Tax Reform in This Election Year: It's Not Likely
Which Credit Card Rewards Does the IRS Care About?The Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) spin machine is in full force today. The first line from a recent press release from the company: "This month, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. will open 81 new stores and clubs across the country, providing jobs for 26,000 associates."
Economist Paul Krugman wrote about the company's questionable status as a job creation machine back in 2005:
... Adding 100,000 people to Wal-Mart's work force doesn't mean adding 100,000 jobs to the economy. On the contrary, there's every reason to believe that as Wal-Mart expands, it destroys at least as many jobs as it creates, and drives down workers' wages in the process ... The new store takes sales away from stores that are already in the area; these stores lay off workers or even go out of business. Because Wal-Mart's big-box stores employ fewer workers per dollar of sales than the smaller stores they replace, overall retail employment surely goes down, not up, when Wal-Mart comes to town.
I don't have a strong position on whether Wal-Mart is good or evil. It's probably somewhere in the middle. But there's something disingenuous about trumpeting the creation of jobs using the gross number of hires with no mention of the fact that many jobs at other stores will be lost. I'm not saying Wal-Mart doesn't have a right to move in and put people out of business. That's capitalism. But bragging about job creation without taking that into account? That's some pretty serious spin.
Wal-Mart added that it's also building two new "High-Efficiency (HE.2) prototypes designed to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use 25 percent less energy than a standard Wal-Mart Supercenter."
Economist Paul Krugman wrote about the company's questionable status as a job creation machine back in 2005:
I don't have a strong position on whether Wal-Mart is good or evil. It's probably somewhere in the middle. But there's something disingenuous about trumpeting the creation of jobs using the gross number of hires with no mention of the fact that many jobs at other stores will be lost. I'm not saying Wal-Mart doesn't have a right to move in and put people out of business. That's capitalism. But bragging about job creation without taking that into account? That's some pretty serious spin.
Wal-Mart added that it's also building two new "High-Efficiency (HE.2) prototypes designed to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use 25 percent less energy than a standard Wal-Mart Supercenter."
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