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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:51 2006 |
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In response to Evelyn Forget's questions about guaranteed annual income
policies:
Charles Clark at St. Johns University has done a lot of work on these
policies in various countries.
Memory, admittedly imperfect, leads me to think that in the U.S. we backed
away from GAI because a piecemeal approach was politically acceptable while
a true GAI was not and that this was true even during the 1960s. It has
become ever truer over time. Further, I do think that a case can be made
that Speenhamland was an early attempt to guarantee an adequate annual
income, an attempt that failed for some of the same reasons that the
piecemeal approach should be judged a failure in the modern U.S. To
illustrate the point: public provision of health care costs through
Medicaid programs has allowed employers to reduce what was, for a time,
part of compensation packages for a large number of workers. Cost shifting
from employers to the public purse has had the effect of lowering real
incomes for those who have lost insurance coverage while increasing public
costs to a politically unacceptable level.
Localized living wage campaigns have been an interesting response to the
consequences of ineffective federal and state policies in the U.S.
Anne Mayhew
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