The High Cost of Wal-Mart

[Crewleader]

Weekend Edition February 14-16, 2014

Subsidizes Profits

The High Cost of Wal-Mart

by PETE DOLACK

Each United States Wal-Mart costs taxpayers nearly $1 million because of the company’s miserably low pay at the same time that the four heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune possess $107 billion in wealth. That’s no coincidence.

You subsidize Wal-Mart whether you shop there or not. And if you do shop there, you are facilitating the movement of production to countries with the harshest sweatshop conditions.

That Wal-Mart workers are often forced to use food stamps and other public-benefit programs is well known; but the company also receives a myriad of local tax benefits, free or reduced-price land, property- and sales-tax exemptions and various grants that, together, are difficult to quantify. The company’s known U.S. subsidies are far in excess of a billion dollars.

A study prepared by the Democratic Party staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that each Wal-Mart costs taxpayers nearly $1 million in public-assistance programs alone. The study said:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/14/the-high-cost-of-wal-mart/