Social safety net as corporate welfare?

Boing boing has a thread claiming that medicaid and foodstamps subsidize Wal-Mart. I am honestly, genuinely trying to wrap my head around this, but I can't. I try to approach it from a place of understanding but get in the commenters' heads just long enough to give myself another way to articulate that they are wrong. This is not where understanding comes from.

The boingboing post + commenters are atrocious and the source articles don't even contain all the facts he cites, much less walk me through his conclusions. Does anyone know of a better source?

Bodies are weird

I can eat about 1.5 hard boiled eggs before I am absolutely stuffed. I can eat 3 pieces of French Toast, each of which uses one egg, before I am full. If I eat 2 scrambled eggs, I feel icky and bloated. If I eat those same scrambled eggs with an equivalent volume of produce, I feel fine.

Quick recs

Roasted Vegetables:

some amount of vegetable (suggestions: potato, cauliflower, broccoli)
olive oil
spices (you can do this yourself, or get a spice mix like those sold by Penzey's).

cube vegetables, apply enough olive oil to hold the spices to the vegetable
put in tinfoil, put tinfoil in oven
cook for a while. Maybe an hour?

It requires minimal no prep time, is forgiving of over- and undercooking*, and reheats brilliantly. It's nutritious, and by varying the spices can taste different every night. The only downside is you do have to start cooking an hour before you get hungry, a thing at which I am not good. But besides that, it's a solid way for lazy people to eat well.


*Note: don't undercook potatoes, they will kill you.

Social safety net part 2

I think the commenters at boing boing are accusing wal-mart of free riding, by paying a wage that qualifies its employees for aid. That just seems sort of weird to me. It's predicated on the employees' health being a public good, a thought I find profoundly disturbing. In fact, it creates that same sort of unease when I heard people describing individuals' health as a public good to justify government funded medicine. It's just too close to owing other people your health.

It's also a little frustrating when people justify high taxes on the rich by saying it will be invested in public goods like health care, and then object when the rich actually receive some benefit from it. That just seems unfair to me.

And if you want to argue that Wal-Mart is able to offer lower wages because of that aid... yeah, that's plausible. Libertarians and conservatives have been shouting about that for years, only we/they were using it as an argument against the aid. Don't call me mean for pointing out the rain and then get mad when you get wet.