John Fredrick Parker
Donor
How could the Family Assistance Plan, proposed by President Nixon in August 1969, have passed the Senate (after passing the House as OTL)? What would be the effects? Previous discussion:
Anyway, FAP, for those of you who aren't aware, was Richard Nixon's 1969 proposal for an annual guaranteed income. While passing through the House by over 100 votes in early 1970, it never got through the Senate thanks to an odd coalition of labor unions and entrenched interests in the bureaucracy(FAP would lead to a *bunch* of fired bureaucrats, which was part of what Nixon wanted.), liberals who were offended at the mandatory work requirements put on to placate conservatives(and who just didn't trust Nixon, period), and conservatives offended at the idea of a GAI at all, especially one that would cover the "working poor" like FAP. The Finance Committee was dominated by Dixiecrats-who, as the representatives of poor Southern states, would be most impacted by the change in social order. 52 percent of FAP's recipients would be Southern-and Western Republicans who didn't like welfare at all:
Now, about Family Assistance Plan (FAP), I don't want to overstate the case, but Earned Income Credit (EIC) has some major aspects of that. It's a successful government program in that it both largely does what it sets out to do and is reasonably popular. It gives extra money to working parents with low and modest income. Non-parents can get some money but only about a tenth of what parents (or older siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc) can get. EIC has also been duplicated in some other countries. an interesting example of a social program in which the U.S. has taken the lead.