
It was the first time I experienced a group of people all using a dataset with the sole purpose of understanding it. There was no expectation that we would find out anything, no assumptions, no need to turn it into a report that evidence how we use funding or compare us to another service. We weren’t constrained by any of the things that ordinarily we have to consider when we pull data together.
Here is one of the failed rules of today’s economy: humans are expendable. Their labor should be eliminated as a cost whenever possible. This will increase the profits of a business, and richly reward investors. These profits will trickle down to the rest of society.
As noted above, a $15 minimum wage might cost Walmart on the order of $5 billion/year. This is no small number. It represents about a quarter of Walmart’s annual profits, and about 1.25% of its annual US revenues. But it might save taxpayers $6 billion per year (and that’s just the amount used to subsidize Walmart; including all the other low-wage employers i…