Is Walmart the largest welfare recipient in America? If the minimum wage was increased, would Walmart hire less people? Would they be forced to increase prices? Does Walmart suffer from high wage states like Washington? Do they hire less people there? Does unemployment go up when states raise their minimum wage? Would an increased minimum wage really move some off of assistance or would they take those wages and simply spend them on affordable products at their local....Walmart?
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demanded that a panel of experts justify why America’s shrinking middle class should continue to subsidize the nation’s wealthiest family in a heated exchange Thursday during a congressional panel.
The Senate’s lone independent pointed out during the panel on income inequality that more Americans were currently living in poverty than at any point in the nation’s history as the top 1 percent siphoned off 95 percent of all income generated between 2009 and 2012.
“Does anyone on that panel … think that that makes moral sense or economic sense?” Sanders asked. “Does anybody think it makes moral or economic sense that one family, the Walton family, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people?”
“Do you think the Walton family, worth a hundred billion dollars, is in need of welfare from the middle class of this country, or do you think maybe we should raise the minimum wage so that those workers can earn a living wage and not have to get Medicaid or food stamps?” Sanders asked the panel.
The first panelist, Scott Winship, of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, offered to answer an earlier question, but Sanders insisted that he justify why taxpayers should subsidize Walmart’s wages with welfare.
“I would not use the word welfare, I think it’s stigmatizing,” Winship said, adding that Walmart offered low prices to its customers.
The exchange turned testy, as Sanders continued to insist that Winship answer the question as he’d asked it.
“I think that we should not raise the wage above levels that’s going to cause Walmart to not hire their workers,” Winship said. “The only way that they’re able to have the prices, which benefit low-income people more than people up on the income distribution (scale), is by paying wages that are not as high as you or I might like.”
“That is corporate welfare of the worst kind,” said Reich, a public policy professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
Reich added that Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, paid its workers an average of $8.80 an hour. By comparison, he said, the nation’s largest employer in 1955 was General Motors, which paid workers an average of $37 an hour in today’s money.
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