another eye opens

WARREN ON WALMART

[Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth] Warren grew up in Oklahoma, the youngest of four children. When her father lost his job, in the early nineteen-sixties, and the family lost their station wagon and very nearly their house, her mother, who had a high-school education and no job experience, supported them by getting a minimum-wage job at Sears. That’s no longer possible, Warren argues, and there’s no disputing her evidence: “Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage today is lower than it was in 1965—about 24 percent lower.” The nation’s largest employer is Walmart, which reported $14.69 billion in profits in 2015. The seven members of the family who founded the company, the Waltons, “have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together,” but Walmart’s wildly underpaid employees get by only with assistance from the federal government. Warren writes, “The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children.”

–Jill Lepore in The New Yorker