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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

I would say a corporation's taxes should, at the very least, cover the tax burden generated from not paying their employees enough to make a living wage.

So if their employees are on government assistance, the cost to provide that assistance is inherently their burden. One way or another, every employee they employ will be earning a living wage from them.

I don't even care about overlap. If both Target and Walmart have to pay the difference between the full cost of government assistance for the same person, that's fine. Build a fucking library or something.

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That's an interesting view though.

If Walmart employees somebody who's part time and is on Medicaid are they on Medicaid because of Walmart or because they couldn't commit to enough hours to go full time? 9% of 1.6 million employees on Medicaid means they are employing over 1.4 million people who are not on Medicaid, all of whom are taxed for income, payroll, property, sales, etc.

If Walmart decided tomorrow to terminate all employees who were collecting Medicaid so that they could avoid a tax increase for that stat would it be a good thing? Is it better for a company to avoid hiring at all, even part time, if they can't fully purge the employee from government assistance?

The number of Walmart workers on some form of government assistance is significant.

Significant enough that Walmart couldn't operate without them. Not to mention, Walmart manages to capture those government dollars through accepting EBT and such.

And the goal is to make WalMart pay regardless of how they try to weasel out. If you say "only full time", then they employ thrice as many people and give no one enough hours to make a living. Same if you prorate to hours worked.

Essentially you need to stop inventing rules and systems that can be gamed. Because Walmart is incentivized to game them. Push them in the direction of hiring people full time and paying them a fair wage for their time.

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