Richard Nixon was not the most likely candidate to pursue Thomas More’s old utopian dream, but then history sometimes has a strange sense of humor. The same man who was forced to resign after the Watergate scandal in 1974 had been on the verge, in 1969, of enacting an unconditional income for all poor families. It would have been a massive step forward in the War on Poverty, guaranteeing a family of four $1,600 a year, equivalent to roughly $10,000 in 2016.
