Did you know that you are a partner in Wal-Mart? That is, if you’re a taxpayer. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce in a February 2004 report, Everyday Low Wages, estimated that a Wal-Mart employing 200 cost federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or $2,103 per employee. This is due largely to the need for many Wal-Mart employees for federal welfare of some sort. Even though they are employed, they still qualify for such federal assistance as children’s health care, tax credits and deductions for low-income families and housing assistance.
You can extrapolate this to a subsidy of $2 ½ billion each year. And this doesn’t count the state benefits available to low-income families, e.g., in California Wal-Mart employees got $20 ½ million in medical care paid by the state in 2003.
I wouldn’t mind having a business where someone else paid a nice share of my employee costs. Would you?
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