure; to give the man 100%, says Friedman, would deaden his initiative.
More radical yet is the guaranteed annual income, an idea that surfaced in Edward Bellamy's 19th century novel, Looking Backward, and strikes many sociologists today as the wave of the future. Columbia Social Work Professor Richard Cloward proposes a strategy of crisis and disruption to achieve it. As Cloward sees it, welfare is a "savage and barbarous" system that strips recipients of all dignity. If millions of the poor could be shown how to claim all the benefits to which they are legally entitled, Cloward believes, they would so overload welfare rolls that Congress would have no choice but to enact a guaranteed minimum income.
The trouble with the guaranteed annual income as a solution to poverty, the President's Council of Economic Advisers noted in a 1964 report, is not the $11 billion or $12 billion that it would cost Washington each year. The Government already spends more than that on welfare. "This 'solution' would leave untouched most of the roots of poverty," said the Council. "Americans want to earn the American standard of living by their own efforts and contributions. It will be far better, even if more difficult, to equip and permit the poor of the nation to produce and to earn the additional $11 billion—and more."
The Cutting Edge. It is this determination to reach poverty's roots that makes the war against poverty so difficult an undertaking. Even so, the U.S. Government is officially committed to a long-term total effort that cuts across every federal department and involves every program that in any way relates to the environment that perpetuates poverty. Last week Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner created the new post of family-planning coordinator to give fresh impetus to birth-control programs—a field that the OEO has treated gingerly despite evidence that the poor have the most children, and grow poorer as a result.