WalMart’s customers directly and indirectly pay for the roads. Most WalMarts I’ve seen were located on highways or major thoroughfares. Trucks that serve WalMart pay for the highways they use – through fuel taxes. So do WalMart’s millions of customers, who also pay fuel taxes.

Communities that wish to attract large sales tax generators often provide incentives. One incentive is an adequate system of side streets to serve the potential traffic. The amount of such incentives are determined by the elected representatives of the voting public. I hope your objection to such incentives is with the actions of those communities, and not with WalMart and other businesses that would be foolish not to take advantage of them.

I understand the question but why shouldn’t Wal-mart pay for roads? There are many developments these days where the developer actually pays for the cost of putting in the roads, water and sewer improvements. And in a way those who buy homes in those developments pay for it too.

There’s a new Wal-Mart distribution center in Windsor, Colorado. They have something like 1200 trucks a day arriving at that facility. It’s about 1 1/2 mile off of I-25. Shouldn’t something that generates 1200 more semi-trucks, not just cars, in a day pick up some part of the tab for all the road improvements that will need to be done at the Crossroads interchange?

It may not be a direct subsidy but in a society where so much of the tax code is framed so that those who can most afford to pay for things do, it seems fair to expect them to at least pick up their fair share.

Communities and states, acting through the voters’ elected representatives, are providing incentives to attract the WalMarts and the Targets, the Honda assembly plants and the Intel microchip factories. If that’s what the voters wish to do, how is it wrong for WalMart or any other corporation to accept those incentives?

Assuming that a locality has a sales tax, clearly the government entity will gain far more in sales tax revenue over a period of years than their initial costs, so for the government it is a rational way to increase their revenue.

Secondly, so long as government makes these programs available, if Wal-Mart (or any other public company) fails to take maximum advantage of them, how long do you think it will be before some predatory law firm will gin up a ‘shareholder’ suit, accusing management of not looking out for shareholder value?

I also agree that you can work both sides of the coin. You can complain about both: Wal-mart getting sweet deals from governments and Wal-mart getting the shaft from governments. Here in Maryland, Wal-mart’s competitors got a law passed, over the governor’s veto, that targets them for increasing their benefits level. That’s certainly something to be opposed also.

In the linked article, of the eight so-called subsidies listed:

4 are tax breaks,

1 (enterprise zone designation) is probably a grab bag of things that includes further tax breaks as well as actual subsidies,

1 (road improvement) is something that everyone with property gets, roughly to the extent of the traffic their property generates (though big businesses like Wal-Mart do seem to get this a lot more proactively than most of us),

2 are actual subsidies.

It is outrageous that they get those last two – as it is for any parts of the Enterprise Zone designation that are actually subsidies – though I doubt the amount is nearly sufficient to reimburse them for the taxes they still have taken from them.

So long as we have public roads, the improvement to those is pretty hard to describe as being “in the public trough”.

Finally, the tax breaks: I hope they get even more – I’m not going to hold the fact that I can’t get my tax money returned to me against someone who can. If nothing else, it’s less money the government has to do stupid things with.

We had a recent Wal-Mart opening in my community. The subsidies were staggering. There were all sorts of tax abatements offered to “bring jobs to the area”. (It helps to have friends on the zoning board to discover stuff like this)