Guenny wrote:
catwho wrote:
Wal-Mart employs approximately 1% of the working US population. Them going under would single handedly plunge us back into a recession as bad as 2008.
And about
80% of them are on food stamps, and none of them have health benefits.
DailyKoS? Really? You can't spot the problems with their statistical analysis? I have no specific love of WalMart, but they don't do anything that tons of other businesses with mostly entry level and low skill labor do. They just happen to employ a lot more people while doing it. I'm not even sure where they get the 80% food stamp participation number since the link provided with that statement doesn't mention it, nor does it include the quoted statement in that paragraph, nor the quote in the box following it. But even if we assume this is true, it doesn't tell us anything specific about WalMart unless we compare that to other businesses with a similar workforce.
I also find it somewhat amusing when the left fights so hard to increase public benefits, and raise the bar to qualify for them, and then turns around and punishes businesses who now have a bunch of employees receiving those benefits. Did Walmart pay change relatively speaking? Or did it just become easier to qualify for food stamps? The bigger issue IMO isn't what WalMart is paying, but that more people who are raising families can't find a job better than WalMart to do so. I just think that it's completely backwards to try to make a low skill job like shelf stocking at WalMart pay a "living wage". What we should be doing is encouraging the creation of jobs that actually produce greater economic value (and thus command higher pay). And in this area, the economic policies of the Left have been an absolute disaster.
Blaming the company paying low wages for low skill work is just kinda stupid. That's like blaming the retarded kid for being retarded. What should be alarming us far more is the lack of availability of genuine good paying jobs out there in the market. Making the crap jobs pay more isn't the right answer and it should be obvious why.