Nixon later confirmed this report of his attitudes toward social workers when he wrote in his memoirs of how he "abhorred snoopy, patronizing surveillance by social workers which made children and adults on welfare feel stigmatized and separate. The basic premise of the Family Assistance Plan was simple: what the poor need to help them rise out of poverty is money."From "Responding to the New Dependency: The Family Assistance Plan of 1969" by David A. Rochefort, in Critchlow & Hawley, Poverty and Public Policy in Modern America, p.293.
The FAP, however, was woefully deficient (total of $2,000 a year for a family of four in 1970) and would have set a dangerous precedent, requiring recipients to accept jobs below the minimum wage. Leftist dilemma: take the deal and establish the principle that the federal government should provide all families with a basic level of income, but greatly undermining a core pillar of working class security, or reject the deal and risk losing the best and last opportunity for expanding and securing the direct welfare component of the welfare state.
I am more and more inclined to think that policy can be changed, but that principles establish parameters for political mobilization and for policy construction that are much more enduring.
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