More Wal-Mart
By Matthew Yglesias | bio
The Waltons haven't taken me up on my offer to become a hired gun for Wal-Mart (totally not tongue-in-cheek -- I have very little integrity) but this argument being spearheaded by the new Progressive Legislative Action Network really does need to be shot down:
Dec 01, 2005 -- 06:03:11 PM EST
A study of only 244 of its stores (out of thousands) by the organization Good Jobs First found Wal-Mart raked in $1 billion in effective taxpayer subsidies. A congressional report found that Wal-Mart's low wages mean that the average retail employee at Wal-Mart relies on roughly $2,103 per year in public subsidies, money needed for housing, children's health insurance, school lunch programs, and Title I education.
Indeed, in all but one state that have made internal studies public, Wal-Mart topped the list of employees that depend on public programs to provide employee benefits.
This is a genuinely perverse way of looking at the situation. Here's what's happening. You have some people. Once upon a time, they didn't work for Wal-Mart. Then they decided to take jobs at Wal-Mart. Presumably, their previous jobs were worse, or not jobs at all. Wal-Mart jobs don't pay very much money, which makes many of the people who work at Wal-Mart poor. The government, at the behest of decades of liberal agitation, runs programs that provide services or money to poor people. And now liberals are supposed to complain that this amounts to Wal-Mart getting subsidies?
That's dumb.
If you closed the Wal-Mart, that wouldn't save the government any money, the poor people who work there would just be even poorer. An cutting Medicaid, food stamps, housing or Title I education aid wouldn't hurt Wal-Mart a bit. If these programs were subsidies to Wal-Mart, Republicans would love anti-poverty spending or else corporate executives would love Democrats. In reality, Wal-Mart executives wouldn't lose a minute of sleep if those programs were hurt. Poor children would lose food, medicine, schooling, and the roofs over their heads. Spending money to help poor families is a subsidy to poor families not to their employers.
This is not so much an unfair attack on Wal-Mart as it is an unfair attack on poor people and programs that are vital to progressive politics.
yglesias.tpmcafe.com |
