ABSTRACT
As frustration over the welfare crisis in the 1960s grew both in Congress and within the executive branch of government, the idea of a guaranteed income attracted more and more attention. One is structural: to raise earning capacities, equipping the poor of this generation and the potential poor of the next with the means to earn above-poverty incomes through normal employment. The costs that concern taxpayers are not the social costs but the additional taxes they will have to pay—or tax cuts they will have to forgo—in order to increase the incomes of the poor. The credit income tax, proposed by Earl Rolph and others, is a scheme for integrating public assistance with a vastly simplified and reformed system of income taxation. The uniform tax rate has great technical advantages, it eliminates all incentive to shift income, either in fact or in appearance, from one year to another or from one taxpaying unit to another.
