Or its an atack on Wal-Mart's wages and benefits, arguing that by being so low and non-existant respectively, their employees are forced onto social safety-net programs despite working full-time, pushing the cost onto the taxpayer.

You're correct to say that Wal-Mart isn't being directly subsidized, and that if we cut these programs their execs wouldn't shed a tear, so the phrasing of the "attack" is indeed poor. However, it still bears a valid point for, say, a discussion of the benefits of keeping Wal-Mart out of your state (lower medicaid costs to the taxpayer), or, perhaps, the advantages of shopping at Costco over Sam's Club.

A point to remember is that not all of these Wal-Mart workers were unemployed or worsely-employed before Wal-Mart , but that Wal-Mart forces other, better-paying competitors out of business when they come to a given community. 
A local hardware store that has provided health insurance and decent pay to its workers cannot compete (see the movie for plenty of examples). In my town, when Wal-Mart moved in right over the state line (about half a mile from town), at least five substantial and longstanding downtown businesses closed within a month. They have all since been replaced by businesses that don't compete directly with Wal-Mart (read: upscale), which is fine, but a good number of jobs went away and aren't coming back. Wal-Mart jobs are often replacing better ones, not worse ones.

A point to remember is that not all of these Wal-Mart workers were unemployed or worsely-employed before Wal-Mart , but that Wal-Mart forces other, better-paying competitors out of business when they come to a given community.

This is the kind of complex issue that economists like to skip to the bottom and say overall more good was produced than bad. 

Walmart has low costs for a lot of reasons, one of the reasons is an employment structure that gets as much as possible out of as many minimum wage workers as possible.  Other reasons include market power in buying, efficient distribution and scale efficiencies.

If other better paying businesses could hire a lot of minimum wage workers but don't they are not expected to survive in a competitive economy.  Walmart exists in the same job market as its competitors.  Its lower costs for the most part do not come from being able to pay the same person less money than its competitors.

Wal-Mart's profits are going to Arkansas and the Walton family that would have stayed in-state if Wal-Mart hadn't come to town but the US Constitution kind of guarantees that things like that can happen.

I'd just close by saying closing Wal-Mart or keeping it out of state is just as hard and has far less political benefit than getting single-payer healthcare.

Creating an environment where WalMart workers and other workers can unionize is another hard thing.  I'd say that has benefits at least as great as healthcare. 

Sorry Matt, you've really missed the boat on this one.

There is absolutely no question that Wal-Mart decreases employment at other retailers. If they offer better wages and beenfits (as e.g. grocery stores generally do) then it is not the case that Wal-Mart's entry necessarily raises wages in the aggregate.

(Think about this -- a few posts ago you rightly noted that unions were at the center of the anti-Wal-mart movement. But if Wal-mart had no downward effect on working conditions at other businesses, why would the unions care?)

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose the market wage for a particular job is $10. Now suppose the government announces a policy of adding $2 an hour to wages of $7.00 or below. Do you think this will not decrease wages? Do you think it will not result in net cost to taxpayers, and net gains to employers following a low-wage business model? And is that not what "subsidy" means? This, conceptually, is exactly what is going on with Wal-Mart.

And no, it is not hypocritical for liberals to make this argument.  Many on the left do not like means-tested programs, this being one of the reasons.

Another point: So far as I know (and I'm pretty deep into this stuff), NOBODY talking about public programs as a subsidy for Wal-Mart wants to cut those programs, they want to force Wal-mart to do more. So this:

cutting Medicaid, food stamps, housing or Title I education aid wouldn't hurt Wal-Mart a bit.

besides being wrong, is a complete straw man.

Really, if this is the best someone as smart as MY can do when he tries out his flack hat, I think those of us in the anti-Wal-Mart camp are on pretty firm intellectual ground. 

This is the point.  Wal-Mart undercuts employers who pay their people a living wage and offer good benefits.  Wall Street is forever telling the head of Costco to pay his people less and make more profits, which advice he routinely resists.  Wal-mart makes it harder to have an economy where profits stay in the community.  Wal-Mart undercuts communities, compared to stores like Target, that sponsor many more community services.

I agree that the problem isn't that subsidies exist for workers that are underpaid by Wal-Mart.  The problem is that the existence of these programs, which we support, allows Wal-Mart to undercut the less unscrupulous competition.  Remember--that was why so many companies favored legislation to require a reasonable level of pollution control,  because otherwise the companies that wanted to do the right thing were put at a competitive disadvantage.  So we shouldn't get rid of the programs, just up the minimum wage and require employers to provide health insurance or pay higher taxes so the gov't can provide it.

Every once in awhile, Mr. Yglesias, you need to be reminded that it is generally thought a good thing to "engage brain before activating computer."  You definitely failed that here.  What you have here is commonly called a "brain fart."

As numerous other posters have pointed out, the employees at many Wal-Marts did not take a "step up" when they went to work there, but rather a "step down," since their previous good job had been destroyed by Wal-Mart's arrival.

This is hardly an "attack on poor people."  It is an attack on a company whose owners are worth a collective $100 BILLION, who run the company in such a way that a substantial percentage of their employees have to depend on public welfare to survive.  If the Walton piggies sacrificed ONE FRICKING PERCENT of their net worth, the problem would not only be solved but vastly improved.

Re: but that Wal-Mart forces other, better-paying competitors out of business when they come to a given community. 

What 'better paying" competitors? The only one I know of is CostCo, and it isn't being forced iout of business by Walmart. Something people need to bear in mind is that retail has NEVER paid well, and those much-lamented mom-and-pop stores (which have been on their death beds for 50 years it would seem) paid even worse than Walmart, Kmart and their like. The problem is not that Walmart pays poorly but that there is a lack of jobs, especially for those with no more than a high school education, that do pay well. Forty years ago such people went to work for unionized manufacturing concerns, not retail: retail mostly employed youngsters, wives, and second income seekers. Few people (outside of management) tried to live and support families on retail jobs.

Wal-Marts have about 110,000,000 shopper per month.  This is why Wal-Marts can drive other retailers out of business.  They do retail better for more Americans than other retailers.  That is what business is about.  Servicing your customers not those who have contempt for those customers.  

While the Waltons obvious are very rich and own Wal-Mart stock Wal-Mart is a public company.  My guess is that every union pension fund most IRAs and 401ks own Wal-Mart.  You don't like Wal-Mart's policies buy its stock and vote your shares.

Businesses obligations are first and foremost to their owners, the shareholders.  They do that by providing their customers what they want at the lostest cost possible.  You don't like the basics of business you better rethink how the our country works.

FOREIGNID: 71885
FOREIGNPARENTID: 71883
FOREIGNCOMMENTERID: 1171
AUTHOR: HoppyCalif
DATE: 12/01/2005 06:38:29 PM

Paying workers higher wages means passing on higher prices (and thus a higher cost of living).

I agree! I think we should cut your pay to the bone so you don't contribute to my higher cost of living too. Whatever happened to the Christian idea that we are all our brother's keeper?

Sirota is conflating two separate reports. The Good Jobs First Report is looking at Property tax and other bottom line tax breaks that Wal-Mart gets for the opening of its distribution centers in most cases. And there is reason to think that there is more to it than that, since it is sometimes hard to track abatement and economic development tax incentives offered as a result of enterprise zones or decision of local planning agencies.

Good Jobs First, as the name of the organization implies, believes that such incentives should be linked to agreements about job standards. That dollar ammount is different from the one for subsidies per Wal-Mart employee, which comes from a report from George Miller's office.

What Sirota is saying (or perhaps what I wish he was saying) is that we support the creation of Wal-Marts with property and other tax breaks and then we subsidize the workforce with a separate set of benefits that are worker based and perhaps we're not getting such great value for the first set of investments.

The real issue here is whether Wal-Mart is taking unfair advantage of the safety net in a way that undermines the common good by creating an employer based race to the bottom on healthcare. If that's the case, then the Maryland bill, which imposes a surtax on companies that don't spend a reasonable ammount on healthcare, makes sense as a device to level the playing field. It doesn't penalize Wal-Mart for the specific fact that its workers get assistance. It penalizes Wal-Mart and companies like it for their own behavior. It really is a simple concept, although determining what is reasonable might be more complicated. The bill, for those not following, was vetoed by Ehrlich and the battle is brewing on the override - hence the sturm and drang from the Wal-Marteers and the Mallaby article in the Post which brought this on.

The other set of bills in the states, that would require states to list the companies whose employees get these benefits has a bit of a "walk of shame" characteristic to it, and I can understand why there would be concern that it is an attack on the safety net. 

I think we should cut your pay to the bone so you don't contribute to my higher cost of living too.

 Well, if you could get me to agree to that, then yes society would be better off, receiving more goods for less. But I would decline, and productivity would go down (consumers don't get a free lunch either -- capitalism is all about finding balances).

 Wal-Mart employees, on the other hand, accepted. They can always quit if they want to.

Whatever happened to the Christian idea that we are all our brother's keeper?

 If you can devise an economic system around that idea, I'd like to see it. In reality, you can't count on everybody being altruistic. Which is why ours is based on incentives instead.

A similar argument was thrashed out in England in the early 1800's over the Speenhamland system. It faded away, first with (Clintonite, back-to-work) reforms of the Poor Laws in the 1830's, then with rising wages. It's eerie that America has reverted to the very early stages of modern capitalism.
The crucial point isn't whether public provision represents a subsidy to Wal-Mart, or private provision a tax on General Motors. It's that firms, and workers in forms, should get equal treatment.

I'm with Matt. The bilge spewing forth on this issue is insane. I live in Upper Manhattan (not Woody Allen's world by a long shot), and I remember when a lot of "progressive" pols were dead-set against big box stores coming into Harlem and putting all the "indigenous" mom-and-pop stores out of business. Anyone can sympathize with mom and pop, but most of my neighbors recognized this argument for what it was: A plea to have the poorest people in New York City pay a premium on goods to keep inefficient retailers in business, using political clout to distort the market by keeping retailers with cheaper prices out of the neighborhood--this after DECADES of bitching about how inner-city supermarkets didn't offer the kind of bargains and competition that suburban shoppers routinely enjoy. I know complete incoherence when I see it--don't you folks? Look, Wal-Mart is a legal business. Where it breaks the law, prosecute it. Where its objectionable business strategies compel us to propose progressive reformist legislation across the social policy board--let's propose it. But please--stop wanking out all these high-falutin' economic arguments about comparative advantage, opportunity costs, work-here-vs-work-there, Wal-Mart-vs.-staus-quo-ante, etc. The signal-to-noise ratio is just about prohibitive to useful communication.

Interesting. IME, an upscale store is staffed at least as heavily as a low end store. Are there really fewer jobs, net, now?

What you describe is what's supposed to happen--that the economy doesn't work like a zero-sum game.  Walmart puts a hardware store out of business, but a bridal shop opens in the same space. The hardware store owner and her employees suffer, but their suffering is offset by the gains made by the bridal store owner and his employees. 

Referring to the piece o