A recent study conducted by the Universities of California-Berkeley and Illinois found more than half of the low wage workers employed in US fast-food restaurant chains earn so little that they’re on public assistance to make ends meet. The study was conducted over the 2007-2011 time frame. Researchers discovered that the ten largest American fast-food companies cost US taxpayers more than $3.8B each year in public assistance in the provision of basic necessities. Moreover, twice as many fast-food workers enroll on public aid programs relative to the overall workforce in general and they earn less in today’s dollars than their counterparts did fifty years ago.
Bear in mind we’re not talking about high school kids here, the median age of these workers is 28. And bear in mind this industry we subsidize generates sales of $200B a year. Even if you separate out those working full time, more than half of those families are enrolled in public assistance programs costing taxpayers $7B with more than half of that relating to healthcare. Overall families with a working member in this society account for 73% of all public assistance enrollment amounting to two-thirds of all public spending.
So I relay all that to say this; we are not subsidizing lazy deadbeat folk who refuse to work. We are subsidizing our “job creator” class and enhancing their profit margins. This is not free enterprise, it is a very destructive version of a parasitic and cannibalistic approach to capitalism. It is a societal wealth extraction business model that internalizes profit while externalizing risk and expenditure.
Wal-Mart; another fine example. Every year Wal-Mart employees rely upon $2.66B in government aid which breaks down to about $420,000 per store. Across all states Wal-Mart workers are the top recipients of Medicaid. And all while Wal-Mart has consistently blocked worker attempts to organize, up to 80% of all workers in Wal-Mart stores utilize food stamps. Make sure you tally that into those “always low prices”.
Another example, the Matador Ranch Company in Montana owned by Koch Industries. This is a 300,000 acre ranching operation consisting of a combination of privately leased, state leased, and federally leased land. Grazing lease rates are tallied as Animal Unit Months equating to an amount per month per animal (AUM). Both state and federal rates have been subsidized for some time, originally intended as a bone tossed to resident family ranchers. Those rates in 2011 were $20.00 AUM or more on private land, a $6.00-8.00 average AUM on state land, and $1.35 AUM on federal land.
So not only were Uncle Charlie and Uncle David sucking up the socialist benefits - yet again - provided by the public, they even sent a representative to Montana Land Board proceedings in 2011 to protest a proposed increase in state land use grazing rates to help fund Montana schools.
What we are doing for our “job creator” class in this society is tantamount to human sacrifice. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. Internalize the profit, externalize the risk and expense. The only government spending these jackasses object to is that which winds up elsewhere.