Seattle families used to get govt check, then the divorces came

Original caption: Vice President Richard M. Nixon is greeted by Senator Hiram Fong (R-Hawaii) as he arrived at Washington National Airport on August 2, 1960 to take off on his first presidential campaign swing. In center are Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton and Mrs. Nixon. The Senator and the Secretary are accompanying the Nixons on the five day trip which will include stops in Reno, Nev., Los Angeles and Whittier, Calif. Hawaii and Seattle. (AP Photo) less Original caption: Vice President Richard M. Nixon is greeted by Senator Hiram Fong (R-Hawaii) as he arrived at Washington National Airport on August 2, 1960 to take off on his first presidential campaign swing. ... more Photo: BYRON ROLLINS/AP Photo: BYRON ROLLINS/AP Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Seattle families used to get govt check, then the divorces came 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Establishing a universal basic income (UBI) in the U.S. might seem like a liberal pipe dream, particularly given the current state of the nation's political discourse, but here's the thing: Seattle had a UBI during one of the most divisive periods of the country's recent history -- and with Richard Nixon in the White House.

For the uninitiated, the idea behind UBIs is that governments pay a flat sum of money to individuals that allows them to meet their basic needs. In theory, this would allow low-income workers to get out of full-time jobs that don't pay a living wage and pursue work that ultimately betters society.

"If people don't have to worry about food and shelter, maybe they'd feel freer to innovate. Maybe they'd start a new company or go back to school," said Avery Trufelman, a producer for the "99% Invisible" podcast, which examined current experiments with UBIs in Finland in a recent episode.

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Seattle was the site of one of four large-scale "Income Maintenance Experiments" enacted during in the late 1960s and early 70s. A joint program in Seattle and Denver paid $3,800 to $5,600 a year (equal to roughly $23,000 to $34,000 in present-day dollars) to 4,800 families from 1971 through 1982. Earlier studies were established in urban areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, rural tracts of Iowa and North Carolina and African American households in Gary, Indiana.

Economist and professor Alicia H. Munnell called the experiments "a landmark in the history of social policy" in her 1987 paper outlining the results of the projects.

Before being forced to resign the presidency rather than face removal from office during the Watergate scandal in 1974, Nixon made basic income a tenet of the so-called "War on Poverty," even referencing the idea of a basic income during his 1971 state of the union address.

"Let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America," the staunch Republican and conservative icon proposed to Congress and the American people. "Let us provide the means by which more can help themselves."

Nixon wasn't the first prominent American to advocate for an income floor. Founding father Thomas Paine was a fan of the idea. But under Nixon's administration, a basic income nearly became law -- twice.

In 1970, the universal income passed the House of Representatives by a 243-to-154 margin as part of Nixon's Family Assistant Plan, but was killed by a progressive Senate in part because Democrats didn't think it went far enough. A 1971 plan sailed through the house by an even wider margin (288 to 132) before hitting a road block in the Senate.

So why hasn't the idea, which appeals to bleeding-heart liberals as well as some libertarians (who see it as an alternative to myriad social programs) and technologists (who view it as a way to combat a job market continually shrinking due to automation), ever come close to the mainstream again?

"The reason that it has been pretty much been discarded to the sands of time was because people started analyzing the results before all the data was in," Trufelman said. "So there were these rumors swirling around that people were dropping out of the workforce and just enjoying this basic income, and it wasn't actually a statistically significant trend.

It was kind of a rumor, which can sometimes be more powerful than a fact."

Imagine that.

In fact, the workforce decline in the Seattle-Denver program was probably less than 9 percent, wrote Rutger Bregman, and most of those not working were "twenty-somethings and women with young children."

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Another rumor -- that the experiments led to significant increases in separations and divorces because women weren't reliant on men for baseline income -- also wasn't borne out in the data, according to Trufelman. Perhaps some women in the study, which took part in the early days of the sexual revolution, left unhappy marriages because they could finally afford to do so, but it wasn't a statistically significant number.

"The American public didn't have the patience for nuance," Trufelman said, illustrating just how far we've come as a society, "And they were like, 'This will be the end of a family unit, so we can't tolerate it.'"

In addition to Finland, UBIs are now being tested in places like Kenya, the Canadian province of Ontario and Oakland, California, in a study established by Silicon Valley startup funder Y Combinator.

So could universal basic income be an idea whose time has come during the Trump administration? It doesn't seem likely, but proponents might do well to take a page from Nixon's book:

"Defeat doesn't finish a man," he once said. "Quit does. A man is not finished when he's defeated. He's finished when he quits."

Seattlepi.com reporter Stephen Cohen can be reached at 206-448-8313 or stephencohen@seattlepi.com. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @scohenPI.