Nixon’s case for ‘mincome’ resurrected
The Woodstock stages at Yasgur’s Farm were just nearing completion when, in 1969, then- U. S. president Richard Nixon addressed the nation with a bold new plan to “abolish” poverty.
“It removes the present i ncentive for families to break apart and substitutes an incentive for families to stay together,” Nixon said of his scheme. “It removes the blatant inequities, injustices and indignities of the welfare system.”
The proposal largely fell on deaf ears. But Nixon’s plan would soon become North America’s progressive policy du jour, a far- left fever dream in the same camp as free tuition and a $ 15 minimum wage. The Liberals made it a priority at their recent convention. The NDP’s Leap Manifesto gives it special mention. The Green party has touted it as a magical cure- all that will empty prisons and make people live longer.
Richard Nixon was proposing a guaranteed mini mum i ncome. Or, as he called it, the “Family Assistance Plan.”
“It establishes a basic federal floor so that children in any state have at least the minimum essentials of life,” he said.
And Nixon wasn’t the only conservative touting “mincome” in the 1960s. Economist Milton Friedman was a free- market champion who once denounced minimum wage laws as the most “antiblack law in the land.” Nevertheless, he touted a “negative income tax” as a way to “treat people who are poor the same way we treat people who are rich.”
Up north in Canada, meanwhile, a guaranteed income had the backing of longtime Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield. In his unsuccessful battle with Pierre Trudeau in the 1968 election, Stanfield promised that a guaranteed annual income would be the first plank in his party’s plan to ensure “decent life and equal opportunity for all Canadians.”
The conservative reasoning for mincome was simple: by cutting poor people a monthly cheque, the federal government would suddenly be free to dismantle the welfare state.
The Liberal proposal for a minimum guaranteed income struck a bit of a different chord over the weekend.
Rather than dangle the promise of a smaller federal government, the resolution promised to fix the “evergrowing gap between the wealthy and the poor.” No mincome, and this gap could soon lead Canada into a dystopia of “social unrest, increased crime rates and violence.”
Nevertheless, the Liberal proposal does claim the plan would be “cost-neutral.” This is not based on any concerted plan to take a scythe to the welfare state. Rather, it’s based on an assumption that once the mincome cheques start rolling in, Canadians will be happier, healthier and generally better behaved.
“Savings in health, justice, education and social welfare as well as the building of selfreliant, taxpaying citizens more than offset the investment,” it reads.
This is based upon the experience of Dauphin, Man., a small town subject to a mincome pilot project in the 1970s. Over five years studied, the town saw hospitalizations and doctor visits drop by as much as eight per cent.
In its purest form, mincome still gets a thumbs- up from Canada’s fiscal conservatives. “It would do away with administrative duplication that inevitably occurs in a multi- program, multigovernment system,” reads a 2015 report by the right-leaning Fraser Institute.
The problem is that nobody trusts a Canadian government to perform the second plank of a Friedman-esque mincome program — namely, to “wipe out” the bureaucrats.
“It’s implementation that becomes the problem,” said Aaron Wudrick of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.