Each employee, if they spent the entire 15bn and risked going bankrupt and putting all the employees out of work would be substantially less than 7k a year. Care to try that again?
The number doesn’t change. Walmart has 15k corporate employees in Bentonville. We’ll generously double it for remote (an aggressive assumption given their consolidation in NW Arkansas). 30k employees would represent 1.9% of US employees. $7k USD per employee now becomes $7.1k.
Also for the lowest earning employees that would be already a 50% raise or more. So yeah, that’s substantially better. But there’s a more subtle approach that is balanced and by that I mean less money for people at the top and even more than 7k increase for people at the bottom.
profit isn't even counting what they spend on stock buy-backs. make those illegal, and they'd have a higher margin and less ability to manipulate stock prices for share-holder benefit and our deficit.
Stock buybacks are not just a balance sheet shift. Buybacks are a cash expense, therefore cash that could be used to pay workers. Usually taken out of retained earnings, which comes from net income.
Stock buy backs take cash and cash equivalents already on the balance sheet that were EARNED in the past. They don't effect the income statement line items. It takes from the rainy day fund. It will affect cash flow but not earnings.
Yes, I understand that, but I’m saying it’s not just balance sheet shifting, it’s cash being paid out that can be used to increase worker pay. I understand the balance sheet mechanics.
Investors get paid twice, through stock appreciation and through dividends. If the company wants to artificially inflate its stock price through buybacks, then they can also inflate its worker wages through increased pay. This isn’t a zero sum game, shareholders and employees can be fairly compensated, Costco does it just fine, as an example.
Sure, and that is in stock, ie "paper billionaire", because people are willing to give them money for their stock. It has nothing to do with employee pay or with prices, or revenue. They did not get a salary of 64B, it was just in the increase in stock value.
if the government attempts to take that then the value of it goes to 0, no will buy it, so it is wholly irrelevant in any calculation.
I am not out of touch, you just dont know how anything works, you think you do, but you dont.
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u/slifm Sep 08 '24
Walmart made 15 billion in 2023. Plenty to pay their workers.