States and metropolitan areas are finding it necessary to grapple with super-sized challenges on their own. Ensuring a living wage. Educating our future workforce. Designing, financing and delivering 21 st century infrastructure. Managing the challenges of an aging and diversifying society. In essence, the withdrawal of the national government as a reliable partner has led to a burst of innovation at the sub-national scale. Federalism is being reinvented without the guiding hand or intentional participation of the federal government.
But not everyone was pleased with the findings. Martin Anderson , a Nixon adviser and great admirer of libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand , vehemently opposed the plan, fearing a future where money was considered a basic right. The concept of a basic income ran counter to everything he and his idol believed in: the smallest possible government with the greatest possible individual responsibility. On the same day that Nixon intended to go public with his plan, Anderson handed him a briefing.
The president was stunned. He changed tack and settled on a new rhetoric. He deplored the rise of big government while promoting a plan that would distribute cash assistance to some thirteen million more Americans. Instead, in line with his admiration for British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Randolph Churchill the father of Winston , Nixon steeped his progressive ideas in conservative rhetoric.
To mollify Republicans and manage concerns over the Speenhamland precedent the president attached an amendment to his bill: unemployed beneficiaries would have to register with the Department of Labor. Nobody in the White House expected this stipulation would have much effect. The conservative president who dreamed of going down in history as a progressive leader forfeited a unique opportunity to overthrow a stereotype rooted back in nineteenth-century England: the myth of the lazy poor.
To dispel this stereotype, we have to ask a simple historical question: what was the real deal with Speenhamland? The French Revolution had been sending shock waves across Europe for six years. Social discontent had reached a boiling point in England, too.
Only two years earlier a young general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed the English at the Siege of Toulon. Grain prices continued to rise, and the threat of revolution loomed ever closer to British shores.
The magistrates of Speenhamland, a district in southern England, realized that repression and propaganda would no longer stem the tide of discontent. They fixed the rate to the price of bread and paid out per family member.
This was not the first European program of public relief, not even the first in England. The local government supplemented their wages up to an agreed minimum. The Speenhamland system was unique in that it put an end to the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, just as Nixon would aspire to do years later. From then on, needy was just plain needy, and everybody in need had a right to relief. The system quickly caught on across the south of England.
To all appearances, it was a great success; hunger and hardship decreased and, more importantly, revolt was nipped in the bud. Conclusion: population growth will always exceed food production. According to pious Malthus, only sexual abstinence could prevent the four horsemen of the apocalypse from descending to spread war, famine, disease, and death.
But the Speenhamland system apparently encouraged people to marry as fast and procreate as prolifically as possible. Malthus was convinced England was teetering on the brink of a disaster as terrible as the Black Death, which wiped out half the population between and Economist David Ricardo a close friend of Malthus was equally skeptical.
He believed basic income would create a poverty trap: the poor would work less, causing food production to fall, fanning the flames of a French-style revolution. The feared uprising broke out in the summer of The authorities arrested, incarcerated, and deported two thousand rioters. Others were sentenced to death. In London, government officials realized something had to be done. A national inquiry was launched into agricultural working conditions, rural poverty, and the Speenhamland system itself.
It was the largest government survey to date, with investigators conducting hundreds of interviews and collecting reams of data that were ultimately compiled in a thirteen-thousand-page report. But the bottom line could be summed up in a single sentence: Speenhamland had been a disaster. The investigators blamed basic income for a population explosion, for wage reductions, for increased immoral conduct — effectively, for the utter deterioration of the English working class.
Widely circulated and endorsed, the Royal Commission Report became an authoritative source in the emerging social sciences, marking the first time a government had systematically gathered data to make a complex policy decision. Employers used poor relief, he said, to depress wages by putting the responsibility for the reproduction of labor on local government.
Like his friend Friedrich Engels, Marx saw the poor laws as a relic of a feudal past. Releasing the proletariat from the shackles of poverty required a revolution, not a basic income. Mothers who are struggling in poverty also need support to raise healthy children. The President has proposed an historic investment in providing home visits to low-income, first-time parents by trained professionals.
The President and First Lady are also committed to ensuring that children have nutritious meals to eat at home and at school, so that they grow up healthy and strong. Progress The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included broad investments to alleviate the poverty made worse by economic crisis.
These changes will reduce the marriage penalty and provide a larger credit for families with three or more children. Guiding Principles President Obama has been a lifelong advocate for the poor. Expand Opportunity Too many Americans live without hope for a better future or access to good, family-supporting jobs. Stem the Tide The economic crisis has hit low-income American families particularly hard.
0コメント