President Richard Nixon: The War On Poverty

"The arguments that framed President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan have wielded tremendous influence over US antipoverty and family policy debates, setting the stage for five decades of policy development that have led us back to a “guaranteed income” through the temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021.

Today, the US faces a safety-net design that policymakers have always intentionally avoided: a form of guaranteed income that discourages work plus a large, bureaucratic welfare state.

Amid this backdrop, federal policymakers have an opportunity to refocus efforts toward creating a coordinated safety net that meets the challenges poor Americans face today and helps them improve their families’ prospects for tomorrow by connecting more families to work.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon released the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), proposing to replace the country’s largest welfare program at the time—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—with a guaranteed minimum income for all families with children. In proposing the plan, President Nixon cited a widespread failure of the US safety net to meaningfully combat poverty in America. In Nixon’s words, “Whether measured by the anguish of the poor themselves, or by the drastically mounting burden on the taxpayer, the present welfare system has to be judged a colossal failure...

Source:American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Angela Rachidi.

From the Angela Rachidi

President Richard Nixon: "The War On Poverty has been first in promises, first in politics, first in press releases, and last in performance". 

From the Richard Nixon Foundation

Whether or not President Nixon actually made that statement about the "War On Poverty", or not, I don't know. The Richard Nixon Foundation is pretty partisan and extremely loyal to Richard Nixon. But whether the President said that or not, it's a very clever line. And I can't say I disagree with it. But only because I don't. 

What I'm about to tell you is going to sound as unbelievable as hearing about hurricanes in Las Vegas, or Seattle running out of water and coffee on the same day, Wisconsin getting no snow in January, etc... But Richard Milhous Nixon was a Progressive Republican. At least on economic policy, and even civil rights, and to a certain extent social policy, (which I'm about to get in to) and even foreign policy and national security.

And I know that hearing that Richard Nixon was a Progressive Republican, is like hearing Socialists who are Libertarians or vice-versa, or fish who hate water and are dying to get on land, or something like that, but Richard Nixon came from the Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party. Or the Liberal Democrats from the 1950s and 60s, who became Republicans in the 1970s because they thought the Democratic Party was moving too far to the Left, who are called Neoconservatives today. 

And to get back to the line about Richard Nixon and the War On Poverty: he didn't run for President and more importantly he wouldn't have gotten elected President of the United States, to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society. He wouldn't have gotten elected had he run on that. When he became President of 1969, he had a Democratic Congress with only 195 or so Republicans in the House and about 43 Republicans in the Senate. So he wouldn't have been able to dismantle the New Deal and Great Society anyway. And had he tried to that as President, it not only wouldn't have worked, but it probably would've cost him reelection in 1972. 

But what President Nixon did instead was propose an alternative to the New Deal and Great Society:

President Nixon's approach was based on work, independence, and federalism. That the states should run these social programs, instead of the Feds, and that they should be designed to move people out of poverty and into the workforce as middle class Americans, through things like work, education, and opportunity. And that idea basically became what President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress passed in 1996, which is known as Welfare To Work. 

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