Nixon abandoned welfare reform while expanding Social Security when inflation soured his consensus strategy.

Evidence

What defeated the plan, however, was not so much these specific objections as Nixon’s own decision to abandon the politics of consensus on welfare in a context of rising inflation. … By his second year in government, the economic outlook had soured and Nixon was less convinced that this strategy would work. Instead, he decided, behind closed doors, to abandon any attempt to reform AFDC while simultaneously overseeing some of the most generous expansions to Social Security in the program’s history. Social Security was (and still is) one of the New Deal’s less contentious social insurance programs precisely because it remains relatively untouched by the normative issues of race, gender, and family formation that intersect in programs such as AFDC. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 234

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s focus on internal varieties of neoliberalism — Friedman’s support of Nixon’s FAP shows market-conservatives backing a basic income style scheme, complicating the caricature. — connects to: 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; Nixon’s welfare reform failed because it satisfied no political constituency — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 233
• SHARE: A specific person interested in welfare politics or basic income history would enjoy the fact that Nixon’s FAP failed because Social Security expansion was the politically safer route.