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