Written By: Anton Sawyer
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If only Dr. Fauci were a surgeon, he may have been able to install the DNC with a spine. Seriously, even George McFly got sick and tired of being the “good guy” and getting walked all over. I’m not saying the DNC needs to become some totally arrogant piece of human filth like the GOP is becoming, but it would be nice if they had the guts to actually take the steps needed to enact the policies of theirs that could stand a chance of working. Their desire to perpetuate the filibuster also shows that they are more concerned with appearances than sticking out their necks to support what they believe to be right. The DNC has done it before in 2013, and the GOP did it as well in 2017. Clearly, the politicians in Washington don’t have a fear of “going nuclear,” so it’s very unclear what was different about the Trump administration and ending the filibuster to clean up his messes that’s stopping them.
There’s one particular element to what Biden is doing economically that has been carried over from the Trump era which if the DNC pulled out all of the stops, they could allow over $28 billion to be funneled towards raising the federal minimum wage. This would lift at least every American Walmart employee that is currently in poverty out of it—and then some. Today I am going to look at the leftover policy that Biden refuses to change which is directly hurting Americans; the Trump tariffs.
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We first have to dissect the impact of the tariffs. Please know that if anyone tells you they’ve been successful, they are outright lying to you. A January 2020 Forbes article showed that because of the Trump-era tariffs and their disastrous impact on American farmers, the US government had to subsidize them to the tune of $28 billion, per year. For the final years of his administration, more money was spent on aid to farmers than NASA, the Department of State, and Food Safety and Inspection, among many others. Given how many taxpayers' dollars are being diverted to the farmers specifically and how President Biden has preached over and over about how he is against all of Trump’s policies, he’s preached about how his focus has been on the middle-class. If this is the case, it’s confusing as to why he’s resolved to do nothing about them.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has advised the Biden administration to end the tariffs imposed by Trump and his administration. The “Concluding Statement of the 2021 Article IV Mission,” which was issued on July 1, 2021, following the end of an official IMF staff visit, takes aim at U.S. trade policies. In it, the statement made is pretty clear: "a removal of the obstacles to free trade would help support U.S. workers and create more and better U.S. jobs (particularly in light of the domestic efforts that are being proposed to increase productivity, labor supply, and the competitiveness of U.S. producers)." If there is any, actual morality on the liberal side of the fence, then why are taxpayers being punished for Trump’s ineptitude? Both Biden and the DNC as a whole have the resources to change the course on this. If they did, this would free up the $28 billion to put towards getting the middle-class workers of this country off of public assistance, especially as it pertains to the largest employer in the US, Walmart.
We’ve all heard how terrible Walmart is to their employees in various news articles and documentaries when it comes to paying them a living wage. The numbers are breathtaking. A nonpartisan watchdog agency—the U.S. Government Accountability Office—2020 analysis of data from the Census Bureau, as well as 15 state agencies across 11 states, found that millions of full-time workers rely on government assistance to make ends meet. The report focused on Medicaid benefits as well as recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Walmart ranked among the top four largest employees of SNAP and Medicaid benefits in the states whose data was included in the report, employing an estimated 14,500 workers who received food stamps, according to the GAO report’s findings. When looking further, these numbers are not new—this has been the standard for AT LEAST the last decade. According to a 2014 report by Americans for Tax Fairness, Walmart receives an estimated $6.2 billion in subsidies every year, primarily from the Federal Government. No matter the town or city, if you have a Walmart in your community, you are paying a Walmart Tax. In fact, a single Walmart Supercenter is estimated to cost taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.74 million per year in public assistance money. A 2020 report published by Mother Jones showed that in the state of Georgia alone, there are an estimated 3,959 Walmart employees on publicly funded healthcare—Medicaid. The reality is that Walmart leads the state in that statistic. Walmart is not alone. I could give example after example of various corporations and their burden to the American taxpayer, but I think you get the idea. When you look at how many people are working full-time but still unable to provide for their families, you begin to see why Americans are quitting their jobs at record rates—almost one million people voluntarily left their jobs in June 2021. There is not a job shortage, there is a wage shortage.
Let’s say you are a single parent that works at Walmart full time. You not only have to work 40 hours, or more, a week, but you also have to try to juggle daycare, along with the everyday elements in life that cost money. You do this and yet you still have to be on public assistance for both food and healthcare. People are seeing this and realizing that if they cut out the middleman (employer), then the cost of daycare and the other things I mentioned above will be drastically reduced. Even removing the enhanced unemployment benefits, the reduction of cost is such to where it can allow people to survive on public assistance alone. Yes, I know that one of the biggest arguments against this way of life is personal pride, but pride and reality are rarely good bedfellows. It makes no economic sense when the job you have ends up costing you more money than you make from it. This is where killing the tariffs comes in.
The cost each year to taxpayers for Walmart alone comes out to somewhere between $6 and $10 billion annually. The tariffs come out to $28 billion annually. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if the funds were re-allocated and put towards the federal minimum wage, or some piece of legislation targeting poverty, then we could at least have the employees of the largest supermarket in America be able to survive … and still have about $18 billion left over for other mega employers that have full-time workers in poverty. Income inequality in America is reaching new levels. Per capita, we have more people employed working a full-time job that are also on public assistance than any other country in the world.
I want to leave you with a quote that shows just how little the current administration is willing to do anything about it. When asked about the million people who walked out on their jobs in July 2021 and what could be done to prevent this, Biden had the answer. “Pay them more.” The lack of self-awareness in that statement, along with the fact that the DNC has the capabilities of making this tax break a reality, is truly astounding. But it illustrates that either he is in mental decline (like the GOP has been using as an attack ad nauseum), or he doesn’t care. Either way, we all lose.
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