Blog #10, Sebastian Mallaby "Progressive Wal-Mart. Really."

"Progressive Wal-Mart. Really" is the title of Sebastian Mallaby's column in the Washington Post. This article defends the retail giant Wal-Mart against a variety of criticisms. Wal-Mart is obviously a progressive case for market success, perhaps more than any other business that is alive and is good for the poor by virtue of its success.
Of course, there are a lot of points to discuss, for example, "Wal-Mart's critics paint the company as a parasite on taxpayers, because 5 percent of its workers are on Medicaid... In other words, they attack Wal-Mart for having 5 percent of its workers receive health care courtesy of taxpayers when the policy that they support would increase that share to 100 percent." It is my belief that there is no solution to this problem in the current system. There is a situation in which wealthy people can afford fantastic health care and those who are not wealthy will be simply destroyed by the first major illness and will end up with the government paying for their health care by default. I think there is, of course, a need to get the insurance companies out of it completely. To my mind, our current health care system is severely broken and needs to be completely rearranged.
One more point that Mallaby raises - is the fact that Wal-Mart saves consumers $200 billion every year on their purchases, while the federal food stamp programs were worth $33 billion. It looks that Wal-Mart is a bigger welfare provider than the government... I’d like to defend Wal-mart, however, I can’t agree with their lack of understanding of the economic and political fundamentals that gave rise to Wal-mart’s success. But what is clear - is that Wal-mart has benefited the American consumer by introducing discounting into the US retail industry. It’s obvious to me that without Wal-mart, very few retailers would have any lower prices the way Wal-mart has with it’s innovations in warehousing, purchasing and inventory management.
Right now the problem for most Americans is that even though the costs of consumer goods is keeping pace with declines in income, the costs of big ticket items is not. Wal-mart’s success is not an answer to the economic and political issues, but anyway, to my mind the consumer should be in the first place.