United States of America: GAI Almost in the 1970s but Downhill Thereafter

The United States’s experiences with guaranteed annual income (GAI) schemes suggest that linking them to resolving specified social problems increases the political acceptance of the idea, although it by no means ensures adoption and implementation. Alternatives more aligned with existing programs and policies of social welfare provisioning tend to be taken more seriously by the public at large and policymakers in particular. This chapter, which in part synthesizes related material from a much broader work of mine that examines social welfare policy transitions in the United States from the 1980s through the first years of the Obama administration (Caputo 2011), discusses how a GAI proposal was seriously considered and nearly adopted by the US Congress when deliberating about how to best reform its major welfare program designed primarily for low-income families, especially single-mother families with young children. It highlights the centrality of reciprocity and priority given to labor force attachment as contributing to the loss of popular support for the idea of an unconditional basic income guarantee and shows how alternative policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit were adopted that fit more readily into a cluster of values and an existing array of social welfare provisioning associated with individual responsibility.