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Last month Governor Deane C. Davis of Vermont could have been speaking for many Governors when he froze education spending in order to raise welfare aid: "If we are to break the cycle of poverty and its resulting human and social costs, we must address ourselves to the treatment of causes rather than symptoms. A high quality of education for every Vermont child is part of the long-range solution. But the tragedy is, a long-term solution is of little help to a child who is hungry, sick or cold this winter. We must have, and we must give them short-term relief."
In the current crisis, frustration and anger have brought federal officials and the states and localities into open warfare over welfare budgets. Leading examples: California and New York. Together, the two largest states have 3,000,000 people receiving aid and distribute almost 37% of the nation's welfare money. Reagan is a conservative, budget-minded administrator confronted by a geometric rise in costs for a program that is in part a philosophical anathema to him. For months he fought to dispense smaller checks than those mandated under federal rules. HEW came within a day of announcing a cutoff of $684 million in aid to California, most of it destined for children and their unemployed mothers. Only last-minute negotiations averted the stop order. In New York, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, just re-elected to his fourth term, is preparing to ask higher taxes to meet the deficit created in large part by Federal Government programs requiring another $1.5 billion in state spending. A leading state senator has proposed Las Vegas-type gambling casinos in New York to help raise revenues.
New York City Mayor John Lindsay faces perhaps the most staggering crisis of all. His welfare population—1,100,000, every seventh New Yorker—could constitute the seventh largest municipality in the U.S. The aid bill for that doomed city within the city last year: $1.7 billion, a sixfold increase in a decade. As is the case with so much of the welfare nightmare, Lindsay's problems mix the pathetic and the bizarre; to his horror welfare officials recently lodged an indigent family at the Waldorf Astoria for a day, claiming absurdly that there was no room elsewhere. Many others on relief, unable to find homes, live in exorbitantly priced but squalid hotels overrun with vice and drug addiction.
Nor is the problem confined within city limits. In Westchester and Nassau, two of the richest counties in the nation, the suburban welfare rolls are growing at a rate faster than that of the city itself. Now Lindsay is attempting to bring down the whole haphazard welfare structure, the better to build it anew. He is preparing a legal attack contending that HEW mandates resulting in automatic increases in his welfare budget amount to an illegal, destructive tax by the Federal Government on the city. He says: "Poverty and welfare are national problems; their solution cannot be found at the local level."
New Plan, Old Failure
So urgent is the welfare crisis that Richard Nixon has been driven to unlikely activity for a Republican President: the espousal of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's unprecedented Family Assistance Plan, which amounts to a guaranteed annual income for the families of