Love the graphic. Love. Also, these are exactly the right points to raise/questions to ask about McGovern and any kind of Post-Phil VP scenario. That's if some butterflies don't bear up Phil's health on their wings. He does have the advantage here of more rigorous medical care given his elected role.
McGoverning
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Love the graphic. Love. Also, these are exactly the right points to raise/questions to ask about McGovern and any kind of Post-Phil VP scenario. That's if some butterflies don't bear up Phil's health on their wings. He does have the advantage here of more rigorous medical care given his elected role.
I realize that, yes, but you pretty much need I think that extra range you get (and engine improvements in terms of a better fuel efficiency) the Concorde-B would offer to be able to fly the Tokyo-Honolulu segment of say a Tokyo-Los Angeles flight (which would require a stopover in Honolulu no matter what).
I hope to see it so classified.This is one of those places where butterflies have begun to flap. It's 1974 by that point, and after the hiccups and scotched contracts and such in 1972-73, the terms have resolved more around these lines:
Several Key International Carriers: Yeah, so, this whole deregulation thing? We need something that helps us stand out and draws in some high-dollar customers. Fuel's expensive as it is, and we could simply get killed on volume alone. We need something that will draw the high rollers to us, in hopes that the proles in Economy will want to fly along by association. So we'd kind of like take-backsies on some of those Concordes we cancelled.
Aerospatiale/BAC Concorde condominum: Excellent. How many would that be, then?
Several Key International Carriers: Well we're each screwed - you guys and us - by fuel costs and inflation, so we figured you'd like "any at all."
Aerospatiale/BAC Concorde condominum: We'd love "any at all"! Any at all is great for us.
So on this "birds are always costlier/ the second time around" model they take some, but not as many. The aggregate effect is still to just-over double OTL's order book, so Concorde looks less like a complete flaming economic disaster and more like an ambitious project ill-starred by timing.
For Pan Am I figure they do the JFK-LHR milk run, plus the Shuttle, plus a one-stop LAX to Haneda (later Narita) by way of Honolulu, to answer both you and @Usili on that. Everybody else is either doing the JFK-LHR corridor (or JFK-Paris, first Orly and later CdeG) or trying to fly over places significantly less NIMBY-empowered about occasional booms (hi, Shah Mohammed Reza!)
Can't regulate what you can't catch.
Cute.
In aggregate, terms, that's quite right. Leave aside how profoundly the feds effed up the OKC project - that the roots of the class-action suit were in grotesque procedural screwups on damages rather than the mechanisms of the experiment itself - OKC ran at the galloping rate of roughly seven booms a day, more on occasion so that there was less on others by way of comparison.
In this case, Pan Am don't want seven booms a day, or anything like it. Nor do they want it anywhere but on ascent/approach vectors on JFK, out there on Long Island, and for LAX. Indeed they're happy as can be to help the feds, or state and local governments, prevent it from happening anywhere else in the country, and even at those locations - regulators can cap what they want to cap, as far as the top floor of the Pan Am Building is concerned, so long as they get grandfathered in for a maximum of two booms a day, sometimes just one depending on maintenance conditions. That suits them just fine: what they're selling is scarcity.
And, taking a page from Juan Trippe in this age of shattered hopes and diminished expectations, they know how to sell the sizzle. It isn't burdensome, they say. It's unique. There's nothing else like it, anywhere! Enjoy the eccentricity! Thrill the imagination! Show your resilience, your embrace, of change! It may be the golden age of NIMBYism but here's a chance to be part of something special. Something, in this new era of limits, that no one else has. We'll even chip in to public-policy campaigns to reduce smog in Greater Los Angeles - we want people to be able to see these magnificent winged creatures coming in over the Sierras, not lose sight of them in the haze!
And beyond that, they have two markets where there's significant political leverage to be had. For LA, or rather Southland California in general, they offer that magic Sun Belt elixir: the chance for social-climbing nouveau riches to do just what the hell they please free of consequence, in a fashion to which none of the proles have access. For NYC, as the city comes to face some 800-lb. gorilla Trends in its fiscal situation (Rocky and John Lindsay have done pretty much all the necessary damage by the time Tex Colson even lights his fire), just as the noise ordinance on transatlantic routes died, the outlook is PLEASE JESUS TELL ME THIS WILL MAKE THE CITY MONEY MY BABIES NEED BUDGET LINES. The McGoverners may have set upon airline deregulation to Empower the Ordinary Consumer, but in the process they've unleashed the forces of concentrated wealth (you've got to have money in order to succeed at putting other people out of business with low prices), untrammeled ambition, cartelization by stealth, and untrammeled desire for privilege.
I actually kind of take back what I was saying with some of the issues for Concorde flying Trans-Pacific flights, especially if you're doubling the order, since I just found out from this site (and where there's a whole lot of info on the Concorde): "As the manufacturers were having great difficulty in selling the 5 remaining Concordes at the end of the initial production run of 16 aircraft, the B spec modifications that would have been applied from production aircraft number 17 onwards never materialised. If the additional range and performance had been available many more airlines might have purchased Concorde and air travel as we know it today might have been completely different."
It also seems that with the proposed engine improvements as part of the Concorde-B, it would've been able to eliminate the re-heat system (which was required for takeoff and to go supersonic if I understand it right?) which would've helped in reducing the noise from the Concorde.
The problem isn't NY or LA, which shouldn't really see sonic booms anyway, it's everything in the middle. If the Concorde is flying supersonic across Middle America (literally, in this case), then it's going to be dumping sonic booms all over the place, which by this point was a no-go. If it's not flying supersonic, then Pan Am executives must be doing some heavy-ass drugs, because it's literally just about the most expensive possible way of doing a subsonic coast-to-coast flight that I can think of.
Yup, although as far as anyone in the family could tell, he basically followed Crosland around throughout his career, including to Moscow. He was very, very late getting back, which led my irate, pre teen mother to become, as she put it "the only senior government lawyer to have ever lamped a minister."
And what about other international airlines that expressed interest in the Concorde? Air India didn't cancel their two Concorde orders until 1975 OTL. Pan Am also could fly from JFK-Paris, IAD-LHR/Paris, and SFO-HNL-Tokyo. I also need to know if any of the planes that ended up going to British Airways or Air France IOTL ended up going to the other carriers ITTL, or were they newbuilds?
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He is! We will see more of him in a handful of chapters, when we get around to the sentence "you know, I wonder what happened with all those trials that were scheduled or going on..."
Ha! Nice. My non-zero number of daughters would agree that it is kids' jobs to buck up their parents' ideas, sometimes by any means necessary.
Fair point. Though I suspect a very entertaining evening could be had if the same execs took those same drugs and then sat down with some coast-to-coast plat maps to try and daisy-chain a flight plan across classified military ranges. Love to have HST as a fly on the wall for those shenanigans, it feels very then.
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You know I am glad you asked that question. All aboard for Clarification Station!
So, yeah, um, did the McGoverners pull off Medicare-for-All?
The tl;dr on that is, pretty much. The important part is what that actually turns into in practice.
,
How so? Isn't Medicare-for-All, y'know, just Medicare... for all?
Indeed. But two points go with that. First: what version of Medicare? Because it's evolved over time IOTL and is doing so ITTL too. Second: Medicare doesn't cover everything. It's single-payer-adjacent, or single-payerish, not full-metal Welcome To Canada/Let's Pass Kennedy-Griffiths single-payer. With Medicare there are some exempted conditions, premiums, cost sharing of various kinds. What you do about that matters a lot.
Ok, but let's get back to the first question. Did President McGovern get a Medicare-for-All system?
Yes. Which tells you both all the awesome things Medicare can do and highlights ones that it doesn't, at least not by itself. So it's a "big achievements/room to grow" kind of report card. Let's dig into that by feeding you a leading question: what does this Medicare-for-All do, then.
I'll play along. What does this Medicare-for-All do, then?
There are two (really three) parts to the Medicare Expansion and Consolidation Act of 1974 system in the McGoverningverse. There's Medicare Part A, which is mostly about hospital stuff but also a few long-term and/or degenerative conditions, about physician-administered long-term medications, etc. Then there's Medicare Part B, which is the "most of everything else" part. Also through the backbreaking administrative grunt work of Jean Westwood's Domestic Policy office, Part B has been rewritten to include all the sorts of things included under most mainstream private insurance policies that were not covered before under Part B (because over-65s don't really have to deal with them) like obstetrics, pediatrics, etc. So: every damn body in the US is entitled to register for and receive Medicare Part A and Part B under MECA. That's huge, and amazeballs.
It sure seems like it. What's the catch? Is there a catch?
It's capitalist America, redolent with robber baronies and the toxic centuries-long legacy of our slice of the Americas' Plantation Archipelago. Of course there's a catch. Like I say, Medicare doesn't cover everything. Exemptions, hyper-specialized conditions not covered, prescription insurance (keep your eye on that one), premiums, co-insurance costs, other kinds of cost sharing ... that's all out there. There have to be mechanisms to supplement the - admittedly awesome - things Medicare does.
So how did the McGoverners pull that off?
In three parts. For most people of all ages, MECA helps them cover what Medicare doesn't cover with a Nixon/Obama-care model. That is, there's an employer mandate on insurance and other people can find and buy policies through government-brokered markets. There are also tax credits for a lot of disadvantaged people (especially older disadvantaged people, that's Russell Long and his "grandma amendments" at it again) to help them afford such policies. So that has the backs of a lot of folks. There's also something that walks and quacks like OTL's Medicare Part C. That is, people can take their Part A/Part B coverage and turn it into something that costs them less by capitating it - they get a fixed "pot" of money benefits (a lot of dental insurance works like this IOTL) that they can use to cover the likeliest things (incl. emergencies) they might need to cover, managed by private HMOs and their physician networks. That works pretty well for people in really good health and keeps costs down for all involved in that scheme.
So where's the catch?
Mostly, where it always is with American political economy - when you hit the poor folks, especially the poor folks who aren't white or are in single-female-parent households white or no. MECA, in the McGoverningverse, changes what Medicaid does, even though it serves the same purpose. Now, rather than being "health coverage for the really poor" it becomes "supplemental Medicare insurance for the really poor" that should in principle blanket those folks with benefits because since they're really poor they truly can't do out-of-pocket costs. The catch comes in the relationship between Medicaid money - mostly federal, provided in block grants to the states - and Medicaid management, which belongs to those states. At the very least MECA gets all of the states in to Medicaid - at this point in time (1974) some states still were not participating (want to make any guesses about the interplay between race and poverty in those states ? Ooh! Ooh! I do!!) This is where we get to the But. Always, there is a But. Ideally, the feds supply a yearly block grant to a state based, under MECA, on a statistical model of who's likely to need coverage in that state and how much it will take to pay for it. The state chips in some cash also, and the rules and regulations about who gets Medicaid are drawn up at the state level in a way that gets that coverage to the people who need it. BUT. States can make their own budget request for the yearly block grant, ignoring data models from the MMMA (the federal Medicare and Medicaid Management Administration enabled through MECA as one of the biggest gears in the Department of Health and Human Services.) The individual states can also choose not to go with the preferred Medicaid model of contracting with a private managed-care system to run what's basically a preventative model (more frequent and rigorous preventative-care services intended to avoid big ticket illnesses and emergencies.) The really crucial negative power the states have is that they get to write the regulations about who qualifies for Medicaid. This gets into the most fundamental cultural hot-button in America's provision of social services - the divide between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor, a divide that's mostly punitive, imposed from the top down, and weighted like Atlas carrying the damn planet with centuries of America's toxic nexus between ideas about poverty and models of Otherness in society.
OK, that got pretty deep there. Let's reel it back up to the surface. Like, how would you grade this outcome? What kind of report card do the McGoverners get?
Well, they've done a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing. Simply getting the basics of Medicare out everywhere - even homeless people have an untrammeled right to be registered for Medicare Part A and B, though there's the usual difficulties over permanent residence and such - is so much more than the US has had ever before ITTL and definitely more than there is IOTL. For anything they could actually get past the last generation of Southern Grandees in Congress, even their total-service model, the Medicare-plus-supplemental-insurance situation, is pretty good. It's set up so the vast majority of Americans can have the security of Medicare plus effective supplemental insurance. There are still issues: there's still legal wiggle room for moral hazard and bad conduct by private partners in the process (insurers, care-management entities, fee-for-service providers, etc.), and most especially there's room for individual states to create "cracks in the floor" through which people without proper access to Medicaid can fall. Also, it costs money. And money is tight in this period of managed stagflation. But - this is a good But - they've created a firm place to stand. It's not a perfect system at all, maybe it's not even a great system in terms of simplicity and equity, but it's a good system, and it's so much better than any politically viable American alternatives that it's a Big Effing Deal as a former vice president once said. Like the evolution of Social Security, they've created a system and a process by which now they can fight to close the gaps while holding the high ground. That's, well, historic.
I suspect TWA will snap up that SFO route soon as they can, in inevitable competition with Pan Am. BA and Air France will keep their orders, one hand washing the other and all that. Air India is still definitely on board, even if it were just to have a small stable of birds that Rajiv could fly on weekends. And there are others also.
In the same spirit as the next-to-last post of mine, let's roll back into Clarification Station, this time over at the tax-policy platform (ha, see what I... is this thing on...)
Yesterday, I think, someone asked me what the state of play was with the McGovern administration's Big Damn Tax Plan. I want to concentrate on one piece of it here, the piece that has most to do with the Revenue Reform Act's role as an incomes policy, or at least a significant chunk of one.
Income policy is a crucial and delicately balanced piece of turf for not-monetarist policy in the face of the whole "stagflation" mess. So on one hand you've got said stagflation, which is defined as a situation where inflation is pushing up and unemployment's pushing up. As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out at the time that's quite possible under the right conditions, like when there's an inelastic (i.e. this is a product people have to buy at least some of) supply shock, even though a lot of his fellow Keynesians had gotten wrapped up in the notion that inflation and employment would always be in inverse motion (not so.) So you're trying to manage inflation by curtailing the amount of money circulating and the way people tend to preemptively bid up wages/prices because they assume inflation will keep rising, but you're also trying not to trigger a bunch of unemployment. Also if you're the Democratic Party in the early 1970s, all the way from the Scoop Jacksons of the party (and the less-reactionary Southerners) over to your President McGovern types, there's a lot of institutional pressure inside the party culture for a full-employment approach, a "welfare reform by actually creating jobs for people to do" approach. Also, for the chronically poor, a way to get them out of that chronic-poverty quicksand with a "simple" - in the sense of radically straightforward - approach to tax policy.
On that front, both right and left (well, part of the right and part of the left) want to attack the problem with what Milton Friedman called a negative income tax. That is to say, in the same way income tax looks at your income and calculates, "OK, you owe this percentage in taxes," it looks at the income of a person below the poverty line and with a similar formula says "OK, we need to give you this amount of money to raise your income to a sustainable level." Nixon latched on to that as a mathematical/market-based alternative to the byzantine bedlam of bureaucratic social-provision programs that cropped up under LBJ. A lot of folks on the left liked it too because there were various punitive or restrictive measures in other programs like Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and they often didn't pay out enough to really lift family units out of poverty.
Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) had a variety of work requirements attached that many liberal-to-left groups and politicians saw as onerous (the right just hated it as "another goddamn handout"), and it also had a cap more liberal folk saw as too low. That cap was that it would "negative-tax" a family of four $2,400 dollars in 1970 (so that's $14,856.00 in 2019 money.) It also helped kill itself by dividing opinion among the poor themselves - especially poor African Americans - between the South and parts of the Sun Belt (more often two-parent black families in chronic poverty with some chance one or other parent could satisfy the work requirement) and urban areas in the North, Midwest, and West Coast (more often single-parent families likely to fall short on the work requirement, for whom other benefit plans might disappear in favor of FAP, cutting them off.) Abe Ribicoff proposed an amendment that would dial back the work requirements and bump up the family-of-four benefit threshold to $2,850 (1970 dollars), but neither that nor Original Recipe FAP got anywhere. Nixon also screwed up his own proposal by schizophrenic messaging, back and forth from how this would make life better for all Americans to his classic "silent majority" stuff about restoring a work ethic and gutting wasteful government programs, etc.
Along comes the McGovern campaign. McGovern had started out with what he called a "Human Security Plan" in 1971 which was to deliver by FAP-like means $600 to every child in the country ($3,720.00 in 2019 money) per year, plus a comprehensive make-jobs program, and a version of what would become Supplemental Security Income (SSI) out of Social Security to handle individuals still stuck in poverty. Along the road towards the nomination his Justice League of neo/pseudo/crypto/paleo-Keynesian economists and other left-leaning econometricians simplified that into the Demogrant model. Sounds like the root there is "democracy" but it's actually "demography", that is to say it's an equal-sized credit to everyone in the country. Above a certain income level that's phased out by the way taxes are structured. But, if you're really poor, its max ceiling is $4,000 in 1972 dollars for a family of four (that's $22,960.00 in today's money.) Which was a substantial chunk of change, not tied to a work requirement. On the campaign trail McGovern was pilloried by Humphrey, among others, with exaggerated claims that it would create an undue tax burden for middle-class folk, and attacked by Nixon' campaign (who had a chance to run to McGovern's right while holding the tattered remnants of FAP) saying McGovern would destroy America's work ethic and put millions more on the welfare rolls ("welfare" was already a coded, negatively charged word by this point. Thanks, Sixties!) In fact, what the Demogrant was designed to do was eliminate the old welfare system (which, you might have guessed, won it no fans among public employees' unions, who would lose members to programs deleted) in favor of income grants that would keep Americans as a whole at or above the official poverty line.
So where are things in McGoverning at this point?
When the McGoverners launch their H.R. 1, there's what you could call a "Demogrant-shaped space" in it, to be filled by a negative-tax-inspired credit system. What the top-level administration folk hoped, in their heart of hearts, was that they could fill it with a version of Abe Ribicoff's amendment to FAP, tailored to secure the position of beneficiaries for whom work requirements would be hard to impossible. However, the combination of renewed infighting among liberal-to-left interest groups and also the coordinated, culturally "framed" assault by Dixiecrats and Goldwaterites rained down on it also.
BUT. While bashing out a Medicare-for-all plan they could get past Russell Long, the plucky band of Scoobies working with Phil Hart tackled a bigger issue too, namely that "Demogrant-shaped space" in H.R. 1/Revenue Reform Act. They seized on Long's own proposal, which is just a hurried-up version of his own OTL!1975 limited, truncated working-man's tax credit, the point of origin for the long process of creating OTL's earned-income tax credit.
Here, the McGoverners hurry up and create an Earned Income Credit Plan all at once. It has:
So that's big progress, if the bill passes Congress. Moving up from the family-of-four cap model it would give a family of six as the cap model (this plays plenty well with Catholics who are still a wavering but crucial part of the Democratic coalition) up to $2,800 in credits in 1974, with $500 each for the married couple and three kids plus the $300 phaseout credit for more wee bairns (so $14,252.00 in current money.) That's less, in the aggregate and per capita, than the Demogrant proposal. But it ain't hay, either. For people with a chance of work it's a major new capacity to get out and stay out of poverty.
But (here it goes again) there are two things in play here. First, the work requirement. Second, that there are still plenty of folks especially in the urban-single-parent demographic who are served poorly by this. So what can the McGoverners do? It makes employment policy central again - despite stagflationary pressures they need to find ways to get jobs to people where they are. Linked to that, it means the administration needs a comprehensive industrial policy, i.e. a strategy for creating both private- and public-sector jobs that can employ people to do more than rake leaves.
So that's where things are at the moment. Your official poverty line around 1974 (IOTL) was $24,255.00 in today's money for a non-farm family of four. So even the McGoverning Earned Income Credit Plan that has Russell Long's blessing does quite a lot for those folks, matched with the rise in the minimum wage. The question for the McGovern administration now is what it usually is for US administrations when they address poverty: how do we plug the gaps? That will dominate administration thinking for some time.
Yesterday, I think, someone asked me what the state of play was with the McGovern administration's Big Damn Tax Plan. I want to concentrate on one piece of it here, the piece that has most to do with the Revenue Reform Act's role as an incomes policy, or at least a significant chunk of one.
Income policy is a crucial and delicately balanced piece of turf for not-monetarist policy in the face of the whole "stagflation" mess. So on one hand you've got said stagflation, which is defined as a situation where inflation is pushing up and unemployment's pushing up. As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out at the time that's quite possible under the right conditions, like when there's an inelastic (i.e. this is a product people have to buy at least some of) supply shock, even though a lot of his fellow Keynesians had gotten wrapped up in the notion that inflation and employment would always be in inverse motion (not so.) So you're trying to manage inflation by curtailing the amount of money circulating and the way people tend to preemptively bid up wages/prices because they assume inflation will keep rising, but you're also trying not to trigger a bunch of unemployment. Also if you're the Democratic Party in the early 1970s, all the way from the Scoop Jacksons of the party (and the less-reactionary Southerners) over to your President McGovern types, there's a lot of institutional pressure inside the party culture for a full-employment approach, a "welfare reform by actually creating jobs for people to do" approach. Also, for the chronically poor, a way to get them out of that chronic-poverty quicksand with a "simple" - in the sense of radically straightforward - approach to tax policy.
On that front, both right and left (well, part of the right and part of the left) want to attack the problem with what Milton Friedman called a negative income tax. That is to say, in the same way income tax looks at your income and calculates, "OK, you owe this percentage in taxes," it looks at the income of a person below the poverty line and with a similar formula says "OK, we need to give you this amount of money to raise your income to a sustainable level." Nixon latched on to that as a mathematical/market-based alternative to the byzantine bedlam of bureaucratic social-provision programs that cropped up under LBJ. A lot of folks on the left liked it too because there were various punitive or restrictive measures in other programs like Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and they often didn't pay out enough to really lift family units out of poverty.
Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) had a variety of work requirements attached that many liberal-to-left groups and politicians saw as onerous (the right just hated it as "another goddamn handout"), and it also had a cap more liberal folk saw as too low. That cap was that it would "negative-tax" a family of four $2,400 dollars in 1970 (so that's $14,856.00 in 2019 money.) It also helped kill itself by dividing opinion among the poor themselves - especially poor African Americans - between the South and parts of the Sun Belt (more often two-parent black families in chronic poverty with some chance one or other parent could satisfy the work requirement) and urban areas in the North, Midwest, and West Coast (more often single-parent families likely to fall short on the work requirement, for whom other benefit plans might disappear in favor of FAP, cutting them off.) Abe Ribicoff proposed an amendment that would dial back the work requirements and bump up the family-of-four benefit threshold to $2,850 (1970 dollars), but neither that nor Original Recipe FAP got anywhere. Nixon also screwed up his own proposal by schizophrenic messaging, back and forth from how this would make life better for all Americans to his classic "silent majority" stuff about restoring a work ethic and gutting wasteful government programs, etc.
Along comes the McGovern campaign. McGovern had started out with what he called a "Human Security Plan" in 1971 which was to deliver by FAP-like means $600 to every child in the country ($3,720.00 in 2019 money) per year, plus a comprehensive make-jobs program, and a version of what would become Supplemental Security Income (SSI) out of Social Security to handle individuals still stuck in poverty. Along the road towards the nomination his Justice League of neo/pseudo/crypto/paleo-Keynesian economists and other left-leaning econometricians simplified that into the Demogrant model. Sounds like the root there is "democracy" but it's actually "demography", that is to say it's an equal-sized credit to everyone in the country. Above a certain income level that's phased out by the way taxes are structured. But, if you're really poor, its max ceiling is $4,000 in 1972 dollars for a family of four (that's $22,960.00 in today's money.) Which was a substantial chunk of change, not tied to a work requirement. On the campaign trail McGovern was pilloried by Humphrey, among others, with exaggerated claims that it would create an undue tax burden for middle-class folk, and attacked by Nixon' campaign (who had a chance to run to McGovern's right while holding the tattered remnants of FAP) saying McGovern would destroy America's work ethic and put millions more on the welfare rolls ("welfare" was already a coded, negatively charged word by this point. Thanks, Sixties!) In fact, what the Demogrant was designed to do was eliminate the old welfare system (which, you might have guessed, won it no fans among public employees' unions, who would lose members to programs deleted) in favor of income grants that would keep Americans as a whole at or above the official poverty line.
So where are things in McGoverning at this point?
When the McGoverners launch their H.R. 1, there's what you could call a "Demogrant-shaped space" in it, to be filled by a negative-tax-inspired credit system. What the top-level administration folk hoped, in their heart of hearts, was that they could fill it with a version of Abe Ribicoff's amendment to FAP, tailored to secure the position of beneficiaries for whom work requirements would be hard to impossible. However, the combination of renewed infighting among liberal-to-left interest groups and also the coordinated, culturally "framed" assault by Dixiecrats and Goldwaterites rained down on it also.
BUT. While bashing out a Medicare-for-all plan they could get past Russell Long, the plucky band of Scoobies working with Phil Hart tackled a bigger issue too, namely that "Demogrant-shaped space" in H.R. 1/Revenue Reform Act. They seized on Long's own proposal, which is just a hurried-up version of his own OTL!1975 limited, truncated working-man's tax credit, the point of origin for the long process of creating OTL's earned-income tax credit.
Here, the McGoverners hurry up and create an Earned Income Credit Plan all at once. It has:
- Full OTL!modern terms on (1) who's an eligible child and (2) who can claim an eligible child for credit.
- Extension of the earned-income credit to Social Security recipients who count as "earners" because they'd paid into SS over time so that's a nice bit of legal gymnastics.
- No marriage penalty, which is to say a married couple can claim individual credits under the plan (this is sold to Long and his Southron cronies as a way to help keep women at home rather than going out to work from economic necessity)
- Up to four claimable children, three kids at full credit level ($500 in 1974 dollars which is actually slightly above the modern credit amount for an individual child under EITC) plus a smaller phaseout credit for "four or more."
- Also, rather than OTL!EITC's stingy cap of $2,000 current-money on savings investments, the McGoverning plan allows $1,000 in 1974 money (so $5,090.00 today) in savings investments, part encouragement to save, part allowance for poorer workers who may be given employee-stock-option benefits, for example.
So that's big progress, if the bill passes Congress. Moving up from the family-of-four cap model it would give a family of six as the cap model (this plays plenty well with Catholics who are still a wavering but crucial part of the Democratic coalition) up to $2,800 in credits in 1974, with $500 each for the married couple and three kids plus the $300 phaseout credit for more wee bairns (so $14,252.00 in current money.) That's less, in the aggregate and per capita, than the Demogrant proposal. But it ain't hay, either. For people with a chance of work it's a major new capacity to get out and stay out of poverty.
But (here it goes again) there are two things in play here. First, the work requirement. Second, that there are still plenty of folks especially in the urban-single-parent demographic who are served poorly by this. So what can the McGoverners do? It makes employment policy central again - despite stagflationary pressures they need to find ways to get jobs to people where they are. Linked to that, it means the administration needs a comprehensive industrial policy, i.e. a strategy for creating both private- and public-sector jobs that can employ people to do more than rake leaves.
So that's where things are at the moment. Your official poverty line around 1974 (IOTL) was $24,255.00 in today's money for a non-farm family of four. So even the McGoverning Earned Income Credit Plan that has Russell Long's blessing does quite a lot for those folks, matched with the rise in the minimum wage. The question for the McGovern administration now is what it usually is for US administrations when they address poverty: how do we plug the gaps? That will dominate administration thinking for some time.
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Other carriers domestically, internationally, or both?
Also figure that Pan Am and TWA will get their full, original Concorde order in due time.
McGoverning: Roll Up for Roll-Call Votes
In the further spirit of G R A N U L A R I T Y I thought folk hereabouts might enjoy a copy of the Senate roll-call vote on the Medicare Expansion and Consolidation Act of 1974. In the spirit of simplicity I've reverted to the Florida Model on this (although I went the opposite way on the '72 election and likely will again on the '74 midterms when we get there), i.e. Blue Dems and Red GOP. Occasional director's commentary can be had in parentheticals by the names. N.B. the "-" symbol indicates the senator in question was not present for the vote or abstained, "P" indicates a "present" vote.
Senate Roll Call, Medicare Expansion and Consolidation Act
Alabama
John Sparkman N (tempted to vote yes in the freedom of his final term, but ultimately didn't want to spend that term being ratfucked by the Alabama governor's office)
James Allen N
Alaska
Ted Stevens N (a stronger "nay" than otherwise to keep up street cred with the party for when he needs to horse-trade with Democrats for TASTY TASTY PORK)
Mike Gravel Y
Arizona
Paul Fannin N
Barry Goldwater N
Arkansas
John McLellan N (ANGLO-SAXON FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM)
William Fulbright Y
California
Alan Cranston Y
John V. Tunney Y
Colorado
Peter Dominick N
Floyd Haskell Y
Connecticut
Abraham Ribicoff Y
Lowell Weicker, Jr. Y
Delaware
Bill Roth N
Joseph "Joe" Biden Y
Florida
Edward "Ed" Gurney N
Lawton Chiles Y
Georgia
Herman Talmadge N
Fletcher Thompson N
Hawaii
Hiram Fong Y
Daniel Inouye Y
Idaho
Frank Church Y
James A. McClure N
Illinois
Charles Percy Y
Adlai Stevenson III Y
Indiana
Vance Hartke Y
Birch Bayh Y (F in the chat today for Birch...)
Iowa
Harold Hughes Y
Richard "Dick" Clark Y
Kansas
James B. Pearson P
Robert "Bob" Dole N
Kentucky
Marlow Cook -
Walter Dee Huddleston Y
Louisiana
Russell Long Y
J. Bennett Johnston N
Maine
Edmund Muskie Y
William Hathaway Y
Maryland
Charles Mathias Y
John Glenn Beall Jr. P
Massachusetts
Edward "Ted" Kennedy Y
Edward Brooke Y
Michigan
Frank Kelley Y
Robert Griffin N
Minnesota
Walter "Fritz" Mondale (DFL) Y
Hubert H. Humphrey Jr. (DFL) Y
Mississippi
James Eastland N
John C. Stennis N
Missouri
Stuart Symington Y
Thomas "Tom" Eagleton Y
Montana
Mike Mansfield Y
Lee Metcalf Y
Nebraska
Roman Hruska N
Terry Carpenter Y
Nevada
Alan Bible Y
Howard Cannon Y
New Hampshire
Norris Cotton N
Thomas J. McIntyre Y
New Jersey
Clifford Case Y
Harrison "Pete" Williams Y
New Mexico
Joseph Montoya Y
Peter "Pete" Domenici N
New York
Jacob Javits Y
James L. Buckley (C) N
North Carolina
Sam Ervin N
Jesse Helms N
North Dakota
Milton R. Young N
Quentin N. Burdick Y
Ohio
William B. Saxbe N
Robert Taft, Jr. N
Oklahoma
Henry Bellmon N
Ed Edmonson Y (sometimes Oklahoma is not quite the South)
Oregon
Mark Hatfield Y
Robert "Bob" Packwood Y
Pennsylvania
Hugh Scott N
Richard Schweiker Y
Rhode Island
John O. Pastore Y
Claiborne Pell Y
South Carolina
Strom Thurmond N (not only no but hell, no)
Ernest "Fritz" Hollings N
South Dakota
Frank Denholm Y
James Abourezk Y
Tennessee
Howard Baker N (tbf, after some soul-searching about the correct political play here)
William "Bill" Brock N
Texas
John Tower N
Lloyd Bentsen P (Lloyd has "present"-ed his way right through MECA in an effort by Texas Dems to keep him viable for future national tickets)
Utah
Wallace F. Bennett N
Frank Moss Y
Vermont
George Aiken N
Robert Stafford Y (Stafford has some reservations but he'd rather sort those out over time on an evidentiary basis - remember when some people rolled like that?)
Virginia
Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (I) N
William Spong N
Washington
Warren Magnuson Y
Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Y (a broken-clock moment of agreement between The Scoop and the McGoverners)
West Virginia
Jennings Randolph Y (Jennings Randolph is a Big Damn Fan of several McGovern administration initiatives - godspeed at reelection, Jennings...)
Robert Byrd P (profiles in courage)
Wisconsin
William "Bill" Proxmire Y
Gaylord Nelson Y
Wyoming
Gale McGee N (McGee likes the bill but is allowed to vote tactically with the cowboys in hopes of keeping his seat)
Clifford Hansen N
Senate Roll Call, Medicare Expansion and Consolidation Act
Alabama
John Sparkman N (tempted to vote yes in the freedom of his final term, but ultimately didn't want to spend that term being ratfucked by the Alabama governor's office)
James Allen N
Alaska
Ted Stevens N (a stronger "nay" than otherwise to keep up street cred with the party for when he needs to horse-trade with Democrats for TASTY TASTY PORK)
Mike Gravel Y
Arizona
Paul Fannin N
Barry Goldwater N
Arkansas
John McLellan N (ANGLO-SAXON FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM)
William Fulbright Y
California
Alan Cranston Y
John V. Tunney Y
Colorado
Peter Dominick N
Floyd Haskell Y
Connecticut
Abraham Ribicoff Y
Lowell Weicker, Jr. Y
Delaware
Bill Roth N
Joseph "Joe" Biden Y
Florida
Edward "Ed" Gurney N
Lawton Chiles Y
Georgia
Herman Talmadge N
Fletcher Thompson N
Hawaii
Hiram Fong Y
Daniel Inouye Y
Idaho
Frank Church Y
James A. McClure N
Illinois
Charles Percy Y
Adlai Stevenson III Y
Indiana
Vance Hartke Y
Birch Bayh Y (F in the chat today for Birch...)
Iowa
Harold Hughes Y
Richard "Dick" Clark Y
Kansas
James B. Pearson P
Robert "Bob" Dole N
Kentucky
Marlow Cook -
Walter Dee Huddleston Y
Louisiana
Russell Long Y
J. Bennett Johnston N
Maine
Edmund Muskie Y
William Hathaway Y
Maryland
Charles Mathias Y
John Glenn Beall Jr. P
Massachusetts
Edward "Ted" Kennedy Y
Edward Brooke Y
Michigan
Frank Kelley Y
Robert Griffin N
Minnesota
Walter "Fritz" Mondale (DFL) Y
Hubert H. Humphrey Jr. (DFL) Y
Mississippi
James Eastland N
John C. Stennis N
Missouri
Stuart Symington Y
Thomas "Tom" Eagleton Y
Montana
Mike Mansfield Y
Lee Metcalf Y
Nebraska
Roman Hruska N
Terry Carpenter Y
Nevada
Alan Bible Y
Howard Cannon Y
New Hampshire
Norris Cotton N
Thomas J. McIntyre Y
New Jersey
Clifford Case Y
Harrison "Pete" Williams Y
New Mexico
Joseph Montoya Y
Peter "Pete" Domenici N
New York
Jacob Javits Y
James L. Buckley (C) N
North Carolina
Sam Ervin N
Jesse Helms N
North Dakota
Milton R. Young N
Quentin N. Burdick Y
Ohio
William B. Saxbe N
Robert Taft, Jr. N
Oklahoma
Henry Bellmon N
Ed Edmonson Y (sometimes Oklahoma is not quite the South)
Oregon
Mark Hatfield Y
Robert "Bob" Packwood Y
Pennsylvania
Hugh Scott N
Richard Schweiker Y
Rhode Island
John O. Pastore Y
Claiborne Pell Y
South Carolina
Strom Thurmond N (not only no but hell, no)
Ernest "Fritz" Hollings N
South Dakota
Frank Denholm Y
James Abourezk Y
Tennessee
Howard Baker N (tbf, after some soul-searching about the correct political play here)
William "Bill" Brock N
Texas
John Tower N
Lloyd Bentsen P (Lloyd has "present"-ed his way right through MECA in an effort by Texas Dems to keep him viable for future national tickets)
Utah
Wallace F. Bennett N
Frank Moss Y
Vermont
George Aiken N
Robert Stafford Y (Stafford has some reservations but he'd rather sort those out over time on an evidentiary basis - remember when some people rolled like that?)
Virginia
Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (I) N
William Spong N
Washington
Warren Magnuson Y
Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Y (a broken-clock moment of agreement between The Scoop and the McGoverners)
West Virginia
Jennings Randolph Y (Jennings Randolph is a Big Damn Fan of several McGovern administration initiatives - godspeed at reelection, Jennings...)
Robert Byrd P (profiles in courage)
Wisconsin
William "Bill" Proxmire Y
Gaylord Nelson Y
Wyoming
Gale McGee N (McGee likes the bill but is allowed to vote tactically with the cowboys in hopes of keeping his seat)
Clifford Hansen N
70s liberals:
Sam is reminding people that he's complicated. He voted against Medicare the first time, and hasn't really changed his stripes. But yes it's a wakeup call, and a broader part of this trajectory where it's really kinda important that the McGoverners and the Boll Weevils are at odds with one another. Fortunately on an issue like MECA the Cold War liberals (yer Scoops on the right, yer Humps on the left) are still aboard the SS Rainbow Progressive Awakening for the social programz. Otherwise one could really get stuck. Also it is worth noting both the salience and the importance of reaching out to the Republican liberals on this, of whom there's an unusually high concentration in the Senate.