Supporting industries is necessary to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic. But using the coronavirus as an excuse, Boeing and other companies are trying to get taxpayers to foot the bill for their managerial errors. It is not too late to put a limit on corporate subsidies....ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Unemployment has three dimensions that often escape public discussion, perhaps because they raise such fundamental questions about the capitalist system. The first dimension concerns the immense losses for society from the kind of unemployment capitalism reproduces and that we suffer today....
Capitalists make those decisions based on what is privately profitable for them, not on what is lost to society. And that loss is huge....
The second dimension of unemployment is the actual costs it imposes on society, costs not borne entirely, or even chiefly, by the capitalists whose decisions determine unemployment....
Capitalism socializes unemployment's immense costs.... [negative externality]The third dimension of unemployment concerns how capitalism distributes unemployment among workers....
Capitalists defend their "right" to hire and fire as an "entitlement" that cannot be questioned. Yet it surely should be challenged on grounds of its undemocratic nature and its perverse social results.Not to mention the immense cost of socializing the consequences of unemployment, which constitutes a public subsidy to the ownership class that externalizes the cost to society as a whole and saves the subsidy. For example, Walmart is complaining that its profits are falling due to food stamp cuts. It's also clear from the data that the deficit spending stimulus is approximately equal to corporate gains.
From 2007 to 2011, the biggest public benefits programs spent $243 billion each year on working families who live in poverty or on the brink of it because their jobs pay so poorly, according to a study published Tuesday by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The research focuses on fast food workers as exemplifying the plight of low-wage workers and the costs that low wages pass along to taxpayers.
The study focused on the largest direct assistance programs to establish the cost of the “last line of defense between America’s growing low-income workforce and the want of basic necessities.” The combined cost of public health care programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit that targets low-income workers, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, formerly known as welfare) for working families averaged $243 billion from 2007 to 2011.ThinkProgress
CATO Institute Report Says Poor Americans Have It Too Good (via Moyers & Company)Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a study released by Congressional Democrats on Thursday.
Though the study assumes that most workers who qualify for the public assistance programs do take advantage of them, it injects a potent data point into a national debate about the minimum wage at a time when many Walmart and fast food workers are mounting strikes in pursuit of higher wages.
The study uses Medicaid data released in Wisconsin to piece together the annual cost to taxpayers for providing a host of social safety net programs, including food stamps and publicly subsidized health care, to workers at one Supercenter in the state.
According to the report, Walmart had more workers enrolled in the state’s public health care program in the last quarter of last year than any other employer, with 3,216 people enrolled. When the dependents of those workers were factored in, the number of enrollees came to 9,207.
"When low wages leave Walmart workers unable to afford the necessities of life, taxpayers pick up the tab," the report says.The Huffington Post
