To meet the challenge of “assur[ing] basic economic security for all Americans,” we need to make “cash payments to all members of the population with income needs.” So recommended a presidential commission in its 1969 report, “
Poverty Amid Plenty: The American Paradox.” A family of four, for example, would receive a base income of $2,400 per year ($15,182 in 2013 dollars), with continued support for earnings up to $4,800 per year ($30,365 in 2013 dollars). Commissioners saw this as a “practical program” that could be passed by Congress quickly. (They estimated that the bill for the program would run to $6 billion a year, or $37.9 billion in 2013 dollars, a sum they considered a “relatively low dollar cost.”) In the longer run, they recommended “that benefit levels be raised as rapidly as is practical and possible in the future.”
“Among policy folks, academics, and activists…there was consensus across the political spectrum that [guaranteed annual income] was a pretty good idea.”
— Brian Steensland, Indiana University
As to whether people should be required to work to receive this income, the commission said “no.” Though “any program which provides income without work may have some effect on labor force participation,” such disincentive effects would not be serious, they suggested. Moreover, to the extent that “secondary family workers” or the elderly reduced work effort, such changes “may be desirable.”
In sum, the President’s Commission proposed that the United States adopt a version of a “guaranteed annual income” (GAI) — a method of ensuring economic security and dignity by means of the Federal Government providing money to any individual or family whose income falls below a certain floor, irrespective of whether the circumstance occured because of low wages, unemployment, prolonged illness, or disability. The commission came to this solution after concluding that forces beyond an individual’s control — not “some personal failing” — induced poverty. Thus, “the problem…must be dealt with by the Federal Government.”
The report’s solution may seem radical today, but it was part of a range of proposals in the 1960s and early 1970s that accepted the idea that a GAI would be an appropriate and effective way for the country to meet its obligations to citizens living in poverty. A year and a half earlier, in May 1968, over 1,000 university economists signed a letter supporting a GAI, and a similar proposal had also been floated by a panel of business leaders appointed by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
The commission that made the 1969 proposal wasn’t even the first “President’s Commission” to recommend a GAI: the 1968 report of the “National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder” (the Kerner Commission) beat them to the punch. And the 1969 commission proposal came five months
after the Nixon Administration released its own, smaller-scale GAI proposal. In 1970, President Nixon’s version of a GAI passed the House of Representatives by a margin of 88 votes.
Now come give white daddy a hug Lil' Larry 
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