We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2022
Recent years have witnessed a marked revival of guaranteed-income proposals. Among these, Milton Friedman's negative income tax is one of the most successful ideas to establish a universal floor of income for every citizen. Elaborated in the early 1940s, it attracted widespread attention among economists and policy makers in the aftermath of Johnson's War on Poverty. This contribution will, however, focus on the intellectual setting under which Friedman envisioned a new way to think about poverty. Tracing back the origin of the proposal in the context of the New Deal, this article shows how Friedman hollowed out redistributive considerations from the hierarchies of needs, notions of duty, or citizenship that were common in the British welfarist conception and preexisting notions of equality where the state played a key role by replacing it with a monetary and market-friendly conception of poverty.
1 On anti-Semitism in American academia in the 1930s see Friedman, Milton and Friedman, Rose, Two Lucky people (Chicago, 1998), 58Google Scholar; Stigler, George J., Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (Chicago, 1988), 31Google Scholar; Arrow, Kenneth, On Ethics and Economics (London, 2017), 29Google Scholar; Weintraub, E. Roy, “Keynesian Historiography and the Anti-Semitism Question,” History of Political Economy 44/1 (2012), 41–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Details of the “Milton Friedman affair” can be found in Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 95–102.
3 Ibid., 64.
4 Ebenstein, Lanny, Milton Friedman: A Biography (New York, 2017), 34Google Scholar. On Friedman's relationship to the New Deal see Edward Nelson, “Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972,” vol.1, manuscript (2018), 65; and Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 58–61.
5 Ebenstein, Milton Friedman, 35.
6 On Friedman's role in the implementation of withholding tax at source see Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, pp. 120–123.
7 On these formative years see, in particular, Beatrice Cherrier, “The Lucky Consistency of Milton Friedman's Science and Politics, 1933–1963,” in Robert van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas A. Stapleford, eds., Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America's Most Powerful Economics Program (Cambridge, 2011), 335–67, at 338; Burgin, Angus, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, 2012), 152–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Milton Friedman interview with Eduardo Suplicy, “News on the Basic Income Guarantee,” June 2000, at https://usbig.net/newsletters/june.html.
9 For citizens whose income rose and fell from one year to the next, the taxation system was making them pay more taxes than those receiving the same amount but whose income was steady. This problem was particularly acute for low-income workers, constantly moving from a zero tax bracket to another. In order to compensate this inequality of treatment, Friedman first conceived a restrictive version of his “negative income tax” so that in a bad year the taxpayer would receive money from rather than pay it to the Treasury. See letter to Mr Melvin Rosen, 4 March 1969, Negative Income Tax 1965–1992, Milton Friedman papers, Hoover Institution, Box 201, File 201.9. Friedman would later explain that he first came up with the idea at the Treasury Department in a 1996 letter to Dennis J. Ventry, where he confirmed that “negative income taxes were probably discussed at the treasury in 1941 to 1943 when I was a member of the Tax Research staff.” Milton Friedman, letter to Dennis Ventry Jr, 3 Dec. 1996, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 201, File 201.7, Negative Income Tax 1966–2004.The episode was, moreover, reported in Christopher Green, Negative Taxes and the Poverty (Washington, DC, 1967), 57; Robert J. Lampman, “The Decision to Undertake the New Jersey Experiment,” in David Kershaw and Jerilyn Fair, eds., The New Jersey Income-Maintenance Experiment, vol. 1 (New York, 1977), xiii.
10 Friedman mentions discussing the proposal with Vickrey in a letter to Christopher Green: “I suspect we must have talked about it at that time but when I checked up on it, I found no reference to it.” Milton Friedman, letter to Christopher Green, 20 Jan. 1966, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 201, File 201.6, 7, Negative Income Tax 1966–1980.
11 Milton Friedman, letter to Mr Melvin Rosen, 4 March 1969. Friedman will discuss his NIT as a more general tool for social policy at the first Mont Pèlerin conference in April 1947 and then, a few months later, in draft of his paper about “A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability,” where he mentions “transfer payments” in the form of “negative revenues.” See “Taxation, Poverty and Income Distribution. Tuesday April 8th, 8.30 p.m.,” Mont Pèlerin Society Records, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, 5.12 Meeting File, 1947; Friedman, “A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability,” typescript, 18 April 1947, Box 38, File 38.9, Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution.
12 Milton Friedman, letter to Christopher Green, 20 Jan. 1966, Box 201, File 201.6, 7, Negative Income Tax 1966–1980.
13 Friedman mentions Douglas, Pigou, and Bellamy's ideas in Milton Friedman, “Lecture Notes at the University of Wisconsin,” Oct. 1940, Box 75, File 5, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution; Milton Friedman, letter to Christopher Green, 20 Jan. 1966. More generally for contrasting views on the genealogy of basic income see Parijs, Philippe VAN and Vanderborght, Yannick, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society (Cambridge, MA, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora, “Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 April 2020; Sloman, Peter, Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2019), 63–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Milton Friedman, letter to Christopher Green, 20 Jan. 1966.
15 See, in particular, Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part I,” Review of Economic Studies 4/1 (1936), 53–71; Lerner, Abba P., The Economics of Control (New York, 1946), 267–8Google Scholar.
16 Arrow, On Ethics and Economics, n. 195. Later, both Stigler and Friedman published accounts of The Economics of Control. See Stigler, George J., “Reviewed Work: The Economics of Control: Principles of Welfare,” Political Science Quarterly 60/1 (1945), 113–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedman, Milton, “Lerner on the Economics of Control,” Journal of Political Economy 55/5 (1947), 405–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Milner, Mabel E. and Milner, Dennis, Scheme for a State Bonus: A Rational Method of Solving the Social Problem (Darlington, 1918), 7Google Scholar.
18 Friedman, letter to Martin Bronfenbrenner, 30 March 1964, Box 21, File 21.35, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution.
19 Peter Sloman, “‘Beveridge's Rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the Campaign for Basic Income, 1942 1955,” Contemporary British History 30/2 (2016), 203–23; Juliet Rhys Williams, Something to Look Forward To: A Suggestion for a New Social Contract (London, 1943), 167.
20 Milton Friedman, “An Objective Method of Determining a ‘Minimum Standard of Living’,” 1939, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 37, File 37.8.
21 The statement was circulated in May 1968 to 275 universities and research organizations. It received signatures from, inter alia, Paul Samuelson, Harold Watts, James Tobin, John K. Galbraith, and Robert Lampman, but also Abba P. Lerner, Kenneth Arrow, T. C. Koopmans, and Joseph Stiglitz. See “A Statement by Economists on Income Guarantees and Supplements, 27 May 1968 in: Income Maintenance Programs,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Fiscal Policy of the Joint Economic Committee Congress of the Unites States. Ninetieth Congress, vol. 2, Appendix Materials, Appendix 17 (1968), 676–90, at 676.
22 See Moynihan, Daniel P., The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Ventry, Dennis J., “The Negative Income Tax: An Intellectual History,” Tax Notes 27 (1997), 491–501Google Scholar; O'Connor, Alice, Poverty Knowledge (Princeton, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huret, Romain D., The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America (Ithaca, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lenkowsky, Leslie, Politics, Economics, and Welfare Reform: Failure of Negative Income Tax in Britain and the United States (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Steensland, Brian, The Failed Welfare Revolution (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar; Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 See in particular Amadae, Sonia M., Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar; Beatrice Cherrier and Jean-Baptiste Fleury, “Economists’ Interest in Collective Decision after World War II: A History,” Public Choice 172/1–2 (2017), 23–44.
24 For Friedman see in particular Cherrier, “The Lucky Consistency of Milton Friedman's Science and Politics”; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, 2012); Timothy Shenk, “Inventing American Economy” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2016); Olsen, Niklas, The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism (Cham, 2018)Google Scholar; Edward Nelson, Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972, 2 vols. (Chicago, 2020).
25 See especially Marshall, Alfred, The Principles of Economics (London, 1890)Google Scholar; and Pigou, A. C., The Economics of Welfare (London, 1920)Google Scholar.
26 Bentham, Jeremy, A Fragment on Government or, A Comment on the Commentaries (London, 1823)Google Scholar.
27 See Ravallion, Martin, The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy (Oxford, 2016), 55–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 74–5.
28 David Grewal, “Utility and Interpersonal Comparability: Skepticism about ‘Other Minds’ in Neoclassical Economics,” unpublished paper, 3.
29 Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 89.
30 Robert Cooter and Peter Rappoport, “Were the Ordinalists Wrong about Welfare Economics?”, Journal of Economic Literature 22/2 (1984), 507–30.
31 Ibid., 519.
32 Pigou, The Economics of Welfare, 17.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 756.
35 For a detailed account of the debates about welfare economics in that period see Antoinette Baujard, “Welfare Economics,” GATE Working Paper 1333 (2013), at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2357412.
36 Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London, 1932).
37 Lionel Robbins, “Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility: A Comment,” Economic Journal 48/192 (1938), 635–41, at 636.
38 Robbins, An Essay, 140.
39 See Grewal, “Utility and Interpersonal Comparability.”
40 Olsen, The Sovereign Consumer, 128–9.
41 Susan Howson, Lionel Robbins (Cambridge, 2011), 215.
42 Robbins, An Essay, 151.
43 Roger E. Backhouse, “The Origins of the New Welfare Economics,” unpublished paper (2016).
44 See in particular Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, “The Normative Problem of Merit Goods in Perspective,” Forum for Social Economics 48/3 (2019), 219–47.
45 Notes on Friedman's lecture, 5 Oct. 1939, 2, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 75, File 75.12.
46 Milton Friedman, “Lerner on The Economics of Control,” early draft, Box 33, File 33.36 (probably drafted in 1946). The piece would later be published in a substantially shorter version in 1947 in the Journal of Political Economy.
47 For a good summary of Lerner's argument and ensuing debates see Paul A. Samuelson, “A. P. Lerner at Sixty,” Review of Economic Studies 31/3 (1964), 172–6.
48 Milton Friedman, “Notes on the ‘The Optimum Division of Income’,” Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 161, File 161.2, 22–3.
49 Friedman, “Lerner on the Economics of Control,” Box 33, File 33.36.
50 Milton Friedman, “What All Is Utility?”, Economic Journal 65/259 (1955), 405–9, at 407.
51 Ibid., 409.
52 Milton Friedman, letter to Earl E. Rolph and George F. Break, 8 April 1952, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 32, File 33.10.
53 Thanks to Peter Sloman for indicating to me the existence of this presentation. See “Taxation, Poverty and Income Distribution. Tuesday April 8th, 8.30 p.m.”
54 Milton Friedman, letter to Robert de Fremery, 18 Dec. 1947, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 25, File 25.15.
55 Olsen, The Sovereign Consumer, 128–9.
56 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London, 2005), 67.
57 Milton Friedman, “An Objective Method of Determining a ‘Minimum Standard of Living’” (1939), Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 37, File 37.8, 5. I want to thank especially Jennifer Burns for indicating to me the existence of this document and inciting me to explore the archives at the Hoover Institution.
58 See, for example, Milton Friedman, “The Regression Analysis of Family Expenditure Data,” typed manuscript of the conference presented at the meetings of the American Statistical Association, Atlantic City, Dec. 1937, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 109, File 109.7.
59 See in particular Thomas A. Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000 (Cambridge, 2009).
60 While at first they decided that it was not the case, after analyzing French diets they changed their mind. See Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 62.
61 Friedman, “An Objective Method of Determining a ‘Minimum Standard of Living’.”
62 Milton Friedman, “The Case for the Negative Income Tax: A View from the Right,” Proceedings of the National Symposium on Guaranteed Income, 1966, 111–20, at 114.
63 Friedman, “The Case for the Negative Income Tax: A View from the Right,” 111.
64 Annelien de Dijn, Freedom: An Unruly History (Boston, MA, 2020), 345.
65 Cherrier, “The Lucky Consistency of Milton Friedman's Science and Politics,” 359.
66 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962), 15.
67 Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, 1980), 66.
68 See in particular Reuel Schiller, “The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation: Economic Deregulation and the American Left,” Business History Review 93 (2019), 729–53, at 739.
69 Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York, 1969), 144, 147.
70 Friedman, “The Case for the Negative Income Tax: A View from the Right,” 115.
71 Robert Lampman, “Nixon's Choices on Cash for the Poor,” Notes and Comments, May 1969, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Lampman archives.
72 T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950), 9.
73 Ibid., 47.
74 Richard H. Tawney, Equality (1931) (London, 1952), 130–31.
75 William H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society (London, 1944), 186.
76 On discussions about needs and planning see in particular Kate Soper, On Human Needs: Open and Closed Theories in a Marxist Perspective (New Jersey, 1981), 203–19.
77 Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York, 1981), 51.
78 John K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York, 1958), 280.
79 Ibid., 189.
80 Ibid., 392.
81 O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 145.
82 Edward D. Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen (Lawrence, 1995), 110.
83 See Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York, 2012), 540; Huret, La fin de la pauvreté? Les experts sociaux en guerre contre la pauvreté aux Etats-Unis (1945–1974) (Paris, 2004), 109, 119.
84 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” 8 Jan. 1964.
85 On the socialist calculation debate and collective decision making see Peter Boettke, ed., Socialism and the Market: The Socialist Calculation Debate Revisited (London, 2000).
86 Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35/4 (1945), 519–30.
87 Ibid., 519.
88 Milton Friedman, letter to Martin Bronfenbrenner, 18 July 1947, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 21, File 21.35.
89 Milton Friedman, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” Farmand, 1951, 89–93, at 90.
90 “Taxation, Poverty and Income Distribution. Tuesday April 8th, 8.30 p.m.”.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Milton Friedman correspondence with John V. van Sickle, “Agenda for the Conference of Fifteen,” 9 Dec. 1954, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 34, File 34.29.
94 Friedman, “The Distribution of Income and the Welfare.”
95 Milton Friedman, letter to Don Patinkin, 8 Nov. 1948, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 31, File 31.24.
96 Milton Friedman, “The Distribution of Income and the Welfare Activities of Government,” lecture, Wabash College, 20 June 1956, 7, at https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/215144/full.
97 Milton Friedman, letter to Robert de Fremery, 18 Dec. 1947, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution, Box 25, File 25.15.
98 See in particular Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler, Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem (Irvington-on-Hudson), 1946.
99 Milton Friedman, letter to Martin Bronfenbrenner, 18 July 1947.
100 Friedman, “The Distribution of Income and the Welfare Activities of Government.”
101 Peter Sloman, Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2019), 48.
102 James Meade, Planning and the Price Mechanism (London, 1948).
103 James Meade, “Poverty in the Welfare State,” Oxford Economic Papers 24/3 (1972), 289–326, at 303.
104 Abba P. Lerner, “Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman,” American Economic Review 53/3 (1963), 459.
105 Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics (Oxford, 2017).
106 Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government. From the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), 272.
107 James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II, Americans, and the Age of Big Government (Oxford, 2011), 123.
108 Ventry, “The Negative Income Tax: An Intellectual History,” 2.
109 Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 146.
110 See Huret, La fin de la pauvreté?, 109; materials available for distribution by the Division of Tax Research, US Treasury Department, 1 Jan. 1946, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institute, Tax Division, Box 101, File 101.12.
111 George Stigler is therefore the first writer to mention an NIT proposal in a published piece. George J. Stigler, “The Economics of Minimum Wage Legislation,” American Economic Review 36/3 (1946), 358–65; Walter Heller, New Dimensions of Political Economy (Cambridge, 1966), 115.
112 William D. Grampp and Emanuel T. Weiler, Economic Policy: Readings in Political Economy (Homewood, IL, 1953), 284–92; H. S. Booker, “Lady Rhys Williams’ Proposal for the Amalgation of Direct Taxation with Social Insurance,” Economic Journal 56/222 (1946), 230–43; Richard Musgrave, The Theory of Public Finance: A Study in Public Economy (New York, 1959); Earl Rolph and George Break, Public Finance (New York, 1961), 404; James Buchanan, The Public Finances: An Introductory Textbook (Homewood, IL, 1965), 157–8.
113 Robert Rudolph Schutz, “Transfer Payments and Income Inequality” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1952).
114 Ibid., 11.
115 Moynihan, The Politics of Guaranteed Income, 81–6.
116 Robert Lampman, “The Effectiveness of Some Institutions in Changing the Distribution of Income,” American Economic Review 47/2 (1957), 519–28.
117 Robert Lampman, “One-Fifth of a Nation,” Challenge 12/7 (1964), 11–13, at 11.
118 Robert Lampman, “Recent Changes in Income Inequality Reconsidered,” American Economic Review 44/3 (1954), 251–68.
119 Robert Lampman, “The Low-Income Population and Economic Growth,” US Congress, Joint Economic Committee Study Paper 12, 1959.
120 Michael Harrington, “Our Fifty Million Poor,” Commentary 28/1 (1959), 25–7.
121 Huret, La fin de la pauvreté?, 82.
122 Ibid., 89.
123 Dwight McDonald, “The Invisible Poor,” New Yorker, 19 Jan. 1963, 130–39.
124 Carl M. Brauer, “Kennedy, Johnson, and the War on Poverty,” Journal of American History 69/1 (1982), 98–119.
125 Michael Harrington, The Other America (Baltimore, 1962), 18.
126 Ibid., 168.
127 Harrington, “Our Fifty Million Poor,” 19.
128 Steven B. Wolinetz, “Friedman, Harrington and Poverty,” Cornell Daily Sun, 16 Dec. 1964, 4.
129 Harrington, The Other America, 168–9.
130 Lenkowsky, Politics, Economics, and Welfare Reform, 52.
131 About the different interpretations and debates on this “fiscal turn” within Keynesianism see James Hillyer, “The Fiscal Revolution in America: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of Policy History 30/3 (2018), 490–521.
132 The term was first coined by Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes (New York, 1966), 287.
133 Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security, 292.
134 Jacqueline Best, “Hollowing Out Keynesian Norms: How the Search for a Technical Fix Undermined the Bretton Woods Regime,” Review of International Studies 30/3 (2004), 383–404, at 386.
135 Lemann, Nicholas, The Promised Land (New York), 118Google Scholar.
136 Appelbaum, Binyamin, The Economists’ Hour, ebook edn (New York, 2019)Google Scholar.
137 Walter W. Heller, “Brief Book on Economic Matters,” 20 Dec. 1962, 3, folder identifier JFKPOF-063a-009-p014, at www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKPOF/063a/JFKPOF-063a-009.
138 Ibid., 4.
139 Martin, Cathie J., Shifting the Burden: The Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (Chicago, 1991), 52Google Scholar.
140 Quoted in Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 183.
141 Walter Heller, letter to Milton Friedman, 28 March 1961, Milton Friedman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Box 28, File 28.5.
142 Best, “Hollowing out Keynesian Norms,” 394.
143 Wehrle, Edmund F., “Guns, Butter, Leon Keyserling, the AFL-CIO and the Fate of Full Employment Economics,” Faculty Research & Creative Activity 18 (2004), 730–48Google Scholar, at 738.
144 Stein, Herbert, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Washington, DC, 1990), 381–2Google Scholar.
145 Milton Friedman, “Letter: Friedman & Keynes,” Time, 4 Feb. 1966, 13.
146 Major, Aaron, Architects of Austerity (Stanford, 2014), 131Google Scholar.
147 Lemann, The Promised Land, 149.
148 “Assuring Decent Living Standard,” Newark Evening, 1 May 1967.
149 Between 1967 and 1978, five experiments were held in US and Canadian cities. There was the New Jersey Graduated Work Incentive Experiment (1968–72), the Rural Income Maintenance Experiment (1970–72), the Seattle/Denver Income Maintenance Experiments (1970–76), the Gary Indiana Experiment (1971–4), and the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (1975–8). For a detailed account of those experiments see David Kershaw and Jerilyn Fair, The New Jersey Income-Maintenance Experiment, vol. 1 (New York, 1976); Widerquist, Karl, “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can We Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?”, Journal of Socio-economics 34/1 (2005), 49–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
150 Lemann, The Promised Land, 212.
151 Ibid.
152 Ibid., 210.
153 Kemp, Arthur, “Welfare without the Welfare State,” Il Politico 31/4 (1966), 716–30Google Scholar; Brozen, Yale, “Welfare without the Welfare State,” The Freemen 16/2 (1966), 40–52Google Scholar.
154 Kemp, “Welfare without the Welfare State,” 729.
155 Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution, 176–7.
156 On his support and then opposition see Milton Friedman, “Testimony on Family Assistance Plan to Ways and Means Committee,” US House of Representatives, 7 Nov. 1969, George Stigler Papers, The University of Chicago Library; Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 382.
157 The proposal was essentially shaped by James Tobin, who had become MacGovern's economic adviser. See Dimand, Robert W., “On Limiting of Inequality: The Legacy of James Tobin,” Eastern Economic Journal 29/4 (2003), 559–64Google Scholar.
158 Huret, La fin de la pauvreté?, 190.
159 Sloman, Transfer State, 5.
160 Pierson, Paul, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge, 1994), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
161 See in particular Margot L. Crandall-Hollick, “The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC): Legislative History,” Congressional Research Service, R44825, updated 28 April 2022, at https://crsreports.congress.gov.
162 Steensland, The Failed Welfare Revolution, 176–7.
163 John Kay, “Redistributive Market Liberalism,” New Statesman, 5 Feb. 1997, 18–20, at 18.
164 Brittan, Samuel, Capitalism with a Human Face (Cheltenham, 1995)Google Scholar.
