What logical justification do you have for claiming that a subsidy to a worker is a subsidy to her employer?
It's not hard to grasp, if workers are paid rates that are so low that it doesn't allow them to pay for the basics of rent, food, clothing, transport, where the shortfall is paid by government subsidy, the government subsidy enables the firm to keep paying their workers sweet ... all for their time and labour because, well, the government is taking care of it
That appears to be magical thinking. By what
cause-and-effect mechanism does the government subsidy enable the firm to keep paying so little?
"Keep paying", you say. That expression refers to continuation of an existing arrangement, which implies before the subsidy was provided the firm was already paying some worker a rate so low that it doesn't allow him to pay for the basics of rent, food, clothing, transport. Apparently that was working for the firm, so why would it have stopped if the worker remained unsubsidized? If you mean the worker would have stopped coming to work, that's not terribly plausible, since he was already making a choice to keep coming to work under those conditions, and his reasons for doing so wouldn't go away just because a government
didn't start subsidizing him. And in the event that he does stop coming to work, the firm will presumably just hire somebody else to do the same job, at the wage the market is bearing. Marginal workers are entering and dropping out of the labor market all the time.
The way a government subsidy to poor people is actually likely to affect prices is by changing workers' calculations of what they can afford to do. Some of them will no longer need to work; the ones who still need to work will have a cushion that lets them be choosier about what jobs to take. It will in general make the poor less desperate. Being less desperate improves anyone's negotiating position. And since some will stop working or will keep looking until they find better jobs, the supply of workers filling the demand for people to do low-skill jobs will decrease. Both those effects will drive up the market wage. So a government subsidy will more likely
stop firms from paying workers such low rates.
Is that how capitalism is supposed to work?
Pay ... all and expect the government to take up the deficit? That's the way of the free market?
"Free market" is a relative term; it's up to government to decide just how free it wants markets to be. "Capitalism" is just a catch-all term for the freer end of the spectrum -- no government has ever wanted markets completely free. Governments put their thumb on the scale all the time for all manner of reasons -- some honorable, some less so. Subsidies to workers are one of the ways government transfers wealth from the rich to the poor. Stopping workers and employers from making mutually beneficial trades is one of the ways government transfers wealth from the rich and poor to the middle class.
Workers, powerless to negotiate a better deal,
But of course most workers are not powerless to negotiate a better deal. The great majority of workers aren't subsidized and are getting a better deal; and if they need to improve their negotiating power, unionization is legal. Government subsidies are a tool for helping the subset of workers who face personal obstacles to succeeding in the labor market; they're not for keeping the economy viable.
must be supported by government subsidies? What if that wasn't available? Riots? Revolution? Let them eat cake?
Quite possibly, if the number of workers who can't make it on their own is too high. But why would it be that high? Riots, revolution and let them eat cake happened not because France was capitalist -- it wasn't -- but because France blew its budget on wars of choice and paid the bills by suppressing its economy with tariffs and by regressive taxes on the poor that the nobility was exempt from.
In a society with such great wealth and resources, it's obscene.
Yes, if subsidies weren't available it would be obscene. That's why they're available.
You appear to be coming at this from a point of view of ignoring individual circumstance and assuming that the working class is an undifferentiated mass -- as though "Millions of American adults who earn low wages rely on federal programs to meet basic needs" meant
a hundred and fifty million. Since some companies aren't paying some workers enough for "the basics of rent, food, clothing, transport", you're arguing as though companies in aggregate aren't paying workers in aggregate enough for "the basics of rent, food, clothing, transport". The latter would create a sustainability problem; but doing it on a case-by-case basis doesn't.
Not everyone knows how to increase an employer's income enough to cover the entire cost of "the basics of rent, food, clothing, transport". Why should such people be prohibited from covering as much of that cost as they can? And why should they be prohibited from learning on the job and thereby upgrading their skills to the point where they do know how to increase an employer's income enough to cover those costs?