Nixon Favours Cash For Poor

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31993, 21 May 1969, Page 15

Nixon Favours Cash For Poor

(By FRANK OLIVER, N.Z.P.A. special correspondent) WASHINGTON. President Nixon has sent his Health, Education and Welfare Secretary, Mr Robert Finch, to Congress to lay out preliminary plans for dealing with the needs of the poor and the hungry.

A little while ago a high Nixon official accused some Democratic members of Congress, notably Senator George McGovern, of “playing politics” with hunger, to which the Senator promptly replied that hunger knew no politics. Senator McGovern and his nutrition sub-committee had been investigating poverty in various parts of the country and, naturally, the television cameras had gone along too. Now’ to most people’s surprise the Nixon welfare plans have been aired and they seem to be moving steadily and inexorably towards that bete noire of the conservative —the guaranteed annual income, or negative income tax or whatever one wants to call it.

The President has urged that the present food stamp plan be carried on for the time being. But he favours, in the not distant future, cash for the poor to buy what is needed to keep body and soul together. Mr Finch said that over the long run "a more basic answer to the problem of malnutrition, as with other problems associated with poverty, must be found in reform of our public assistance and employment programmes !. . . cash income, not a succession of payments in kind, (best preserves the dignity and ‘freedom of choice of the in-

dividual to meet his own needs through the workings of the private market.” Had a Democratic Administration breathed words such as this the cry of State socialism would have been certain. To most observers it looks like a very short step from the Finch position to the guaranteed income.

The problem is now out in the open. As one noted newspaper said not long ago, official Washington had long resisted making the admission that affluent America had a serious hunger problem even when newspapers headlined it, television cameras filmed it, doctors diagnosed it and when Robert Kennedy made it an issue in his primary campaign which ended in his death.

There was even one Senator who admitted he knew of hunger conditions in his own state and had helped to cover up the facts. Almost every state in the union was reluctant to admit that hunger and malnutrition existed within its borders. Not today. The issue is big and it is explosive and it has got to be dealt with. As of now the United States Government helps some six million poverty - stricken Americans to subsist with free surplus food allotments and by issuing food stamps which are redeemable in food worth much more than the price on the stamps. But recent studies indicate that there are the working poor and the invisible poor and that there may be as many as 10 million people suffering from malnutrition, including Negroes in rural areas, Indians, Mexican-Americans and migratory farm workers. “The hunger and the bur-! den of the poor can no longer 1

be ignored,” said a South Carolina senator recently and was promptly accused of hurting his state’s “image” by his “worm hunt.” He had, however, seen scurvy, rickets, pellagra and near starvation and he said so. In State after State similar conditions have been found in the rural areas. In the cities the situation is often very bad. Take, for example, New York City. In one month at the beginning of this year 50,000 people were added to the welfare rolls. This was before the recent Supreme Court decision that a poor person did not have to establish 12 months residence to become eligible for welfare payments. This was unusually high but nonetheless the New York welfare rolls are increasing by about a quarter of a million people a year.

This crushing burden is one of the main reasons why all large cities in the United

States are poverty stricken and unable to clear one slum area before another falls into the same state of decay. The Congress and the previous Administration were slow to act in what many saw as a developing crisis. Mr Johnson’s Secretary of Agriculture always insisted he had only limited authority to issue free food and food stamps. When the amount of scurvy, rickets and pellagra was uncovered in South Carolina Mr Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture immediately set in motion a pilot programme in two counties, issuing food stamps free to the neediest poor and distributing surplus foods.

Congress was just as reluctant to help as had been the Johnson Administration. Senator McGovern asked for a paltry quarter of a million dollars to investigate poverty. The Rules Committee promptly chopped it to $lOO,OOO without explanation. The Senator decided to fight the Rules Committee, something that is not done. He put such a devastating picture of poverty before the committee it reversed its decision—the first time it has done so.

Now comes a supposedly conservative Administration with a scheme to pay out actual cash so that the hungry may be fed and scurvy eliminated.

Mr Nixon plans to increase spending on all food aid programmes by SIOOOm a year so that the spending rate by the end of 1971 will be $2500m. It has staggered a lot of people on Capitol Hill. Mr Finch told Congress cash assistance was the most flexible and useful form of aid for the poor. If a needy person could not be trained or could not work, he said, "he

must have available an income maintenance programme which provides for his basic necessities in a way most unencumbered by administrative red tape and cen. tralised judgments about human needs.” The plans for expansion of aid to the needy will put emphasis on improved nutrition in child and mental health programmes, further increases in free or reducedprice school lunches, greater distribution of enriched supplemental food packages and new efforts to instruct welfare recipients in food buying and menu-planning.