wal-mart welfare

An alarming article about Wal-Mart, the latest in a barrage of such stories, served up the following statistic:

In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in holding employee compensation at low levels, [a report by the House Education and Workforce Committee] assesses the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.

And that's Fortune magazine's "Most Admired Corporation?"