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The Economic Collapse
The 2.6 Billion
Dollar Welfare Payment That The U.S. Government Gives To Wal-Mart
By Michael Snyder
December 28th, 2014
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?
Unfortunately, it looks like our problems are only going to accelerate
in 2015. Thanks to the stunning decline in the price of oil, we
are starting to lose good paying jobs in the energy industry…
One company caught in the industry downturn is
Hercules Offshore Inc. The Houston-based firm is laying off 324
employees, roughly 15% of its workforce, because oil companies aren’t
renewing contracts for its offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico
while crude prices are depressed.
“It’s been breathtaking,” said Jim Noe, executive
vice president of Hercules, which was founded in 2004. “We’ve never
seen this glut of supply and dislocation in oil markets. So we’re not
surprised to see a significant decline in demand for our services.”
These are jobs that we cannot afford to lose.
Since the end of the last recession, the energy industry has been the
leading creator of good paying jobs in America.
But now as the U.S. energy boom goes bust, it might lead the way in job
losses.
In order to have a middle class, we have got to have middle class jobs.
Unfortunately, those kinds of jobs are disappearing and the entire U.S.
economy is moving toward the Wal-Mart model.
In the end, we will all pay a great price for such foolishness.
Read this and other articles at The Economic Collapse
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