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