system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Rubio's plan to expand the EITC is nothing more than a handout to the business community.

After watching Marco Rubio's interview on The Daily Show, I see his plan to expand the EITC as a way to subsidize low wages so that the profit margins of businesses are not impacted by being forced to pay all costs for their employees. This is another plan to socialize the losses and privatize the profits for business in America. How is this not giving companies even more leverage to lower wages even further or simply to not increase wages as necessary, thereby causing the taxpayer to subsidize the profit margins that a company would normally have to cut in order to maintain employees? He goes on to claim that this subsidization will allow companies to put off the (eventual) automation of the business. Why should we put that time off to the future and pay the costs in the meantime? If a company cannot stay in business without being subsidized then is it really a business or just an arm of the government that is being manipulated to pay the executives a higher wage?  Should McDonalds be absorbed as a function of the government? I don't think so, but it seems as though some think it should be supported like it's a part of our national economic security. 

Please change my view, because I'm kinda confused about these types of "solutions".
gpt
The EITC is a subsidy to wages. There is no way to levy a subsidy (or a tax) on an economic transaction such that only one side gets the benefits. Even if you offer the benefits *solely* to one side or the other, the subsidy makes the recipient more eager to accept the transaction and that increases the bargaining power of the other side.

Before there was an EITC there were various programs that phased out abruptly as your income rose. These had the unfortunate consequence that sometimes people who got a job, or a slightly better job/longer hours, ended up with less resources for their family ... in effect, it was an extremely high tax on the poor that discouraged poor people from improving their lives.

If you want to offer benefits to poor people, but you don't want to punish poor people for becoming less poor, you have two choices:

(1) offer everyone a universal basic income, that never phases out at any income level

(2) offer something like the EITC - in effect, a negative income tax or wage subsidy for levels of income below a certain threshold. For every dollar you earn, instead of getting a little bit taken away from every dollar (normal taxation) or a huge hit once you reach a certain income level (traditional welfare benefits), you get a little bit added to every dollar, with the amount going down with each dollar until finally you are paying taxes yourself (wage subsidy)

These are the only two ways. There is very little political support for (1) (outside of Alaska, which actually has a universal income for Alaska natives)

Anyway - does this mean that McDonald's is a branch of the government? Not really. Lots of companies use/build off of federal infrastructure (like highways, the Internet, the space program) or benefit from federal subsidies (charter schools, farmers, solar panel manufacturers) without being part of the government. Deciding whether to subsidize something with tax money and whether it should be run as a public or a private institution are two different questions.