Thom Hartmann: 'We Are Subsidizing Low Wage Employers!'

Source:Thom Hartmann talking about another form of corporate welfare.

“Thom Hartmann shares his disgust with huge corporations that pay their workers low wages and leave the American taxpayer to pick up the slack.”

From Thom Hartmann

As I wrote about this back in October: 

“I think there are some real simple solutions here to how you fix this problem. Not that I see Congress ever even addressing this issue either this year, next year, or regardless of who controls the House and Senate in 2015. But the problem on a policy level is very easy to fix:

Fast food companies rely on public assistance to compensate their employees, while they make record profits and pay their workers starvation wages. So what you do is pass a public assistance tax to cover Food Assistance, Public Housing, health insurance, etc.

You also lower the corporate tax and tell companies that we want you to invest here. But you either pay your employees living wages, or pay for the public assistance that they receive instead. They could escape the public assistance payroll tax, by paying all their employees living wages.”

From FreeState MD

I think when people tend to think of corporate welfare in America, they think of the government giving large corporations tax benefits for simply being successful:

A big oil company getting a large tax benefit for drilling on private lands, that sort of thing.

Or large companies being able to write off their losses, so they don’t have to go into bankruptcy, regardless if they made bad business decisions.

But these are just a few examples of corporate welfare.

Another example of corporate welfare, is what The Real News got into and I what Thom Hartmann (who I agree with about as often as it snows in Hawaii) was talking about as well, which is allowing corporations to pay their workers very low wags, at taxpayer expense. They pay them 7-8 bucks and hour and the taxpayers pick up the rest of their cost of living, everything to do with health care, housing, groceries, simply because they don’t earn enough money at work to cover these expense themselves.

So to go back my previous post about this, I think the solution here is pretty simple in practical terms:

Replace the minimum wage with a more livable wage.

Encourage work, even lower-wage, lower-skilled jobs, over Welfare.

And force employers to pay into the public assistance safety net with a payroll tax, the money that otherwise would’ve gone to their employees, to cover their cost of living. As we are having a low corporate tax, to encourage businesses to invest in this country.

Not saying my plan would pass while anytime soon. But the solutions here are pretty easy in practical terms.

You can also see this post at FreeState MD, on WordPress.