The Continuing Struggle for a Negative Income Tax: A Review Article

Abstract

After a summer of furious analytic activity, the Office of Economic Opportunity suomitted to President Lyndon Johnson in October 1965 its first National Anti-Poverty Plan that contained a recommendation for a universal negative income tax for all of the poor according to the single criterion of need. So began the major bureaucratic/political struggle within the federal government for Negit, as negative income tax schemes came to be called.' The ensuing decade reached a dramatic climax in the congressional defeats of President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) and of a modified version of FAP referred to as H.R. 1. Even though Congress twice rejected a negative income tax scheme for families with children, it did enact four pieces of legislation that have important components of the original OEO Negit proposal-the Welfare Amendments of 1967, the 1971 amendments to the Food Stamp Act, Supplemental Security Income, and the so-called Long amendment providing a one-year work bonus to low income families.2 And although the recommendation of a full-blown Negit seems a victim of President Ford's efforts to hold down spending and new initiatives this year, it may be only a temporary hiatus in the continuing struggle for basic reform in the American income security structure.