Workers at top US low-wage firms rely on public assistance, report says | Hacker News Reader

Workers at top US low-wage firms rely on public assistance, report says

theguardian.com

32 points_bypa7 comments

Does this count as a government subsidy for these companies?

Effectively yes, this does illustrate how hard it is to effectively structure welfare at a national level.

Everyone involved would be better of with a lower (or negative) income tax instead of subsidies.

> Everyone involved would be better of with a lower (or negative) income tax instead of subsidies.

That's quite wrong. The low income earners effectively pay no income tax - after deductibles and so on - further lowering the income tax would do absolutely nothing for them.

It'd be an economic and political suicide to lower taxes during high deficits while government money is literally blown up into fine dust in various wars around the world.

Refundable tax credits are a thing the government knows how to do. If a negative income tax law was written to allow refunds to people who owe net negative taxes, the IRS could do it.

Don't think of it as a government subsidy....think of it as more like a single-payer wage system.

Every few years a bill is introduced requiring profitable companies to pay additional taxes to cover the cost of the SNAP (food stamp) benefits received by their employers.

Lobbying ensures such proposals never gets far, but it seems like a common sense way of ensuring that these funds subsidize people rather than corporations.

Walmart has a large fraction of it's employees not making enough to live, and receiving food stamps to help support them, while at the same time Walmart is the single largest recipient of food stamps dollars.

They are double dipping, extracting wealth from a system that isn't supposed to make them wealthy. Food stamps is partially a government handout to businesses, but to agribusiness, not grocery chains, which did not need any government handouts and is only just now becoming an noncompetitive market.

Tax payers get to support "Super important job creators" by subsidizing their payroll, giving them constant tax breaks, and feeding a percentage of every single government welfare dollar into their private pockets.

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