Public Subsidies

Washington—As it has for years, the federal government is providing a massive subsidy to the nation’s largest and lowest-paying firms, such as Walmart and Amazon. The subsidy is because the low-wage firms pay their workers so little they must turn to federal food stamps, free school meals for kids, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing vouchers to survive, a new study says. And that’s not the sole subsidy source the companies milk from the taxpayers. The corporate CEOs earn so many millions of dollars via stock buybacks and low capital gains tax rates on those transactions that they’re subsidized, too, at the same time their workers scrape along from paycheck to paycheck.