Kevin's Weblog

There was discussion about Walmart on Marketplace this evening. Apparently someone outside the alternative press finally realized that when companies pay below a living wage and expect their employees to make up the difference by applying for food stamps and the like, in essence the taxpayers are subsidizing the operation of that company. This isn’t exactly rocket science, but I guess it’s news to some.

However, there was a counterpoint from someone arguing that Walmart employs mostly retirees (hmm... employeed retirees, how’s that work?), college students, and the variously disabled, so they’re actually reducing the public burden because otherwise those people would be completely dependent on public assistence. Now, maybe I haven’t seen a representative sample, but that doesn’t match any Walmart I’ve been to, where the employees pretty uniformly appear to be typical working-age, working-class, fully-abled individuals.

In other recent news, I saw a couple newpaper headlines insisting that there was no post-convention bounce for Kerry. However, the Electoral Vote Predictor strongly disagrees. Liberal media indeed...

I think it would be interesting to see a similar graph, but distorted so that size reflected population or electoral votes. Already this graphic is nice in that it reflects a shift from the vast sea of red that we’ve gotten familiar with in recent years, but shrinking some of those wide-open western spaces down to size would really paint a different picture.