Why Wal-Mart is Bad for America

Wal-Mart is bad for America and takes advantage of the system. Wal-Mart pays its employee's poverty level wages that hardly sustain life. Wal-Mart has taken a strict anti-union stance that has practically bypassed the system that would allow employee's to form a labor union to negotiate better wages. Wal-Mart pays its' employee's a poverty wage an expects government subsidies such as welfare to pick up the slack so their employees can sustain.The estimated cost to the taxpayers in the state of California alone is $86 million that Wal-Mart has created by paying these extremely low wages. Wal-Mart also goes into communities and attempts to get tax subsidies to open up a store in that town. It is estimated that Wal-Mart has received over one billion dollars in tax subsidies from state and local governments.

Wal-Mart is a huge factor in globalization and outsourcing which is damaging America's economic security. Wal-Mart is the nation's single largest reailer of goods produced in a foreign country. The majority of those foreign made goods are coming from the communist country of China. Wal-Mart directly imports sixty percent of the goods on its' stores shelves and the other fourty percent of their goods come from American suppliers. What Wal-Mart does not inculde in their figures is the percentage of the goods from the American supplies that were actually produced in a foreign country or from globally sourced parts, thus the actual number is much higher than sixty percent. In 2004 Wal-Mart reported that they purchased $18 billion from China. If Wal-Mart was an economy of its own it would be China's eigth largest trading partner ahead of Russia, which shares a land border with China. Wal-Mart has helped to create the largest trading defecit between any two countries ever (the United States and China).