See if this business model sounds familiar:
The billionaires created by stripping the rest of our wages (and taxes needed to fund our government) use the wealth gained from this model to influence our government and keep the game going. For example, the Walton heirs helped fund a drive to repeal inheritance taxes. The Walmart heirs were one of 18 families that funded a 10-year campaign to get rid of inheritance taxes. In 2006 Congress did just that. Public Citizen documented how these families used front groups to push the “death tax” AstroTurf campaign to convince Americans that average people (“They’re taking family farms!”) were affected by this tax, when only one-fourth of one percent of Americans were affected at all. This campaign gave politicians “cover” to vote for the repeal. (Congress has since restored some of the estate tax.) A Measure Of The Cost How much does this Walmart-model economy cost? A new study measured job losses from Walmart’s offshoring at 400,000. The New York Times reports on the study, in “Walmart’s Imports From China Displaced 400,000 Jobs, a Study Says”: Imports from China by Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and biggest importer, eliminated or displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013 …The study is “A Conservative Estimate of ‘The Wal-Mart Effect’,” by Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Key findings from the report include:
In the long history of false promises made by trade negotiators, the claim that China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 would reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China and create good U.S. jobs stands out. The total U.S. goods trade deficit with China reached $324.2 billion in 2013. Between 2001 and 2013, this growing deficit eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs (Kimball and Scott 2014). As the world’s largest retailer, U.S.-based Wal-Mart is a key conduit of Chinese imports into the American market.The study explains how China sets up this situation: China has achieved its rapidly growing trade surpluses by manipulating its currency: it invests hundreds of billions of dollars per year in U.S. Treasury bills, other government securities, and private foreign assets to bid up the value of the dollar and other currencies and thereby lower the cost of its exports to the United States and other countries. China has also repressed the labor rights of its workers and suppressed their wages, making its products artificially cheap and further subsidizing its exports. Wal-Mart has aided China’s abuse of labor rights and its violations of internationally recognized norms of fair trade by providing a vast and ever-expanding conduit for the distribution of artificially cheap and subsidized Chinese exports to the United States.It concludes that America needs to reform its trade policy to benefit working people instead of billionaires like the Waltons: The U.S. relationship with China needs fundamental change: addressing the exchange rate policies and labor standards issues in the Chinese economy should be important national priorities. Wal-Mart’s huge reliance on Chinese imports illustrates that many powerful economic actors in the United States benefit from China’s unfair trading system. Wal-Mart’s gain, however, is not the country’s gain, as Wal-Mart’s imports have contributed to the ever-growing trade deficit that imperils future economic growth.That 400,000 job-loss number doesn’t measure the jobs lost at smaller, local Walmart competitors driven out of business. It doesn’t measure the cost of public assistance for low-wage employees. It doesn’t measure the way communities are hit by the job losses and resulting low wages. It doesn’t measure the lost jobs due to deferred infrastructure maintenance that result from tax dodging – and budget cuts forced on us by politicians funded by billionaires. The “Walmart model” has become the model of our economy. The billionaires that model creates use their wealth to bribe – I mean, “influence” — our government to keep things the way they are. It is time to take back our government from the billionaires, fix trade, fix taxes and fix wages. Source URL |