Americans for Tax Fairness has published their findings of a Walmart tax evasion investigation. I’m not devious enough to quickly understand how Walmart is doing this, and I sure don’t know if what it’s legal, but I’m glad to know eyebrows are being raised.
Their scheme goes something like this: Walmart has lied in corporate earnings filings about how much money they’ve sent overseas. They have stashed that money in secret accounts, mostly in Luxembourg, to avoid paying United States taxes on it. An interesting sidebar is that they now Walmarts wants to bring a lot of that money back into the US in order to expand their operation – again, without paying taxes on the earnings it represents. This just stinks, don’t you think?
I already knew Walmart and its owners are the scum of the earth. I can only hope that learning how little the Waltons are willing to share with the countrymen who have made them so rich will motivate people to stop shopping at Walmart. After all, it isn’t the bargain people think it is. As Politics USA writes:
Not only does Walmart keep their workers in poverty through low wages, kill small locally owned businesses when they move into an area, cause an increase in local taxes by getting sweetheart tax free deals from local politicians, tax dodging by corporate giants like Walmart increases taxes on small businesses by $3,200 a year.
Walmart’s no bargain
Oh, and then there’s the thing where Walmart solicits donations from shoppers so workers will have enough food for their Thanksgiving dinners. And let’s not forget that Walmart pays its workers so little, many need foodstamps to survive:
“The same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue — an estimated $13 billion last year — also likely has the most employees using food stamps.”
The name of the mammoth food stamp-reliant company is no secret: Walmart.
As journalist Krissy Clark notes in Marketplace’s valuable new series “The Secret Life of the Food Stamp,” Walmart benefits from food stamps in multiple ways, as taxpayers both underwrite the company’s food sales and also subsidize its payroll costs.
There is no doubt that food stamps (and a host of other public subsidies from Medicaid to home heating assistance to the Earned Income Tax Credit and beyond) reduce Walmart’s employment costs substantially. A study released last year by staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that a single 300-employee Walmart Supercenter may cost taxpayers anywhere from $904,542 to nearly $1.75 million per year.
Politifact answers the question: Just how rich are the Waltons?
Sanders tweeted that “the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America.”
The statistic correctly compares the combined net worth of the bottom 41.5 percent of American families with the six Walton family members. We think the additional points — that many people with a negative net worth are not necessarily poor and that percentages about wealth distribution can be deceiving — are important and interesting. Nevertheless, Sanders’ claim is solid. We rate it True.
Kathryn Longo and Leen De Weerd Mosley for sharing articles about the new report.