The Nation: Welfare: Trying to End the Nightmare

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amounts to a guaranteed income. FAP, as even less hostile critics have noted, is in fact a pilot guaranteed annual income or a negative income tax, though Nixon has wisely not heralded it as such. A more fundamental criticism is that FAP does not offer any broad attack on the structural causes of poverty, as many Great Society programs attempted to do.

Despite its limitations, FAP has the endorsement of many who have lived through the chaos of welfare administration. Robert Levine, who served as assistant director of research in OEO under the Johnson Administration, and is now with the Rand Corporation, is an enthusiastic supporter. He sees among FAP's chief advances its criterion of simple need rather than employability or "deservedness." Onetime HEW Secretary Wilbur J. Cohen and California Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton, experts in the field, both see the federal commitment to a minimum national standard as the plan's principal virtue. Even Banfield applauds FAP's certain effect in the South, where "the system is far below what decency requires."

In the new Congress, a real possibility exists for a major advance involving FAP. Congressional opposition to revenue sharing is strong, perhaps fatal. FAP stands a good chance in this session, however, and there has been little argument with the idea of a uniform federal income standard. Coincidentally, the state and local share of welfare is about $6 billion—the same amount of new money that Nixon wants to hand the states and cities under revenue sharing.

One possible alternative: the President could put aside his revenue-sharing plan and instead propose a full federal takeover of welfare. A number of benefits might result: the states and cities would have available for other programs the $6 billion they now spend on welfare —in effect, the no-strings money they would get under revenue sharing; with only the Federal Government financing welfare, one standard of aid would apply nationally, and one set of rules.

Even that major step would not do away with the dilemma of poverty. Measured against the rest of the world's major non-Communist industrialized nations, America, in fact, has never matched its generosity of spirit in its performance. The U.S. was the last to adopt Social Security legislation, and still devotes proportionately less of its resources to welfare than most. The problem is far greater in the U.S. than elsewhere, for several reasons. In a heavily heterogeneous society, economic differences are made more complex by racial and cultural distinctions. The movement of population within the country has damaged family stability. Moreover, in a real sense, the success of the economic system is a problem. The mechanization of agriculture displaced millions, and automation in industry has reduced the number of unskilled jobs. The process continues, and technological breakthroughs seem to happen faster than it is possible to educate and train people for skilled tasks. The remaining jobs, in the view of Sociologist Nathan Glazer, have become socially undesirable. He suggests that many of the able-bodied men who reject menial work—though relatively few are on welfare—are the same ones who father children but do not support them.

All this is happening just as several trends come together to produce a psychological crunch. The