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The FAP would replace the AFDC program; each family would get $1,600 from the Federal Government. That would be only the floor. Through continuing state contributions atop that sum, most recipients would get approximately what they get now. But the change in much of the South would be dramatic. HEW estimates that there are 845,000 AFDC families in the South and Puerto Rico that would benefit to varying degrees. In Alabama, for instance, the maximum payment for an AFDC family of four is now $972; under FAP, it would be at least the federally guaranteed $1,600, even if Alabama decided to contribute nothing more. The maximum level now in effect in Arkansas is $ 1,140, Louisiana $1,248, South Carolina $1,236, and Puerto Rico $636.
The fundamental importance of the plan, however, lies less in the level of payment than the source. For the first time, the economic base would be federal and nationally uniform. The second major element of the FAP proposal, again a departure from the past, is that the $1,600 could go not only to fatherless families, or families with unemployed fathers, but to an estimated 10,571,000 people in families that make up the working poor. They are mostly intact families, headed by males, and now go largely unaided—in effect, the walking wounded. The Administration estimates the additional cost of FAP at $4.4 billion.
The Question of Incentives
FAP includes a requirement that the potentially employable seek work or job training to remain eligible for benefits, but such a condition already exists in most states and would serve more to assuage taxpayer irritation than substantially reduce the rolls.
Nevertheless, much of the criticism of FAP has centered on the question of whether the plan provides the incentives and the means for those on welfare to work their way out of it. What solid evidence there is gives little support to the myth of the lazy poor. A study of 1,350 working-poor families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, begun in 1968 and still going on, shows that those who receive federal payments to supplement their small earned incomes, and those who do not, both seek work with equal persistence. Says Dr. Harold Watts, one of the experiment's supervisors: "People simply do not take the money and sit on the porch and whittle."
Perhaps of equal importance is the question of how much the administration of welfare would be improved under FAP. The answer—which must remain unclear until the program is finally shaped by Congress—is, for the moment, depressing. In FAP's latest version, welfare would probably continue to be administered by the states under contract to the Federal Government.
What Decency Requires
FAP has also been attacked because it simply does not give the poor enough money to bring them above the poverty line (currently set at $3,967 for an urban family of four). By the Government's own standards, the proposal falls as short of the goal as the present system. And it has been attacked by others. Reagan among them, because what it does give