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The entire big box economy is a big honking subsidy to people with cars living in the suburbs by the poor, the singles, the seniors, the urban, the cyclists.
It only works because of the highways and the parking lots and the infrastructure paid for by everyone (road taxes do not cover the cost of the roads) and enjoyed by the drivers. The companies charge twice as much for small packages as big ones because they can; the purchasers without cars and access to the big boxes, the ability to drive between the Walmart and the Costco and the Price Club, don't have a choice.
Read on for Treehugger's reasons. Is bulk buying bad after all?
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Does Buying in Bulk Save Money, or is it a False Economy?
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Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:58AM (11 children)
Maybe he should worry more about the vast amount of money Walmart gets from taxpayers instead of paying their workers properly. [msnbc.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:41AM (10 children)
Because employing poor people is bad, thus we would never want to subsidize that.
(Score: 3, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:39PM (9 children)
Quite right, taxpayers are much better off giving billions in aid to the richest among us, they are much more likely to make good use of all that extra money.
We can't trust poor people to invest sensibly, they just throw their money away on food and shelter.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:32PM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:55PM (7 children)
What I am advocating is preventing corporations from paying their employees wages so low they can't afford to live, forcing taxpayers to pick up the slack.
The above is a pretty good example of exactly that, isn't it?
Based on what I remember of your post history, you're well aware of all that, but choose to argue anyway. I suspect you've probably had more satisfying arguments than this, but I hope I've been some fun.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @01:27AM (4 children)
And that is the problem. When you prevent employers from doing that, you prevent employees from earning those wages. That makes the problem worse. For example, consider Puerto Rico. Over half the population has left the island. That's due in large part to forcing businesses to pay wages much higher than the Puerto Rico norm. So rather than having a low paying job that allows for a modest living in a low living cost region, they now have moved to low paying jobs in the mainland US with higher costs of living.
In other words, minimum wage didn't increase wages in Puerto Rico, it helped depopulate Puerto Rico. That incidentally should be an object lesson for any attempt to hold poor countries and regions to the standards of the developed world.
One-size-fits-all minimum wages force people out of low cost parts of the region affected and into the higher cost areas - which incidentally have higher market wages and hence are less harmed by minimum wage policies.
I believe we'll see another example of this in practice with the new minimum wage law that's being slowly implemented [usatoday.com] in California. I've made a prediction [soylentnews.org] about Fresno, California. If the minimum wage of $15 per hour gets implemented in 2022, then the city will see its first time ever reversal of population growth by 2027. I picked this city because a) almost half its current population makes less than $15 per hour, and b) it has seen growth since its founding in 1880. A decline in population will indicate something big happened - such as unemployed workers moving to other cities to find a job.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday September 27 2017, @01:43AM (1 child)
That's what I thought.
You think something will happen, so it definitely will, despite the evidence [stuff.co.nz] against your feelings. [theguardian.com]
Even the Federal Reserve are not convinced. [frbsf.org]
Pretty sure you've taken a position and like to argue despite being wrong a lot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @04:26AM
Unemployment is a poor measure of how desperate the situation is getting because employment is the first thing most people take care of, when they are unemployed. It's like using starvation as a measure of wealth. It doesn't take much wealth to to where starvation isn't a factor. Similarly, it takes a certain amount of effort and ability to get employed. Past that, you don't have an idea of how well the worker is doing.
Further, there are a host of confounding factors. A key one is migration. If someone moves out of Puerto Rico to get a job in New York state, they count as not unemployed whether or not one includes them in the study population. But they had to undergo the tribulation of migrating and finding a job outside of Puerto Rico.
A universal, one-size-fits-all minimum wage is destructive to the poorer, but lower cost parts of a region. For example, if Puerto Rico were subject to a $15 per hour US-wide minimum wage, I think it'd destroy a good portion of what economy is left. Manufacture, tourism, finance, etc are all things that compare poorly as it is between Puerto Rico and either its neighbors or the US mainland. Higher labor costs won't make that better since they're competing with parties either not subject to minimum wage (non-US locals) or which already have an income distribution well over minimum wage (Florida and rest of US mainland, resulting in a decline in Puerto Rico's cheaper wage advantage over those places).
We would see yet more migration elsewhere until the reduced pool of labor fell into balance with the new, much lower demand for labor.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday October 01 2017, @03:47AM (1 child)
Bullshit. The reason Puerto Rico is so poor and people have to leave is that the USA screws it over, with laws like the Jones act.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 01 2017, @04:10AM
Minimum wage is more law like the Jones act.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @02:03AM (1 child)
No, I think it's an example of two subtle fallacies. First, that this is bad because you can label it as corporate welfare. But we see that the result, if it really is corporate welfare, is to encourage companies like Walmart to employ poor people. So it's a good sort of corporate welfare as opposed to the variety of dysfunctional and perverse behavior usually associated with corporate welfare, and you should be happy to subsidize it. But of course, you re not because it is better to spite a company and its millions of hapless workers than to back down on an unfounded ideological assumption.
Let's also keep in mind that usually these sorts of labor games benefit labor unions which just another sort of corporation (sometimes with slight legal differences). So your approach to get rid of corporate welfare, is just itself corporate welfare - just welfare of different parties than the alleged earlier welfare.
Then there's the observation that there's always going to be someone who pays workers the lowest. Thus, your supposed sore point never goes away and never gets better. You can always point to these businesses as the latest "subsidy" recipients and thus, automatically generate yet another demand for more regulatory thrashing.
This second fallacy is one of scale. There is no sense of scale here, no sense of a threshold or goal that we should be shooting for. Living wage can be set arbitrarily high. Companies that pay low enough to trigger social programs can always be considered to benefit from the "subsidy". There is no metric by which you can say things are better much less that they are good enough.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @02:16AM
My point here is not that this is a useful observation, but rather it's just as valid a conclusion given the same level of reasoning you put into your assertion that social programs are corporate welfare because companies employ people who use social programs.