If Walmart laid off all their employees and replaced them with half as many employees that were paid twice as much, you'd be subsidizing even more people's living expenses. Yet somehow Walmart would be a more ethical company because no of their their own employees would be on SNAP?
So if you don't have the skills to be worth twice the compensation, you don't deserve a job at all and it's the taxpayer's responsibility to pay for your expenses?
What a weird thing to read into my comment. No, I do not think that. Skills didn't even come up. And this isn't the only employer that exists, nor is there a fixed supply of job money in the world.
Also, paying half as many people twice the wage is in aggregate roughly the same as cutting typical work hours to 20 per week while maintaining the same pay per week. Where's the downside for the employees?
And in particular for the SNAP aspect, the whole point of this discussion is that the current wages were not getting those people out of the SNAP income range, so the taxpayer cost is the same even if Walmart fires all of them and replaces them with nothing.
If Walmart is bad for employing people who rely on SNAP, then wouldn't it be the same be true for any other business that does the same?
> Also, paying half as many people twice the wage is in aggregate roughly the same as cutting typical work hours to 20 per week while maintaining the same pay per week.
My point is that it's not roughly the same at all. In one option everyone is still employed, and in the other half the people don't have a job. Obviously, if something magically doubles everyone's productivity, that would be a good thing, but you have to apply that on both sides of the comparison.
> taxpayer cost is the same even if Walmart fires all of them and replaces them with nothing.
Walmart minimum wage is $14 now. Walmart workers who are single and childless or married to a working couple who otherwise wouldn't be eligible for SNAP would become eligible if they lose their jobs.
> If Walmart is bad for employing people who rely on SNAP, then wouldn't it be the same be true for any other business that does the same?
I didn't say they're bad. My claim is that if they paid twice as much per hour, for half as many people, that would be an improvement.
> My point is that it's not roughly the same at all. In one option everyone is still employed, and in the other half the people don't have a job. Obviously, if something magically doubles everyone's productivity, that would be a good thing, but you have to apply that on both sides of the comparison.
If people can get paid the same amount while working half as many days, most of them will work fewer days. Half of people would not be unemployed. And for the people that would end up unemployed, more jobs will fill the void.
We don't need to push down wages to keep people employed.
There would be a lot of chaos if every single company doubled wages to low level employees on the same day. But we don't need to worry about that contrived scenario.
> Walmart minimum wage is $14 now. Walmart workers who are single and childless or married to a working couple who otherwise wouldn't be eligible for SNAP would become eligible if they lose their jobs.
I think the vast majority of them would find new jobs.
Or we could only apply this policy to future Walmart hires or something.
> If people can get paid the same amount while working half as many days, most of them will work fewer days. Half of people would not be unemployed.
I gave a simple thought experiment, but you're trying to escape making a trade off. Yes, in the real world, people value free time, you can employee people part time, and there are other employers besides Walmart, but that's outside the point I'm trying to make. If we're going for full realism, Walmart would also go bankrupt if they laid off half their workforce and paid the rest twice as much.
I'm not trying to escape the trade-off, I just don't think it teaches us anything we can apply to the real world.
If we keep things as simple as possible, and assume those people stay unemployed, then Walmart should make as many jobs as possible at absolute minimum wages, maybe even below the legal limit. But if we're talking about semi-realistic scenarios, then they should not do that.
This moral framework can lead to all sorts of suboptimal outcomes, such as employer healthcare mandates that are subsided with tax incentives (though some other interventions, like modest minimum wages can help people without distorting the economy).
