WAL-MART WELFARE

Because Wal-Mart employees are paid so little, they are poor. The government (taxpayer) then subsidizes their lives. In Georgia, one in four of the company's employees had a child in the state's program for needy children in 2003.

For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the US government is spending:

• $108,000 for children's healthcare (California spent $20.5 million on WalMart employees' medical care)
• $125,000 in tax credits & deductions for low-income families
• $42,000 in housng assistance
• = $420,000/year or $2,103 per employee in this store -- and the company employs 1.2 people

Taxpayers subsidize corporate accumulation. (This is even more extreme if you factor in government support after retirement.)

This information is from a February 2004 report by the House Education and Workforce Committee (from the Democratic staff), reported in a review of texts on Wal-Mart by Simon Head, "Inside the Leviathan," The New York Review of Books (Dec. 16 2004: 88) .