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> How is giving food stamps to walmart employees a subsidy for walmart? If you consider the purpose of a having a job is to pay the bills and buy food, then yo

> How is giving food stamps to walmart employees a subsidy for walmart? If you consider the purpose of a having a job is to pay the bills and buy food, then you're allowing Walmart to not hold up their end of the bargain and then use tax money to fill in the gap. I can already predict your counterargument, because it's one I see a lot on Hacker News. You'll claim "Well that's the wage the worker agreed to", but that's a highly naive point of view. It ignores the fact that workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have zero leverage. They have to take what they can get. Walmart is abusing that position to pay as little as possible while our tax dollars are picking up the slack.

gruez 1y ago
>If you consider the purpose of a having a job is to pay the bills and buy food, then you're allowing Walmart to not hold up their end of the bargain No, that doesn't follow. The "purpose" of running a restaurant is to make money from serving your clients, but if your restaurant sucks and you can't make the numbers work out, you can't blame your customers for "holding up their end of the bargain". >and then use tax money to fill in the gap. Being employed reduces the amount of money the state has to subsidize compared to the counterfactual where the person is unemployed, so with that framing, walmart is actually helping the state out. > It ignores the fact that workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have zero leverage. They have to take what they can get. They have zero leverage because the supply/demand for their labor is not in their favor. If you characetrize this imbalance as "abuse", does the opposite hold? Are the AI researchers "abusing" poor Zuckerberg, who has to pay 9 figures for white collar employees that usually cost 6 figures? Since we're in a thread about housing prices, are all the boomer home owners "abusing" the poor millennial/gen-z home buyers, by charging 7 figure sums (the market price) for homes that they bought for 5 figures a few decades ago?

gruez 1y ago

>If you consider the purpose of a having a job is to pay the bills and buy food, then you're allowing Walmart to not hold up their end of the bargain No, that doesn't follow. The "purpose" of running a restaurant is to make money from serving your clients, but if your restaurant sucks and you can't make the numbers work out, you can't blame your customers for "holding up their end of the bargain". >and then use tax money to fill in the gap. Being employed reduces the amount of money the state has to subsidize compared to the counterfactual where the person is unemployed, so with that framing, walmart is actually helping the state out. > It ignores the fact that workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have zero leverage. They have to take what they can get. They have zero leverage because the supply/demand for their labor is not in their favor. If you characetrize this imbalance as "abuse", does the opposite hold? Are the AI researchers "abusing" poor Zuckerberg, who has to pay 9 figures for white collar employees that usually cost 6 figures? Since we're in a thread about housing prices, are all the boomer home owners "abusing" the poor millennial/gen-z home buyers, by charging 7 figure sums (the market price) for homes that they bought for 5 figures a few decades ago?