[Alberta's Child]

The government makes up the difference in building safety nets plus the social costs of family degeneration.

That is only true if every employee Wal-Mart hires would have otherwise been working at a far higher pay scale without Wal-Mart. You'd have a hard time making the case that this is true with any Wal-Mart employees -- let alone all of them.

The "burden" that Wal-Mart places on taxpayers is a myth, and I'm surprised at how much traction this myth has gotten even here on FreeRepublic. It's not as if Wal-Mart builds a new retail store somewhere and imports welfare cases from all over the country to work there.

[ex-snook]

OK My remarks at 7 were not Wal-Mart specific but aimed at the situation that the NAFTA type promise of 'trade bringing good paying jobs to America' is not met by the Wal-Marts. The limbo of how low can you go in paying people is not a long range solution to economic prosperity.