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The advantages of either concept over the present welfare system are numerous. Either would leave people poor by just about any definition—no plan offers more than a meager subsistence—but the most brutal poverty would be eliminated. Most of the 17 million not covered by welfare now would be included for the first time: with a floor under them, many families would begin to break the cycle of poverty that has kept them on welfare for, in some cases, three generations.
There are, to be sure, difficulties as well. The family allowance would still not take care of the childless poor, while the negative income tax could not really be administered, as its proponents sometimes claim, with only a small addition to the staff of the Internal Revenue Service. For one thing, money would have to be handed out monthly or weekly, a big chore that would cause rather substantial changes in the IRS bureaucracy. The negative income tax would have a further practical drawback. Middle-income workers would not benefit at all, as they would with family allowances, and they would undoubtedly balk at paying taxes to subsidize people who earn only a few hundred dollars less than they themselves make. However, the objections, big as they are, diminish when they are placed next to the welfare monstrosity that now exists.
Deserving and Undeserving
The major, perhaps insurmountable, obstacle to reform is the American belief that no one should get something for nothing. In fact, there are relatively few able bodied men on welfare (.7% of the total), and there is little evidence that very many men would stay on welfare if they could get a decent job. Yet proponents of income supplements ought to concede that the plans might indeed make things easier for the lazy. A potentially superior system ought not to be rejected because of possible or even likely abuses; but the whole idea is likely to run counter to the American ethos for a long time to come—at least until the idea becomes established that every citizen has an inherent right to share in the national abundance. Perhaps that notion will be accepted only when the nation is very much richer than it is today.
The costs of most income-maintenance schemes Would be vast—another formidable handicap. The most modest plan would cost about $4 billion more than today's welfare; the most ambitious would cost $30 billion more. Neither calculation, however, reckons the present system's potential cost, which, without any modifications, might continue to expand indefinitely. Eventually, even the most generous supplement plan might seem cheap by comparison. As it is, the U.S. spends less proportionally on social welfare than almost any other industrial country.
A Little Progress