Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Walmart Effect

I’ve written before about Walmart-as-an-object lesson. The last time I looked, the company was averaging profits of $15.5 billion dollars annually, the Walton family’s net worth was over $129 billion dollars, and the company was still declining to pay employees a living wage. Instead, it relies on taxpayer dollars to make up the difference between its workers’ paychecks and workers’ cost of living.

After all, when an employee must rely on food stamps or other safety-net benefits, taxpayers are paying a portion of that employee’s wages.

Walmart (including Sam’s Club) is the largest private employer in the country–and one of the largest recipients of corporate welfare. (Walmart employees receive an estimated $6.2 billion dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies each year.)

Money not paid out in salary, of course, goes directly to the bottom line, so we taxpayers are also funding shareholders’ profits. 

All this is, as they say, old news–along with the recognition that Walmarts located on the outskirts of small towns have emptied out the retail centers of those communities.

Recently, however, research has added another layer to what I’ve come to see as the Walmart scam.

No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

As the article notes, it’s relatively simply to calculate cost savings for consumers, but those cost savings don’t represent a company’s total effect on a community.  When a new Walmart opens, consumers change their shopping habits, workers switch jobs, and competitors shift their strategies–or often, close. 

One research project found that In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a  community, “the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.”

In theory, however, those people could still be better off if the money that they saved by shopping at Walmart was greater than the hit to their incomes. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Walmart itself, for example, the store saves households an average of $3,100 a year in 2024 dollars. Many economists think that estimate is generous (which isn’t surprising, given who funded the study), but even if it were accurate, Parolin and his co-authors find that the savings would be dwarfed by the lost income. They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.

A second study found that the losses weren’t limited to workers in the retail sector. They affected every sector from manufacturing to agriculture. But why would this be?

When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers. (By some estimates, the company has historically sourced 60 to 80 percent of its goods from China alone.) As a result, Wiltshire finds, five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”

I wonder what will happen when Trump’s China tariffs force Walmart to raise prices…

For now, Walmart is a monopsony— a company that can pay low wages because workers have few alternatives. This helps explain why Walmart pays lower wages than competitors like Target and Costco.

In a properly functioning capitalist system, we taxpayers wouldn’t be subsidizing monopsonies.

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How Far We’ve Fallen…

During Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, I shared what was then a widespread opinion–that he wasn’t up to the job, that the country’s economic problems were a consequence of Presidential ineptitude. My evaluation was based on the sort of superficial knowledge and media coverage upon which most busy people rely (I was a newly-minted lawyer with three small children at home–four if you counted the husband I had at that time.)

I’ve since come to appreciate the considerable contributions Carter made both in office and after. His death has unleashed multiple reports of those contributions. The obituaries and commentaries have also focused–quite rightly–on the fact of his decency. In an age when the label “Christian” is dishonored daily by racists and White nationalists claiming the title, Carter’s life honored the term.

Whatever disagreements Americans might legitimately have with Carter’s Presidential performance or policy positions, it’s unbelievably depressing to compare his life–characterized by integrity, human kindness and concern for the common good–with that of the degenerate specimen we are about to inaugurate.

Recently, a reader shared with me a lengthy post he’d come across, responding to the question: why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid? I’m reproducing it below.

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THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/trump-university…/502387002/)

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.” (https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hotel-paid-millions…)

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.” (https://abcnews.go.com/…/list-trumps-accusers…/story…)

That when he made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/donald-trumps…/)

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you exclaimed, “He sure knows me.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/president-donald…/4073405002/)

That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to which Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting, and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!” (https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story)

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw. (https://www.nbcnews.com/…/donald-trump-criticized-after…)

That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?” (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/americas-first…/549794/)

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/what-trump-has…/1501321001/)

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!” (https://www.latimes.com/…/la-na-trump-campaign-protests…)

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!” (https://www.independent.co.uk/…/donald-trump-orders…)

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!” (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/why-cant-trump…/567320/)

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.” (https://www.huffpost.com/…/trump-insult-foreign…)

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!” (https://www.politico.com/…/138-trump-policy-changes…)

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!” (https://www.usnews.com/…/how-is-donald-trump-profiting…)

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was in the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/the-very-big-ocean…/)

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!” (https://www.cnn.com/…/donald-trump-dictators…/index.html)

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids, has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “Well, OK then.” (https://www.nbcnews.com/…/more-5-400-children-split…)

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise. (https://www.americanprogress.org/…/confronting-cost…/)

What you don’t get, Trump supporters, is that our succumbing to frustration and shaking our heads, thinking of you as stupid, may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.

Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

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We’ve descended a very long way from Jimmy Carter…..

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Let’s Call It What It Is

I have a number of kind, well-meaning, “Never Trump” friends who tell me I’m painting with too broad a brush when I characterize the MAGA movement as racist to its core. These nice people (granted, lots nicer than me) are loathe to attribute Trumpism simply to hatred of those “Others”–Blacks, Jews, Muslims, immigrants (ok, Brown immigrants–not those from Norway or Canada), LGBTQ+ folks, and those detested “libruls.”

Sorry, but after coming across a recent news item from the Guardian, I rest my case. The headline really tells the story: “Anti-woke’ dog food and pro-America lipstick: US sees rise in rightwing stores.”

Mammoth Nation and Public Square are among the most prominent in the movement, both offering an Amazon-esque service, but stocking only goods which they claim are made by companies which have “conservative values”. Mammoth Nation makes its values clear on the homepage of its website: “Join Mammoth Nation to fight against Radical Left agendas,” booms a message, with the company claiming to stock only “brands who align with your beliefs”.

“When all of this wokeness started to happen and cancel culture, and then you start to see these companies stand up and say, ‘We’re not supporting this conservative or this Christian value any more,’ and just really lines in sand were starting to get drawn,” Drew Berquist, the national spokesperson for Mammoth Nation, told The Need to Know Morning Show, a North Dakota-based rightwing radio show, in December.

“And a lot of people were trying to figure out: OK, well, who are the good companies? Who are the companies that share our values, that support our constitution, support our troops or, you know, our Christian values as a country.”

Evidently, the Right’s “Christian values” are limited to “anti-woke” commitments. PublicSquare – which touts itself as Amazon for the right wing– claims to list products from more than 70,000 businesses. Unlike Amazon, however, PublicSquare’s merchants tout their allegiance to Republican causes, including opposition to abortion and an ahistorical version of the Constitution.

Evidently, efforts by companies to embrace diversity and inclusiveness–Target carrying Pride merchandise, Bud Light collaborating with Dylan Mulvaney (a trans media personality) – enraged rightwing consumers, creating a market for companies like Mammoth Nation and PublicSquare.

The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, launched a range of razors in 2022, after the company’s CEO deemed a rival razor brand to have “canceled” conservatives. The publication has since branched out into chocolate, soap, floor cleaner and, earlier this year, “manly green vitamin capsules”.

“Do you want to buy your men’s health products from a company that partners with drag queens and supports radical organizations that push gender procedures on children?” the Daily Wire asked readers in an article announcing the multivitamin – which at their launch cost 10 times more than Centrum-branded multivitamins.

According to the Guardian, most of these efforts have thus far failed to show a profit.

What they have shown, however, is the real motivation behind right-wing attacks on “woke culture.” Not that anyone paying attention will be shocked, or even surprised.

The word “woke” originally meant “awareness”–awareness of social injustices. The term has been co-opted by the Right, and become shorthand for a raft of cultural changes that enrage MAGA folks: efforts to be inclusive, efforts to combat racism, applications of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even mainstream Christian teachings about loving one’s neighbors and welcoming the stranger–in other words, for the America that a majority of citizens want to inhabit. “Woke” is thus the antithesis of White Christian male dominance and superiority, and a favorite epithet of a MAGA movement that is reactionary, racist and misogynistic.

My kinder and gentler friends insist that it is unfair to paint the entire MAGA movement as racist. I think the fairness of that accusation depends upon how one defines MAGA–whether it includes the small Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wing of the party. We are now seeing that it doesn’t (despite Musk’s own neo-Nazi sympathies), and I’m willing to concede that there is a faction of uber-wealthy “bros”–mostly Silicon Valley techies– whose motives for supporting a mentally-ill felon are purely financial and transactional. (The incompatibility of that faction with Trump’s GOP/MAGA base is currently playing out in real time.)

Non-bro MAGA Americans are replaying the Civil War, albeit thus far with less bloodshed. They are unwilling to share the civic table with those “Others” they insist cannot be “real Americans.” The war against “woke” is a contemporary battle for White “Christian” Supremacy.

It’s an ugly, embarrassing reality, but let’s call it what it is…..

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Speaking Of Unanticipated Consequences…

Forgive me if today’s subject seems unnecessarily repetitive, but I recently came across an article from The Bulwark that eloquently explained my concerns with our digital information environment. The article was titled “American Folklore,” and “Folklore” was an apt description of what has become of my original excitement/thrill/misunderstanding of the then-new communication mechanism called the Internet.

The dream of the internet was that it would create a high-information, high-trust society. Technology was supposed to make facts and primary sources immediately available to everyone, thereby ushering in an age of rationality and data-driven decision-making.

If you lived in Bumblefuck, Missouri, the internet meant that you were no longer beholden to the limited stream of news provided by your local paper, three broadcast networks, and assorted cable news players. You’d be able to see the information with your own eyes.

A Senate committee issued an important report? A scientific journal published a landmark study? You’d be able to sit in your living room and pull up the actual study or report and read it yourself, from soup to nuts. Your local newspaper might run a 600-word story about a speech some politician gave. The internet meant that you could watch the entire speech, unfiltered, and draw your own conclusions.

It was a lovely dream. And as we all know now, incredibly unrealistic..

As the article acknowledged, the internet has, indeed, made all of that data readily available to people. But the magnitude of even credible information is overwhelming, and much of it is too complicated for non-experts to understand. Furthermore, as the author says, the “bigger problem has been the sheer volume of noise that the internet gave rise to.” That noise has overwhelmed the information, and is largely the reason for the decline of trust in institutions.

I think there is another, even bigger problem.

Not only does the massive amount of information and disinformation challenge ordinary citizens, the way in which the Internet distributes information– the way that information is made accessible–requires each of us to be our own gatekeeper. It requires us to know what it is we need to know, and then to search it out and determine its credibility.

Let me use an example. A site called Chalkbeat provides vetted, credible information about education in several states, including my own state of Indiana. A couple of years ago, I asked over twenty reasonably bright, educated people if they had ever heard of the site or visited it; every one of them was unaware of its existence.

When we had local newspapers that were widely read, gatekeepers (editors) determined what subjects were important to disseminate–what informed citizens needed to know. They weren’t uniformly right, but those papers included education news, and readers who may not have had children in school or who were unaware of or disinterested in how education policy affected them (think property taxes, the effects of school reputation on sales price of homes, etc.) would at least see headlines that might lead them to better understanding of why they should keep informed about the subject.

The gatekeepers weren’t perfect, but they were helpful. Today, we can remain blissfully unaware of what is occurring in many  policy areas and the relevance, let alone the existence, of sources of information on the topics.

The scattered nature of our information environment not only puts the onus on the individual to determine what s/he needs to know and where to find trustworthy sources, but it is the major reason that we Americans occupy incompatible realities. The “zone”–that is, the Internet–has been flooded with propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, as well as sincere but different ideological approaches to most subjects. There’s a reason so many people have turned to social media for their “news”–it is simply unreasonable to expect every American to decide what subjects s/he needs to know and then to  search out and evaluate information on those subjects.

As the linked essay notes,

The result of all of this [changing economics of media] is a growing consumer alienation from the actual sources of information, a return to a kind of folk-story society ripe for manipulation by demagogues who promise simplicity in an increasingly complex world…

We are now a folk-story society. The drones. The immigrants eating cats and dogs. The crime wave and “economic hardships” that haven’t been real since 2022.

It’s all folklore. Stories that a post-literate people pass on to one another in the oral tradition.

Our information environment isn’t the only cause of our current dysfunctions, but it is a major contributor.

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An Uninformed Electorate

Over the years I’ve been writing this blog, one of my more frequent laments has been the collapse of America’s local newspapers. The last time I looked, the United States had lost a over a quarter– 2,100 – of its local newspapers, and that number doesn’t include the “ghost” papers that are theoretically still functioning, but no longer able to adequately cover local news.

What do we lose when we lose local newspapers?

We lose “news you can use” about local government agencies, schools and the goings-on at the State legislature. As I’ve previously noted, we also lose a common information environment that builds community and is more trusted than national media sources. And that trust matters.

Research confirms that the loss of a properly functioning local paper leads to diminished participation in municipal elections, which become less competitive. Corruption goes unchecked, driving costs up for local government. Disinformation proliferates because people turn to social media to get their “facts.”

A recent study confirms the importance of local newspapers to the maintenance of an informed citizenry. I’ve previously reported on a statistic I found stunning (and depressing)–the fact that people who follow the news (presumably including Fox “News”) voted for Harris by a considerable margin, and people who reported seldom or never following the news voted for Trump by a much larger margin. But that finding didn’t distinguish between local and national news sources.

This study–cited by the Local News Initiative-– did.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in U.S. history, but in news deserts – counties lacking a professional source of local news – it was an avalanche. Trump won 91% percent of these counties over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, according to an analysis of voting data by Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project.

The study didn’t confuse correlation with causation; researchers were careful to note that Trump’s dominance in the country’s news deserts isn’t a simple matter of cause and effect.

That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average–exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020….

But news deserts do have the potential to affect voting behavior in important ways. When voters lose access to local news, they tend to gravitate toward national news sources, according to research by Joshua P. Darr, a professor of public communications at Syracuse University. This kind of news, by definition, focuses on broad national issues—abortion, immigration, the economy, etc.—without regard to local conditions.

Individuals exposed only to national news are thus unlikely to know how a given candidate’s priorities will affect their cities or states. They base their votes on a few national issues that tend to reinforce basic partisan identities. Voters in news deserts are also more likely to engage in ballot “roll off”  – that is, vote for president but leave local and statewide races blank. Others will simply vote a straight ticket for candidates who share the political party of their presidential choice.

Those practices can hardly be considered informed votes by thoughtful citizens–those needed by a democratic system.

Several of the studies I’ve previously cited have found that citizens tend to place more trust in local sources of news than in national media. The absence of a local newspaper doesn’t just deprive them of important information about their own communities–the disappearance of those trusted local sources leaves them with a choice between inadequate alternatives: they may stop following the news altogether, or they may ignore the so-called “legacy” media in favor of less credible sources that reflect their partisan leanings and biases.

I agree with the researchers that Trump’s victory in America’s news deserts is not a “simple matter of cause and effect.” The study’s results should not be reduced to “Trump won because people were uninformed.” But it would be equally wrongheaded to dismiss that argument entirely. It is at least plausible to assume that more information from a more trusted source might have influenced at least some of these voters–if not to withhold a vote for Trump, at least to consider their choices for down-ballot candidates. (The presence of a local newspaper has been found to increase ticket-splitting, for example, indicating more informed voting.)

Life in a news desert leads to more political corruption, higher taxes, lower bond ratings, greater social alienation, misinformation, and loss of social cohesion. It also leads to more votes for enormously unfit candidates.

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