Word: mcgoverns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whether to propose the negative income tax remained an open question until late August, but the thought of proposing it was finally dropped, a few days before McGovern presented his new tax and welfare reform proposals to New York's Society of Security Analysts. Though the negative income tax was much less generous than the demogrant, it was still a very generous plan. Politically, it possessed most of the same vulnerabilities as the demogrant: it, too, would be hard to explain, it would appear to put many millions "on welfare," and it would be attacked for its cost. The plan...
...ADVICE of politicians and politically-minded aides played a key role in the final decision to drop the negative income tax. From inside the campaign, McGovern was being urged to drop the plan by Van Dyk and Paul Offner, a former aide to Senator Gaylord Nelson who joined the campaign to work on economic issues in mid-August. Offner believes that, until he brought it to their attention, McGovern and Weil had not considered the fact that the plan would put a third of the nation "on welfare", though Weil denies this...
Offner and Van Dyk argued that McGovern should propose jobs for the poor and concentrate on Nixon's mismanagement of the economy. And they persuaded McGovern's liberal Senate friends--Gaylord Nelson, Alan Cranston, and Abraham Ribicoff--to urge him not to propose the Ross plan...
Alvin Schorr, a social work expert who had advised McGovern's Senate Committee on Nutrition, also warned that the proposal would be politically fatal and argued that it was much more feasible to reduce poverty by giving the poor a greater share of Social Security and similar benefits...
...Social Security benefits, and an upgrading of welfare benefits for poor people who are not covered by Social Security and cannot work. Under this upgraded system, a family of four would receive $4000 in cash and food stamps--a gesture of continued commitment to the $4000 minimum implicit in McGovern's $1000 per person proposal...