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So, WalMart could, quite easily, pay their employees more and still profit without raising prices.
Gross profit is only revenue minus cost of goods sold and does not account for taxes, SG&A, interest, and other expenses. You want operating and net profit for the actual profit realized by the owners AFTER ALL EXPENSES.
Operating profit margin (revenue minus all expenses other than taxes and interest) average for WalMart FY 2018 = 4.01%.
Net profit margin (revenue minus all expenses, including taxes and interest) average for WalMart FY 2018 = 1.44%.
Less than 2% net profit margin. And check the graph of the WalMart profits. The last 5 years are steady, downright scary decline. Last quarter 2018 they had a 1.01% net profit margin. There's nowhere for them to decrease that low of a margin. So either prices go up or costs go down. The CEO salary you think is THE PROBLEM actually only represents 0.0043% of the WalMart cost/expense basis. Drop it to zero, and you don't really change the actual profit margin of WalMart, but you do frighten the crap out of investors and The Street ad your stock plummets, which makes not one bit of sense for a publicly traded company, but hey, it's your silly arse moralizing math.
This thread is hurting my head too much. You socialists out there who demand that SOMETHING be done, reach into your OWN pocket and give all you want. I assure you that no one will stop you from doing that. However you should quit trying to STEAL from the pockets of others to promote your ideas of benevolence. After all, benevolence, which is nothing more than charity, is what each individual chooses to give FROM THEIR OWN EARNINGS. Since socialism requires the supposed benevolence to be taken by force of government, there is NOTHING charitable about it, rather it is redistributed WELFARE.
Go read a book or three, and I don't mean skimming through it and looking at the pictures. Maybe you'll learn something.
James Madison (known as the Father of the Constitution because he wrote most of it) said,
Quote:
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
It's actually quite true. Profit amount isn't profit margin, as the amount is solely based on volume without taking the enormous corresponding costs into consideration.
Walmart isn't the problem with their less than 3% profit margin. Look to Apple and Google (Android products/services) with their 20+% profit margins to see who's ripping off the middle class and the poor.
Goes back to the original topic statement which implies that most people feel we SHOULD close the gap. The reality is that the quickest way to become significantly richer is to make someone else become poorer, as fast as possible. The smartest billionaires will extract their fortunes from the rest of us and cut and run.
I'd like to think we don't need to make someone else poorer in order to make more money for ourselves, and on it's face that seems awfully short of understanding how economics works in general. Economics and/or our personal finance challenges are not a zero-sum game.
What we know is it won't be by putting it in the vice of socialism. That debate is a dead end leading to the graveyard.
I tend to agree, but I think there is value in understanding why lots of people find appeal toward some of what more socialist countries provide in the way of balancing the scales between rich and poor. I would also argue that conservatives who hold up Venezuela as some sort of poster example of socialism demonstrate too much ignorance about the subject in general.
Just go and look at what caused the great depression, and then you'll understand why a society that is completely dependant on one another can only sustain so much of a gap.
Not a bad idea, though I don't think we need to look at extreme economic collapse to better understand why such a gap between the most wealthy and the bottom half is a bit hard to justify on a variety of levels, for a variety of reasons.
To those who defend the absurd and still increasing inequality, what is so good about a tiny, egoistic elite increasingly governing the world (and destroying it in the process)?
I can understand that the elite itself defends that, but why would people such as the middle class who are actually suffering from this system (even if they don't notice) defend it?
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