If there’s one thing that conservative and liberal economists agree about, it’s that old bromide about there being no free lunch.
That widget you are manufacturing contains raw materials, its construction takes labor, and its distribution and marketing must be paid for. Your facility and utilities cost money. Those costs–plus some profit–have to be reflected in the price, or you’ll go broke.
You may be able to gain a market advantage by shifting some of your costs to others–we all know of cases where pollution created during production is discharged into the air or water to be paid for by the community at large, rather than by being properly disposed of and the cost of that disposal factored into the product’s sales price–but if it’s a cost of doing business, someone has to pay it.
Market theory assumes that the widget manufacturer will pay all the costs of production, and then pass those costs on to the ultimate consumer, as part of the price.
Increasingly, however, taxpayers are assuming those costs.
Case in point: we are subsidizing the wages of a quarter of the people who have jobs today. A recent study from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois found that fully 52% of fast-food workers receive public assistance–mostly Medicaid and food stamps–to the tune of $7 billion dollars a year. (McDonald’s workers alone got $1.2 billion of that.) One Wisconsin Wal-Mart costs taxpayers over a million dollars a year.
The United States now has the highest proportion of low-wage workers in the developed world. And as the report noted, every dollar taxpayers spend subsidizing corporations so they can continue paying their workers poverty wages is a dollar not spent on early childhood programs, or schools, or roads, or any other social good.
We need to have a national conversation about who is paying for that burger.
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