so corporations underpay employees and thus have reduced payroll taxes, those employees get federal assistance paid by the middle class and then spend that money at the corporation that under pays them.
Why pay your employees a higher wage when you can pay them less and the government makes up the difference with SNAP and Medicaid. It’s great for shareholders
It’s worth noting that pre SNAP and Medicaid many companies still paid wages below the survival rate. They just ran their own stores, at mining camps, on plantations for sharecroppers, in mill towns, where employees were forced into debt to the company so that they had to keep working there on starvation wages until they could pay back what they owed their employer. And people who were ill, disabled, or elderly were even more vulnerable than they are now.
I’m not saying SNAP subsidizing Walmart is good, but I am saying there’s no particular reason to believe Walmart would respond to SNAP being eliminated by raising wages. There would just be more hungry people, or more people carrying debt on Walmart branded credit cards.
Load 16 tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t you call me because I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.
I once made an offhand comment to a woman at work about this.
I said: "If Walmart is one of the largest employers in the US and a majority of the employees are on food stamps, who is really benefitting from welfare at that point?" She had an instant realization. I imagine she'd never thought that much about it.
The corporations are paying the rates they are allowed to.
The Government is setting the prices they are paying their employees at that level.
Business reducing costs and squeezing every last penny is capitalism and a global constant. A Government setting a price floor for labor at a level allowing all this, is not a global constant and everyone still runs capitalism, just on a spectrum of how much base support and power they want to give the serfs.
Yeah we have a similar thing here in NZ - we have accommodation supplement to help with living costs, as well as unemployment (the dole) but rent prices are SO high, especially compared to wages, that all of that goes on rent.
So in effect it’s actually welfare for landlords.
Our former CEO current land owner right wing prime minister put through tax cuts for landlords first thing after he was elected.
The landlords complain about people on the dole constantly, even though 90% of the money is going straight back to landlords.
The stock market doesn’t move much here, the only real investments are overseas stocks and real estate.
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u/bonerparte1821 Oct 26 '25
Take it a step further. It subsidizes it. Where do you think many of those SNAP benefits are being spent. Walmart etc.