UBI unpopular

The first official proposal for a federal basic income program, though, came not from a paragon of progressivism, but from Richard Nixon. In 1969, Nixon introduced the Family Assistance Plan, which would have provided additional cash to poor families through a negative income tax — cutting checks to the poorest Americans instead of them paying the government — of $1,600 (about $13,000 today) for a family of four. The proposal was motivated by Nixon’s desire to replace the welfare system, which was unpopular with White blue-collar voters, but it never made it out of the Senate Finance Committee.

Many skeptical politicians and voters feared that giving people cash would allow them to quit their jobs, stop looking for work or work less. Around the same time, a series of negative-income-tax experiments benefiting about 7,500 people in six states appeared to confirm those concerns: In Seattle and Denver, where the two largest programs took place, married men worked an average of 7 percent fewer hours after three years of the program, while married and single women worked 17 percent fewer hours. And while researchers didn’t look at any other measures of stability — whether participants were more likely to seek medical care, for example, or whether their children missed fewer days of school — they did observe a modest increase in the divorce rate. Those two factors were enough to destroy widespread interest in guaranteed-income experiments for several decades.