Guess who else wanted to give Americans a financial boost?
Shhhh. Don’t tell Joe Biden, but he is the modern incarnation of Richard M. Nixon.
Not with Watergate. Not with Nixon’s heritage as a cold warrior. Not with his instinct for scheming against his enemies.
But with his $1.9 trillion coronavirus-relief bill, Biden is taking a page from Nixon’s approach to fighting poverty. And at the same time, Biden inadvertently is taking aim at nearly a century of Democratic dogma on socialwelfare programs.
More than 50 years ago, Nixon startled Washington with his guaranteed-income plan, which passed in the House but stalled in the Senate. The Nixon plan was designed to attack poverty and hunger — and essentially to replace welfare — with a negative income tax that would send a flood of money to the poor.
Its 21st-century incarnation is the Biden plan to provide as much as $12,800 to some families of four
in the form of stimulus checks plus expanded child tax credits.
“Nixon really believed the way to fight poverty was to give people money,” said John Roy Price, a Nixon domestic-affairs aide who, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor who later became a Democratic senator from New York, helped shape the Nixon Family Assistance Plan. “… But he thought there was an animus toward what we think of as welfare. He saw poverty as a problem of lack of income.”
Nixon did not believe in merely paring down the spending-program largesse of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt years.
Instead, Nixon wanted to junk the myriad New Deal spending programs that Lyndon Johnson built upon with his expansive Great Society and that were attracting increasing, even bipartisan, criticism.
Though the Nixon plan, providing nearly $11,500 in 2021 dollars to a family of four, never was enacted, the philosophy behind it spawned the expansion of food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the earned-income tax credit.
And this winter, Sen. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, floated the idea of making direct bank deposits of $3,000 a year for children between the ages of 6 and 17.
All of this, including the Biden plan — derided by 21st-century conservatives as a giveaway to favored constituencies — is a repudiation of the New Deal/Great Society ethos.
“The growing interest in cash payments is an admission that welfare programs aren’t working,” said former Republican Sen. Robert Kasten of Wisconsin.
At the same time, the 21st-century Biden approach is an adaptation of a notion that first surfaced in overseas-development circles in the mid-20th century. At a time when foreign aid was under attack — by conservatives who considered it a waste of money, by liberals who argued it was ineffective, and by scholars who maintained it was a remnant of colonialism — growing numbers of thinkers argued that targeted development programs should be replaced by the simple transfer of money.
“The notion is to make people sustainable in the long run. It’s the old idea about teaching people to fish so they can eat for a lifetime rather than giving them a fish for one day’s dining,” said Donald W. McNemar, who teaches at Bentley University in Massachusetts.
That idea does not have universal appeal. “You want the money to be used the way you want it to be used,” said Raphael S. Cohen, a RAND Corp. senior political scientist who studies foreign aid.
And at the same time, critics believe that a substantial portion of the money provided by the Biden plan will be employed more as savings than as stimulus, with the final effect being to billow the deficit and pass the costs on to future generations of American taxpayers.
“Someday this bill will have to be paid,” said former GOP Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. “The only thing that is saving us right now is that all the other industrialized countries are printing money like crazy too. When it catches up to us, it catches up to the world.”