Walmart, Wages, and the Public Good « Commentary Magazine

Walmart, Wages, and the Public Good « Commentary Magazine

When New York Times columnist Timothy Egan wrote a column called “Walmart, Starbucks, and the Fight Against Inequality,”claiming that Walmart’s low wages forced many of its employees onto public assistance, such as food stamps and Medicaid, David Tovar, the communications director for Walmart, treated it as a first draft and pointed out its many factual inaccuracies. He then posted it on the Walmart website. It makes for hilarious reading.
Egan’s argument is that if Walmart paid higher wages, its employees wouldn’t need public assistance. Using very dubious math and a “study” that left-leaning Politifact.com calls “mostly false,” Egan describes Walmart as a “net drain” on taxpayers. Tovar points out that Walmart is the largest taxpayer in the country.
I doubt that Timothy Egan has ever gone into a store to buy something and, on being told the price, insisted on paying more. So if Walmart can hire a satisfactory employee at a given wage, why should it insist on paying more? For one thing, it would violate its fiduciary duty to the stockholders. For another, it would have to raise the prices its hundreds of millions of customers pay.
Egan’s column, demanding that Walmart pay higher wages, is classic modern liberalism, solving the problems of the world with other people’s money, and using junk statistics to justify it.