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?
(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.