Tuesday, January 6, 2015

"The 2.6 Billion Dollar Welfare Payment That The U.S. Government Gives To Wal-Mart"

I was vaguely libertarian starting when I was 16. Later I realized it was a systemic political/economic philosophy. Even later I realized many "libertarians" are leftists who support open borders and who think Science is a God which Explains Everything.

They also think Wal-Mart and McDonalds are free market instead of the world-spanning welfare whores they really are.

This article was written by Michael Snyder and is from The Economic Collapse.


Wal-Mart Should the federal government be spending billions of dollars to pump up Wal-Mart’s profits? I know that question sounds really bizarre, but unfortunately this is essentially what is happening. Because Wal-Mart does not pay them enough money, hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees enroll in Medicaid, food stamps and other social welfare programs. Even though Wal-Mart makes enormous profits, they refuse to properly take care of their employees so the federal government has to do it. And of course this is not just a Wal-Mart problem. There are hundreds of other major corporations doing exactly the same thing. And they will keep on doing it as long as they can because relying on the federal government to take care of their employees allows them to make much larger profits. This gives these companies an enormous competitive advantage and it distorts the marketplace. If you love the free enterprise system, you should be aghast at this. Our big corporations have become the biggest “welfare queens” of all, and Wal-Mart is near the top of that list.

Does your local Wal-Mart store seem like it needs help from the federal government?

Of course not.

Wal-Marts all over the nation were absolutely packed this holiday season, but according to a recent Bloomberg article, the average amount of welfare that Wal-Mart employees receive from the government each year breaks down to about $420,000 per store…

Wal-Mart’s low wages have led to full-time employees seeking public assistance. These are not the 47 percent, lazy, unmotivated bums. Rather, these are people working physical, often difficult jobs. They receive $2.66 billion in government help each year (including $1 billion in healthcare assistance). That works out to about $5,815 per worker. And about $420,000 per store.

Does that make you angry?

It should.

Today, Wal-Mart employs approximately 1.2 million people in the United States, and it makes a yearly profit of about 17 billion dollars.

So why does it need 2.6 billion dollars of help from the U.S. government?

Wal-Mart is a colossal money-making behemoth. Just consider the following numbers…

The size of Wal-Mart is sometimes difficult to visualize. To put it into some context, consider the following: 100 million U.S. shoppers patronize Wal-Mart stores every week. Wal-Mart has twice the number employees of the U.S. Postal Service, a larger global computer network than the Pentagon, and the world’s largest fleet of trucks. Americans spend about $36 million dollars per hour at the stores. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other company in the world, capturing one of every four dollars spent on food in the U.S. The average American family of four spends over $4,000 a year there. Each week, it has 200 million customers at more than 10,400 stores in 27 countries. If the company were an independent country, it would be the 25th largest economy in the world.

Wal-Mart does well enough to be able to pay their workers a livable wage.

And yet they refuse to do it.

Shame on them.

Meanwhile, the six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the poorest one-third of all Americans combined.

This reminds me of something that I read in the fifth chapter of James the other day…

Come now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have stored up treasures for the last days. Indeed the wages that you kept back by fraud from the laborers who harvested your fields are crying, and the cries of those who harvested have entered into the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have lived in pleasure on the earth and have been wayward. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter.

But we continue to reward this behavior, don’t we?

100 million of us continue to visit Wal-Mart every single week, and we continue to fill up our shopping carts with cheap products that are made outside this country.

We refuse to support American workers and American businesses, and this is a recipe for utter disaster. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “National Economic Suicide: The U.S. Trade Deficit With China Just Hit A New Record High“.

The truth is that we cannot consume our way to prosperity. When we consume far more wealth than we produce, we pile up debt and we become poorer as a nation.

And as a country we have become exceedingly cold-hearted toward our workers. If you truly love free markets and capitalism, you should be encouraging big companies to pay their workers properly. Instead, we are moving closer and closer to the slave labor model employed by China and other communist nations with each passing day. Sadly, I am becoming increasingly convinced that many prominent “pro-business” voices in America today are actually closet communists. They seem to want everything to be made in China and for American workers to be paid just like Chinese workers.

At this point, the U.S. middle class is well on the way to being destroyed. As I have written about previously, 40 percent of all American workers now make less than what a minimum wage worker made back in 1968 after you account for inflation.

How is the middle class supposed to survive in such an environment?

And for any “pro-business” people that want to defend Wal-Mart, do you actually like paying suffocating taxes to support all of the people that are being forced on to the safety net?

What is our society going to look like as millions more Americans become dependent on the federal government each year? Government dependence is already at an all-time record high. How much worse do things have to get before we admit that we have a real problem?

For the rest of the article click HERE.

10 comments:

Wraith said...

Cart before the horse. FedGovCo does not "have" to take care of anyone, nor should they, nor are they authorized to. This is not the equivalent of 'subsidizing' Wally World.

Maybe they should get back to their Constitutionally specified duties, quit giving money to people or corporations, and let the market work itself out unhindered.

Axe Head said...

FedGov is biggest enabler of immigration invasion. Wal-Mart's low low prices make it the second enabler. No surprise that FedGov enables Wal-Mart. Top two enablers, working together.

Anonymous said...


"Maybe they should get back to their Constitutionally specified duties, quit giving money to people or corporations, and let the market work itself out unhindered."

Two economists are marooned on a desert island with no food but a can of beans. One says to the other "assume we have a can opener."

We're way beyond anything that can be solved by tweaking the taxes and cutting the redtape and public benefits, anyway. The people who run things want cheap, plentiful and compliant manual labor at home and products produced by slave labor under no labor or environmental standards abroad. That's Chinese prices for goods and services without having to drink Beijing water or breath Beijing air. They have an army of deracinated, borderline autistic libertarian economists and journalists who've covered them all the way in this. There'll never be a shortage of libertards to explain why open borders at home and slave labor abroad are fundamental to the maintenance of freedom and liberty.

sth_txs said...

I'm a libertarian(not open borders)/classical liberal but this simply another reason why most of government should be abolished.

The libtards will howl about this while forgetting that their leftist policies lead people and institutions to do what is in their self interests.

Robert What? said...

On the one hand, I applaud Walmart for employing many otherwise unemployable people. OTOH, Walmart gives me the creeps. I think I've been in a Walmart two or three times in the last ten years.

Anders said...

"At this point, the U.S. middle class is well on the way to being destroyed." Actually, it is already destroyed, they just don't know it yet, but they will, oh yes they will. And there will be blood running through the streets on that day.

Glen Filthie said...

The home grown middle class is doing just fine.

The reason the lower class is growing is because Obama's children breed like lice, and he is importing more low IQ/low skill third world trash from Mexico.

Also - I am no friend of Walmart but they are so paying their people enough. The job market is what it is, and people that stock shelves and run cash registers get exactly what they're worth. This is the socialist dream America, and when you voted for Obama you decided to live that dream...good and hard. I hope it hurts because it looks good on you. Maybe you'll take the next election seriously.

Anders said...

The situation would be nearly identical with the manchurian candidate McCain as president, so your words ring pretty fucking hollow there, Glen.

Chicken Little said...

“FedGov is biggest enabler of immigration invasion.”

Using your logic, the BIGGEST invaders were the Europeans who came to North America and jackbooted Native Americans.


“…why most of government should be abolished.”

Ask that question to the majority of American citizens today. See how they would respond to your inquiry.


“Actually, [the middle class] is already destroyed…”

Destroyed? Um, no. Losing ground? Yes. Keep the hyperbole to the funny pages.



“he is importing more low IQ/low skill third world trash from Mexico…”

Not in Texas, fuckface. Yee-haw!

http://forabettertexas.org/images/EO_2014_09_PP_Immigration.pdf

Unknown said...

^Leftist troll.