The rise and fall of guaranteed income
The erosion of mutual obligation
Though each of the various groups and individuals who supported guaranteed annual income (GAI) proposals in the 1960s and 1970s had a different justification for doing so, at the most basic level the proposals were all rooted in a sense that the broader society had a duty to eradicate poverty.
That mindset — shared by both liberals and conservatives — is apparent in President Richard Nixon’s first inaugural speech in 1969. “Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole,” Nixon said. “To go forward at all is to go forward together.”
Advocates of a GAI made frequent appeals to this sense of solidarity and mutual obligation. In 1970, for example, Senator Charles Goodell (R-N.Y.), in proposing a more generous alternative to Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, promised “to fight to ensure that never again will Americans go hungry because their country has refused to treat them as its own.”
“This decade, this year, this session of Congress is the time to decide whether we can in conscience allow children to wear rags in a land of riches,” Goodell said. “This is the time to affirm in action, not recite in rhetoric, that it is indeed our sacred duty to be our brother’s keeper.”
But since the 1970s “there has been an unraveling of obligations in every sphere,” said Daniel Rodgers, a professor of history at Princeton University and the author of ”Age of Fracture,” which chronicles the shifts that occurred in American ideas in the 1970s and 1980s. “That assumption that society has social obligations to its members is basically gone.”
The shift in ideologies can be seen in the stark difference between the rhetoric Nixon used in his inauguration speech and that which Ronald Reagan deployed nearly 20 years later. In a message to Congress titled “A Union of Individuals,” Reagan articulated his vision of the replacement of social responsibility with individual responsibility, “a vision of a free and self-reliant people, taking responsibility for its own welfare and progress through such time-tested means as individual initiative, neighborhood and community cooperation, and local and State self-government.”
“The return of responsibility and authority to the individual American is now leading to a virtual renaissance in America of liberty, productivity, prosperity, and self-esteem,” Reagan asserted.
Rodgers attributed the shift from social to individual obligation, in part, to a broader fragmentation of social identity. Americans, he said, used to feel more rooted in the wider groups and communities to which they belonged than they do today.
“People took great pride in belonging to a larger social group,” he said. Today, however, “people tend more to imagine themselves as social beings by choosing [narrower] groups that look like them and that match their values.”
Jason Murphy, an assistant professor of philosophy at Elms College who has studied the history of GAI proposals, agreed.
“You might hear people say that we have an obligation to take care of every person in society,” Murphy said, “but often when they say ‘everybody’ they have an image in their mind that does not actually include everybody, just them and people that look like them.”
A consequence of that attitude, Murphy went on, is that people who are not poor do not think of those Americans who are as being a group that can make legitimate claims on the broader society.
Rodgers also attributed the devaluing of obligations to the poor to the growing dominance of “market values,” or values based on the ever-more ingrained belief that the market is infallible and will, if left to its own devices, invariably produce the most desirable outcomes.
“When you’ve got this idea of the perfectly free and efficient market, there’s a sense that there should be no reason why somebody who wants to work shouldn’t be able to find a job,” Rodgers said. “There are no other obstacles except for the individual’s desire to work and willingness to get paid the going rate.”
According to that logic, “not having a job or being poor becomes the fault of the individual,” he said. “And once blame gets into the equation and one begins to blame the poor for their poverty, everything about moral obligation tends to unravel.”
Dividing the “deserving” poor from the “undeserving” poor
Michael A. Lewis, an associate professor of social work at Hunter College and an advocate for a GAI, readily acknowledges that the current political and social environment has become much less conducive to the idea of a GAI than what had existed 40 years ago.
One reason, Lewis, said, is that Americans have become increasingly invested in the idea that individuals should be required to work in the labor market in order to receive benefits. “We are more invested than ever in the idea that the able-bodied poor have an obligation to work in order to get anything from us,” Lewis said.
While he pointed out that the obligation to work has long had a prominent place in American values, Lewis also said that the rise of market values added to the feeling that, if an individual was not working in the formal labor market, the circumstance was a result of a personal failing, and that he or she should not be seen as a productive or valuable member of society.
Michael Katz, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania agreed, and as an illustration pointed to the current conservative meme of dividing the population between the “makers” — those who work and pay taxes — from the “takers” — those who receive government benefits. In 2010, Congressman and eventual Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was one of many Republicans who invoked this meme explicitly.
“Right now about 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes,” Ryan said in an interview. “So we’re going to a majority of takers versus makers.”
That kind of rhetoric, Katz said, effectively “represents an elevation of the idea that some people, on account of [their lack of] participation in the labor market, are worth less than other human beings.”
The contrast couldn’t be stronger with the thinking that animated the GAI proposals of the 1960s and 1970s, proposals rooted, in the 1970 words of Senator Fred Harris (D-Okla.), in the belief in “the dignity and value and worth of every human life.”