[Superman]

Now yer talkin' Gaijinda. I'm not sure the absenteeism thing would be such a problem. Yes, it might happen but it's not like workers would be unavailable to work the remaining hours. And unreliability is grounds for dismissal, of course. And perhaps there'd be no public assistance for folks who are part time by choice.

But you also touched, I think maybe accidentally, on a real potential problem. Yes, there would need to be a re-shuffling of wages in other occupations because comparative equity would still need to remain. Journey construction workers would still need to earn a multiple of the folks earning min wage. But that's still not the problem. MAny more workers would have disposable income, so the volume of consumer spending would rise. Perhaps substantially (minimum wage workers are frugal, and an extra several hundred dollars per month would be real money, and much would be spent). And in the combination of these, we'd have inflation. That, in my view, would be one of the more damaging arguments against my suggestion. There would be demand-push inflation, and there would be wage-pull inflation. both.

Colin, the price of burgers is determined by both supply and demand. In a society where 20% of workers cannot afford to buy (except very occasionally) fresh-cooked food, if that 20% were suddenly added to the population of people who can afford to eat out, then demand would rise and potentially economies of scale would cancel out the increase in cost (the $0.15 per burger) that would occur in the static example. In the static example, the cost of producing a burger is raised but demand for the burger does not. In reality, demand would certainly rise. That's what they found when all those unemployed workers started earning money back in the Great Depression. They bought all sorts of stuff, and paid taxes on that stuff, and paid taxes on their incomes, and the merchants they rescued paid taxes on their increased incomes, and the government MADE money, even though it was simply creating a bunch of government jobs and paying for them outright.

Gaijinda, the problem with earned income credits, in my humble view, is that this is still an example of the government paying for something that is a cost incurred by business. It's still government subsidizing something that I don't know why we just don't make industry pay for. There's lots of stuff that taxpayers pay for that industry gets a pass on. Pollution, for example. It's nice to pretend that business can have stuff for under-market, but I'm tired of picking up the difference.