I'm always fascinated by how low-income workers are always lazy slackers with too many kids who don't deserve any sort of financial security, but people like the Walton family, who did nothing other than get born to a particular guy, are upstanding individuals entitled to every penny they squeeze out of that underpaid work force. It's a cognitive dissonance in Americans I just don't understand.
http://gawker.com/the-simple-path-to...art-1467622860
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The two proposals differ a bit in the details, but they use roughly the same mechanism to reach the same goal, so we'll go with Demos's proposal (described in full here) for ease of explanation. Basically, the argument is this: Walmart throws off enough cash in profits each year that it could easily raise the wages of its workers by about 50%, so that they all made about $25K per year, which is what activists are seeking. Currently, the company just uses that cash for other purposes. Like what? Well, Demos points out that Walmart spent $7.6 billion last year buying back its own stock shares, a maneuver designed to buoy the stock price and dividend payments. From the report:
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There's this attitude that anything to raise stock prices and dividends is of course morally superior to paying workers a living wage, because filling the pockets of people who already have more money than they will ever spend is far more morally important that ensuring that the people who are the actual engine of the economy have money to keep that engine running by spending it on food, fuel and necessities.
The wealthy spend a much, much smaller percentage of their income than do the middle class- they end up hoarding large amounts of money, thus removing it from the economy. And there aren't enough wealthy people to make up for all of the middle class people who have now slid into the lower class and do not have disposable income. We are destroying our own nation in order to cater to the plutocrats. AND we are subsidizing them while we do it, because large numbers of Wal Mart employees are on government programs. So even people like me, who don't shop at Wal Mart, are supporting Wal Mart via our tax dollars, so the Waltons can hoard even more money. Yay!