Good point; I'm fairly certain being on welfare while working for WalMart was/is a common thing; I saw it in a documentary, and so I'm just repeating what I've heard, since I've never worked for them and have no plans to. But we're talking about a rock and a hard place; if we increase the minimum wage, businesses lay-off employees to make up the difference, which merely increases the workload for the remaining employees. The social safety net catches those laid-off and to pay for all these people to survive without work, we would reappropriate taxes, either from one spot and to another (and social is already one of the biggest, if not the biggest black-holes of tax money, right up there with military and interest on debts), or increase taxation to push into social, one way or another. On the other hand, if we lower minimum wage, people would still really need that social safety net to get by. The worker just can't get a break, it seems.
Well, right now an employee is able to get a WalMart job, and say "yes" to the paltry wage, because he knows he can still rely on safety nets to survive. But what if we were to take away the safety nets? Wouldn't employees demand higher wages to make sure they have enough to live off of, or even start saying "no" to the job until it offers more pay? I would think there is some point at which an employee would decide that the pay is low enough to not be worth their time or their effort. In the end, sure, prices at WalMart will go up a bit, but they may be more than offset from everyone not having to pay as much for safety nets.
That is why corporations
bribe contribute to both parties. They don't want to lose their corporate entitlements.
