A Nixon welfare plan briefly united figures across the political spectrum

Evidence

When it was first proposed, Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan attracted an extraordinarily broad alliance of supporters—embracing the Republican president and moderate conservative Richard Nixon, the neoliberal Milton Friedman, the Democrat Moynihan, the liberals and leftists of the National Welfare Rights Movement, and liberal economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith and James Tobin. There were of course clear differences of opinion among those who supported the plan—Friedman, for example, envisaged a more frugal form of welfare redistribution than that favored by liberals or leftists (in private correspondence, he conceded that he saw the negative income tax as a pragmatic step towards the elimination of all social welfare programs). But with the exception of a few dissident, feminist voices in the National Welfare Rights Movement, all agreed that welfare in its existing form undermined the traditional family. And all converged on the necessity of maintaining some kind of redistributive welfare system. In the 1960s, even Friedman recognized the need for a basic income redistribution program to ameliorate the inevitable market failures of private charity. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 230

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing material on internal varieties of neoliberalism — Friedman’s pragmatic acceptance of redistribution complicates the caricature of him as pure market absolutist. — connects to: Nixon’s welfare reform failed because it satisfied no political constituency — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 233; White suburban antibusing parents weaponized the Silent Majority trope against Nixon — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 72; Nixon abandoned welfare reform due to inflation and political calculation, not policy objections — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 234
• SEED: Angle: the pre-1970s window when even Friedman endorsed basic income redistribution overturns the notion that universal basic income is inherently left-wing.

Broader Connections

• Nixon’s welfare reform failed because it satisfied no political constituency #complicates (0.90) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 233
• White suburban antibusing parents weaponized the Silent Majority trope against Nixon #complicates (0.80) — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 72