J842P - You have a point that actual Corporate Welfare is a real problem and should not be diluted. Yet this is still corporate welfare to a degree and here's why I say it:
The "supply and demand" says that the employees **MUST** look for work to receive benefits in many cases. Yet they aren't just getting a low-wage job that is only worth low wages. The Walmart Corp makes MASSIVE profits. The system is forcing these people to take any old job - I'd be okay with that except when someone is making a monstrous unreasonable profit off their labor.
Ok, I just wanted to address one thing before getting into the meat of your argument.
"Supply and demand" does not say that employees must look for work to receive benefits. That isn't something decided by a market - that's a government action. It would have to be government action for it to be corporate welfare.
The government - that is the rest of us should join in the collective bargaining that says, you want these people, you pay them enough to not need public assistance for as long as you are making profits.
Now, it seems to me that the public would be much wiser if it simply did not make employment a stipulation for public assistance, since that seems to be at the root of the problem.
The idea that the government assistance allows Walmart to make it's profits by providing it with a labor force doesn't make any sense. If there were no government assistance, or even no government
and no government assistance, that labor force would still be there. If one were to argue otherwise, that would suggest to me that there would be sufficient deaths by starvation or by other means if the government didn't provide assistance, and I don't buy that. The only sort of angle I would find
believable is if you are arguing that by providing some assistance and stipulating current employment as a part of that assistance, this incentivizes workers to accept lower wages for these low-wage positions. But then we are back to where we started, and it seems to me that the solution is not to stipulate employment requirement for assistance. The ideal solution, I am beginning to believe, is some sort of guaranteed minimum income.
Regardless, I just can't bring myself to say that it is accurate to call government assistance corporate welfare.
It makes a lot more sense to say that the public infrastructure that allows Walmart to have it's sophisticated inventory management systems, which is at the heart of their success and profits, might count as some sort of welfare to the corporate entity known as Walmart, but even that is stretching the term for me.
If your company is not making a profit - if it's working for zero, then by all means, give the people some jobs. But when your CEO is making hundreds of times their wages, then you are ripping off the rest of the people by paying your worker so little that they need welfare.
I have a really really large problem with a company making profits - huge profits - while requiring aid from welfare to keep their employees alive.
I'm sorry, but I just don't think those are rationally compelling arguments. They are tailored to be emotionally compelling. So, consider the argument that Walmart should be able to pay their waged employees more because their CEO makes absurd amounts of money. Walmart's CEO gets payed 35 million (totally absurd), and there are approximately 1.5 million Americans employed by Walmart. If they didn't pay their CEO
any salary, that only gives you about 35/1.5 = 23.33 dollars more
per year for the employees. As a likely low estimate, one could assume that around 50% of the employees are waged (the ones we care about when discussing low-income). That still gives you less than $50 per year for waged employees.
Now lets take a look at the profits Walmart makes. What happens with that money? Surely, we would want to understand the money if we are going to be using the force of government to potentially lower it.
Here's a pdf containing Walmart's 2013 financial statements:
http://stock.walmart.com/microsites/annual-report-2013/pdf/Walmart_2013_Fin.pdf
The document we are interested in is their statement of income on page numbered 32.
Right off the bat, we see that their net income is almost 16 billion. That's a staggering number. Even more staggering is that their net sales are close to half a trillion. But anyway, we want to talk about profits and what is happening with those profits. The 16 billions number is just accounting profits, so let's look at their statement of cash flows on the page numbered 35. Here we can see how much cash they actually made, their net cash provided by operating activities, and it's a hefty 25.6 billion. But that money isn't just gold coins in a huge vault that the CEO of Walmart periodically sleeps on top of, and sometimes takes a few of those coins to toss at the street urchins while on carriage rides through the park. Most of that cash is invested back into the business and goes back into the economy. A significant chunk is also payed in income taxes. For a detailed breakdown, check out page numbered 48. They payed about 8 billion of the 25 billion in taxes, at an effective rate of about 30 percent. But don't forget about the dividends! Looking back at page numbered 35, and the dividends payed equaled about 5 billion. That's money payed directly to shareholders, many of which are ordinary people with retirement portfolios.
It seems to me that there is a lot of implicit moral outrage at Walmart making lots of profits, as if these enormous figures ended up as money in a couple of peoples bank accounts. That money is invested, and additionally, since Walmart is a publicly traded company, that is money that is going directly to shareholders, i.e. anyone who owns Walmart stock. Also, Walmart pays a big chunk of that money straight into public coffers.
