We've said I dunno how many times that Wal-mart is the leader in scamming taxpayer money, getting city, county, and state govts to pay for things they ought to be paying for themselves. We've pointed out the way Wal-mart goes after tax abatements; gets cities to pay their water, sewage, and electricity bills; has counties or states pay to build the roads leading into and out of WM Superstore parking lots, and so on. We've detailed how their refusal to a) provide reasonable health insurance to their employees, or b) pay them enough to buy reasonable health insurance for themselves. In fact, so many Wal-mart employees are paid so little that it's not uncommon for them to have to go on Welfare or apply for food stamps.
Well, WM has successfully taught these scams to the rest of the US corporatocracy.
Wages have been flat or even losing ground ever since Reagan. At the bottom of the income scale, that means we have a lot of workers making so little they're still below the poverty line. This is what corpo's like Wal-mart want. Why? Because then someone else - you and me, the taxpayers - will have to supply the missing wages. So, reports the NYT today, a lot of states are doing just that.
Over the last two years, officials in Arkansas and at least a dozen other states have announced plans to extend the safety net — through monthly cash payments — to thousands of low-income workers struggling to gain a foothold in the work world.
Most states focus on people who have left welfare for low-wage jobs. Officials believe that the programs, which typically combine several months of cash assistance with career counseling, health insurance and subsidized child care, will help low-wage workers weather family illnesses and cash shortages and deter them from cycling back onto the welfare rolls.
You know what would help them "weather" that stuff even better?
A LIVING WAGE.
I'm not going to offer a lot of props to the states for doing this because a) they don't really have much choice unless they want to go back to the Great Depression of the 30's, and b) they're doing exactly what the corporations want them to do: subsidize their employees' wages so the corpo's can report higher profits and pocket more $$$. With corporations able to take so much advantage of so many Pub-passed tax loopholes that many of them pay NO TAXES AT ALL, virtually all of the expense will be born by non-corporate taxpayers. You and me.
Because now that they've forced local govts to, in effect, pay a portion of what they ought to be paying their workers, CEO's will now start screaming about how their personal taxes are too high. With any luck, they'll be able to bamboozle a business-friendly Dem president into lowering the taxes of the rich even further than Bush (always with the threat of "we'll take those jobs to Indonesia if you don't do what we want" behind it).
What do they want from us? Michael Parenti said it years ago:
- All of the rewards and none of the responsibilities
- All of the resources and none of the burdens
- All of the profits and none of the expenses
- All the benefits of taxation without having to pay any actual taxes
And they're getting it.
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