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A political realist, Moynihan realizes that genuine integration in many Northern schools is a long way off. That realization is reflected in the U.S. Office of Education's Coleman Report. "The report shows that in educational achievement, mixing helps the lower class, but does not help the middle class," notes Moynihan. "If we are going to persuade these [white, middleclass] parents to act differently, we will have to give them a powerful incentive." Like most sociologists, Moynihan feels that young Negro boys suffer from overexposure to women—in schools as well as fatherless homes. A firm be liever in military training as a spur to selfdiscipline, he says: "When these Negro G.I.s come back from Viet Nam, I would meet them with a real estate agent, a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, and a list of jobs. I'd try to get half of them into the grade schools, teaching kids who've never had anyone but women telling them what to do."
But education is only one phase of the self-perpetuating cycle that entraps the Negro—a low-paying job, or none at all, leading to housing in a slum, leading to a segregated, second-rate school, leading back to an inferior job. The basic way to break the vicious circle, thinks Moynihan, is with money. "Beef up the family income," he says, "and everything else will follow in its train." Moynihan proposes two measures. The Federal Government, he says, should guarantee jobs by becoming the "employer of last resort" any time the national unemployment rate is above 3%. Merely putting the Post Office back on two residential deliveries a day, he points out, would give jobs to 50,000 men, while hundreds of thousands more could be usefully employed in providing such public services as work in hospitals or street and building repair. The cost, at the current rate of unemployment (4%), would be about $1 billion a year and, to Moynihan, well worth it. "The biggest single experience anyone has," he says, "is working."
Family Allowances. His second solution to the plight of the urban poor is to give allowances to families with children. "We are the only industrial democracy in the world," he told a Sen ate subcommittee last winter, "that does not have a family or children's allowance. And we are the only industrial democracy in the world whose streets are filled with rioters each summer."
Moynihan's plan is patterned after the 23-year-old Canadian allowance, based on the age of the child. He suggests something like $8 a month for each child under six, $12 a month for children between six and 17. For a family of four, this would mean a raise of about $40 a month, or roughly $500 a year. Small as the sum is, he says, it should be enough to "sharply reduce the number of Negro families living in poverty." Cost: about $9 billion a year, at least part of which would be offset by reduced welfare costs.