Tom Paine 1949
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- Mar 15, 2020
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There have been many proposals aimed at abolishing poverty via “market-friendly” measures — from Earned Income Tax Credits or Negative Income Tax schemes to Guaranteed Annual Income and Minimum Income proposals. Some of these suggestions have had more Conservative backers than Liberal ones.
The typical conservative criticisms that welfare programs hurt desire to work and self-improve, or break up the nuclear family, and concern about expensive self-interested welfare bureaucracies, as well of course as more crass demagoguery about “black welfare queens” — all these have prevented for two generations creative and even serious consideration of new programs for solving political-economic-social problems. Given our new high tech economy, global trade/production and competition, and the Covid pandemic, it seems to me it is more than appropriate to look at new solutions — some of which have been discussed before but never tried.
Here is an interesting article on the “Family Assistance Plan” seriously proposed by the Nixon administration, pushed by Senator Patrick Moynihan, which unfortunately was derailed and never passed. It is a historical piece that gives insight into how we might proceed in the future. It appeared in a Foundation newsletter associated with Andrew Yang, who himself proposed a “Guaranteed Annual Income” to address poverty and growing inequality when running for President:
The typical conservative criticisms that welfare programs hurt desire to work and self-improve, or break up the nuclear family, and concern about expensive self-interested welfare bureaucracies, as well of course as more crass demagoguery about “black welfare queens” — all these have prevented for two generations creative and even serious consideration of new programs for solving political-economic-social problems. Given our new high tech economy, global trade/production and competition, and the Covid pandemic, it seems to me it is more than appropriate to look at new solutions — some of which have been discussed before but never tried.
Here is an interesting article on the “Family Assistance Plan” seriously proposed by the Nixon administration, pushed by Senator Patrick Moynihan, which unfortunately was derailed and never passed. It is a historical piece that gives insight into how we might proceed in the future. It appeared in a Foundation newsletter associated with Andrew Yang, who himself proposed a “Guaranteed Annual Income” to address poverty and growing inequality when running for President:
Fifty Years Later, Reflecting on the Defeat of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan
Guest Editorial by Almaz Zelleke, Associate Professor of Practice in Political Science, NYU Shanghai Fifty years ago, on August 8th, 1969, President Nixon p ...
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