Building Workfare: WIN II, SSI, and EITC

      Senator Russell Long had headed home to Louisiana victorious when Congress adjourned in December 1967. He had regaled a crowd in Shreveport with the story of how his eleventh-hour maneuver on the Senate floor had foiled a filibuster planned by liberal Democrats, securing passage of the WIN amendments authored by his fellow Southerner Wilbur Mills and sealing the fate of the welfare measure proposed by President Johnson and Senate liberals. “That group of young turks,” he concluded, “has a lot to learn” about how to run a filibuster.¹ Four years later, he was back before crowds in his home state to celebrate an even greater victory in blocking another president’s liberal welfare reform proposal. This time it was Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP). Hand-scrawled in the margins of Long’s March 1971 speech was his conclusion: “Last year FAP failed. Finance Committee and I as the chairman in particular was blamed…. Good thing.”² Long would later call the defeat of FAP the crowning achievement of his legislative career.

      With FAP’s collapse, the campaign by conservative Southern Democrats against liberal welfare reform measures seemed to draw to a close. As it turned out, they were just getting warmed up. In the early 1970s, emboldened by their victories on WIN and FAP, Southern Democratic leaders in Congress shifted from a strategy of blocking liberal reform initiatives to crafting their own model of federal income assistance. They quietly spearheaded three legislative initiatives in quick succession that changed the landscape of public assistance: the Talmadge Work Incentive amendments (WIN II) were approved in 1971, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) passed in 1972, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) became law in 1975. Though not conceived or executed as a coordinated conservative assault on the New Deal system, the piecemeal reforms fundamentally altered much of the existing structure of public assistance. Their combined impact was to steer the ends and means of federal income assistance toward the principle of rewarding and enforcing work.

      The three reforms are often overlooked in accounts of welfare policy change, or treated as distinct, unrelated developments. Many accounts move quickly from the (largely expansionary) 1960s to the (largely contractionary) 1980s. The 1970s were, in the words of one historian, years of “stalemate” in poverty politics, sandwiched between the liberal and conservative welfare state projects.³ The Talmadge amendments are often raised only in passing, as a tightening of the original 1967 WIN work requirements. SSI is typically tacked onto the social welfare expansions of the Great Society period, mentioned as a consolation prize after the disintegration of FAP, or treated as a mere administrative change. And despite increasing recognition of the EITC’s importance as an antipoverty measure, the politics of its passage are rarely incorporated into the larger story of welfare policy.⁴

      Far from years of stalemate, the early 1970s saw a distinct phase of welfare state development led by antiwelfare Southerners, one that disrupts the neat demarcations between expansion and contraction, and between the respective roles of liberal Democratic welfare state “builders” and conservative Republican “retrenchers.” It marked a conservative turn, but it was not an episode of retrenchment: it was a period of welfare-state building, and, in fact, it produced an expansion of programs for the elderly, disabled, and working poor. Far from a series of minor and unrelated initiatives, moreover, the three 1970s initiatives recast public assistance policies—to require work from those on AFDC, to reward work among low-wage workers, and to exempt from work only those too old or ill to earn wages.

      Three conclusions emerge from a close study of the legislative and political history. First, the initiatives reflected a political response by Southern congressional Democrats to Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which threatened to expand the welfarist model of public assistance. As this chapter will show, FAP triggered a counterreaction by Southern Democratic lawmakers, and these programs were its leading edge. To create the three programs, Southern Democrats moved to “hive off” favored elements of the Nixon FAP proposal, modify them as necessary, and secure passage through independent legislative vehicles. This had the immediate political effect of undercutting moderate and conservative support for FAP, carefully cultivated by the administration on the basis of precisely these provisions.

      Second, although Southern Democratic leaders had many reasons to oppose the Republican administration’s plan, their statements and strategies reveal that a core concern was the challenge FAP posed to social, political, and economic arrangements in the South. Key Southern leaders were convinced that Nixon’s proposal threatened to destabilize local low-wage labor markets: by directing federal cash assistance to current and potential workers, FAP would provide those workers with an alternative means of livelihood and the ability to refuse low-wage jobs or reduce work hours. Each of their three favored legislative alternatives, in contrast, promised to leave labor market relations largely intact by ensuring that the able-bodied poor were compelled to enter the workforce and by subsidizing—rather than disrupting—low-wage labor markets. The initiatives were in this sense profoundly conservative, even though they marked expansions, and they protected traditional Southern economic and political interests.

      Third, these initiatives, taken together, reoriented the purposes of federally supported income assistance. The struggle over public assistance has long been a debate over whether and how to aid three categories of poor Americans: (a) those who are poor because they cannot work, (b) those who are poor because they will not work, and (c) those who are poor even though they are working.⁵ The New Deal framework sought to direct assistance to the first category and to withhold aid from the second category; those in the third category (working but poor) received no public assistance, though they benefited from other New Deal legislation.⁶ FAP proposed to erase these distinctions by installing an income floor under all poor families. The Southern conservative counterreaction assertively redrew its own distinctions. The piecemeal reforms introduced by leading Southern legislators—such as Senate Finance Committee chair Russell Long (D-La.), House Ways and Means Committee chair Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.), and Senator Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.)—created a new public assistance model. It provided aid to a much smaller population judged to be physically unable to work, through SSI; imposed work requirements on those judged able but unwilling to work, through WIN II; and offered a new entitlement to those who were poor even though they were working, through the EITC. This established the foundation of the workfare approach. By the mid-1970s, programs for the poor had been expanded, but in ways that accorded new priority to the criteria and imperative of work.⁷ This chapter opens with an analysis of the role of Southern politics in the rise of work-fare, then examines the political developments leading to the creation of the three programs in the 1970s.

       The Fight to Control Welfare in the South

      Why would conservative Southern lawmakers, who were generally opposed to both a large federal role in public assistance and the creation of new programs for the poor, spearhead an expansion of the federal welfare state? Southern leaders’ motives and interests in public assistance policy were neither uniform nor unchanging.⁸ Their role in building a new workfare regime is best understood in the context of relief’s place in the region’s social and economic order, and of Southern leaders’ reaction to FAP.

      From the 1930s through the 1960s, Southern political leaders were largely successful in defending the prerogatives of state authority in public assistance programs. But by the late 1960s, Southerners were beginning to lose many of their