could EITC help hold down rates in low wage rate jobs?

consider $10 an hour the ceiling on low wage rates

consider   27 million households 
received $60 billion in tax credits through the EITC in '09

at $ 2 on average in subsidy  an hour that's 30 billion hours
 at 2000 hours per head that's what ?

    15 million full time job equivalents
over 10 % of the job force

question

would low wages by higher without EITC ?

i very much doubt it
given the job rationing system we call the labor "market "

its an admission and expulsion  system
set never to exhaust the supply of applicants even at the peak of a boom

however ...,,note well:

"The value of the EITC’s refundable tax credit varies according to a worker’s family income and size. In 2008, the maximum benefit per family was about $4,800 per year for a family with two or more children and a maximum income of about $39,000 per year. The benefit levels, however, vary substantially across family types. In the same year, the maximum EITC payment for a single person with no children, for example, was under $500 on a maximum eligible income of just under $13,000 per year.

    The EITC is not a direct subsidy to the wages of low-wage workers because its value depends on both the worker’s family size and the income received by other adults in the family. For single workers with no children, the EITC has little effect on hourly earnings. For example, a single, childless, full-time, full-year worker earning the federal minimum wage in 2008 would have earned about $12,280 before the EITC – an average of $6.14 per hour.
12 If eligible for the maximum EITC, this same worker would have seen his or her annual earnings rise to about $12,720. This translates to about $6.36 per hour, or an EITC top-up of about $0.22 per hour, leaving this worker still only about half way to the low-wage threshold in 2008. To further complicate the calculations, if the same childless worker were in a family with another worker who earned more than about $1,000 per year, neither worker would be eligible for any EITC payment because they would exceed the family income limit for a childless family.

The EITC has the greatest impact on the earnings of low-wage, single parents with children. Eissa and Hoynes estimate that in 2004, the EITC raised the hourly earnings of a single, full-time, full-year minimum-wage worker with two children by about $1.90 per hour (relative to a minimum wage of $5.15 per hour in that year), and the wages of a similar worker with only one child by about $1.30 per hour.

13 In either case, the combination of the minimum wage and the EITC would still leave this worker below the low-wage threshold in that year.

The EITC may also have a perverse impact on the wages of workers who do not qualify for the program.

 Since the EITC significantly raises the after-tax wages of many eligible low-wage workers, the EITC effectively raises the labor supply for eligible workers, which may act to lower the before-tax wages paid by employers. The EITC more than compensates recipients for any decline in the wage employers paid, but a large share of low-wage workers, especially those without children or in families with other adults in work, experience only the supply-induced reduction in the hourly wage because they are not eligible for the EITC (or receive much smaller payments). "

ONE  estimate of lower wage off set :
".. the net result of these gains and losses for different types of workers is that an additional dollar spent on the EITC only raises after-tax wages by about 73 cents."


" ten percent increase in  the EITC is associated with around a  3 to 4%  fall in the wages of high school dropouts and a two percent fall in the wages of those with only a high school diploma."


hmmm
 statistics damn statistics and econometrics !!!