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Prometheus 6

All respect and no restraint

Subsidizing capitalism

One Wal-Mart Store Costs Federal Taxpayers $420,000 per year

The New York Review summarizes some recent analyses of Wal-Mart's effects on communities and its labor practices: For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.

http://angrydesi.typepad.com/minority_report/2005/01/the_washing

Corporations were created with the understanding that they would become wealth engines for society, not just for their owners. There is no reason to believe that this wealth generation would be in the form of the "trickle-down" effect so favored by Republicans. The enormous social inequity in wages, the pushing down of health and pension costs onto workers, reinforced by government is setting the stage for a market failure.

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