Word: local
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...national urban policy. The initial draft ("Toward a National Urban Policy") appeared in the fall issue of Public Interest and a second will appear in book form this spring. These ten points quickly collapse into three major recommendations: to relocate slumdwellers, to reorganize the political and fiscal bases of local government, and to encourage more national decision-making in the federal government...
Moynihan's association with the Nixon Administration has caused many people to label him-perhaps unfairly- a conservative. He does accept some key conservative doctrines: the need for economic incentives, the reduction of federalism, and the return to local initiative. He scored the old welfare program for breaking up families. He stands opposed with many Republicans to the provision of services through the federal government. The government, he holds, is good at collecting revenues but bad at distributing services. Direct cash payments to the poor are more effective than what he calls "the monopoly strategy of services," because the government...
...SECOND point of this policy- the reorganization of local government- might even do more to aggravate stolidly Republican suburbia. Moynihan correctly calls urban government "fragmented and obsolescent." The flight of both industry and middle class to the suburbs has eaten away at the urban tax base. This smaller tax base must simultaneously finance more and more government services for the outcast population left behind...
There is little agreement on the best way to restructure local government, and Moynihan vacillates accordingly. The metropolitan sprawl, he recognizes, has made it "difficult to collect power in one place." This leads him at first to espouse annexing the suburbs. Later on, he opts for community control and decentralization. Soon he is also stressing the responsibility of the states, and, in a final dizzy burst, ends up praising the sensibleness of county government. Instead of conserving political energies, Moynihan seems to suggest that reformers pursue all these goals simultaneously...
...addition, the draft process will remain in the hands of local boards-some of which will get much further down the list of birthrates than others...