The article does not go far enough in refuting the Democrats “report” on “Walmart subsidies”.
Two factors help determine any size of how many Walmart employees might be on Medicaid. The first is Walmart’s huge size - one of the largest employers in Wisconsin (where the “study” was done). The second is a condition relative to the entire retail industry - the sorts of people that take retail jobs.
Ignored in the “study” is the fact that many retail workers in any retail company who might be on Medicaid can be part time workers supplementing a household income that qualifies for Medicaid, and not career full time employees.
Ignored and not even looked at in the study was the rate, in Wisconsin, of “retail workers” altogether who were also on Medicaid. Is Walmart an outlier in that? No.
The myth the economic ignorant have been indoctrinated to think is that great revenue size is a bigger factor than rate of profit as to what any employer can afford. It assumes, wrongly, that Walmart’s massive revenue means it could afford to get away with paying massive salaries. It can’t.
Walmart, Costco, Amazon all have annual net revenue of less than 3 cents per dollar of gross revenue (2.8, 1.9, 1.6 respectively). Target’s latest is just over 3 cents on the dollar.
Retail is low paying because regardless of size of revenue profit margins are not high.
Lets say the average employee makes $10.00/hr. That comes out to annual cost of $46B. Lets give every employees a 50% raise! so now annual cost is $69B, a $23B increase in labor costs.
So compared to gross revenues how does that $23B stack up?
$23B/$469B = 5%. So I am not advocating a 50% increase in salary only showing that 50% increase across the board salary increase would cause a one time 5% increase in the retail price. This is not earth shattering.