Peter Girnus 🦅(@gothburz):There is an old promise in this country that a person who works hard, full time, will not be poor. That the job will be enough. For millions of people that promise is quietly no longer true, and we have built an economy where almost no one has to say so out loud. A federal audit released this month found that most working adults on Medicaid are not part-time or occasional workers. They hold full-time jobs. 66% of them. 13.8 million people who go to work every morning and still cannot afford to see a doctor without help from the rest of us. They are not idle people. They open the store before dawn. They stock the shelves you shop, they drive the packages to your door, they stand at the register while their own feet ache. They do the work. The work simply no longer pays enough to live on, and it is worth asking, plainly, why. It is not a mystery. A worker at the median at Walmart made $30,520 last year. In the same company, in the same year, the chief executive was paid close to $29 million, and the company spent $37.6 billion buying back its own stock. Amazon earned $77 billion in profit while the number of its workers on public aid nearly tripled. They are not failing companies. They are among the most successful enterprises in human history. They can afford to pay their people. They have chosen instead to let the rest of us cover the difference. I do not say this to turn you against the woman ahead of you in the checkout line paying with public benefits. She is doing nothing wrong. She is working. The mistake we are encouraged to make, again and again, is to look down the line at one another instead of up at the arrangement that put us all in it. A country can be talked into resenting the poor. It is a much harder thing to get it to resent a quarterly report. We pay for this twice. Once at the register, for the low price. Again in the spring, on our taxes, for the public aid that makes the low price possible. The savings were always real. We were simply never told who was paying for them. None of this breaks the law. It is no comfort. It means the law was written to permit it, and a law can be rewritten. It means this was a choice, and a choice can be made another way. The people who do this work are not asking for charity. They are asking for the old promise to be kept, that a full day of work should be enough to live a full life. It is not a radical thing to want. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, and it should trouble us that it has come to sound like too much. They will open the store again tomorrow morning. The least we owe them is to stop pretending we do not know why they are still poor.

2026.07.29 22:38

There is an old promise in this country that a person who works hard, full time, will not be poor. That the job will be enough. For millions of people that promise is quietly no longer true, and we have built an economy where almost no one has to say so out loud. A federal audit released this month found that most working adults on Medicaid are not part-time or occasional workers. They hold full-time jobs. 66% of them. 13.8 million people who go to work every morning and still cannot afford to see a doctor without help from the rest of us. They are not idle people. They open the store before dawn. They stock the shelves you shop, they drive the packages to your door, they stand at the register while their own feet ache. They do the work. The work simply no longer pays enough to live on, and it is worth asking, plainly, why. It is not a mystery. A worker at the median at Walmart made $30,520 last year. In the same company, in the same year, the chief executive was paid close to $29 million, and the company spent $37.6 billion buying back its own stock. Amazon earned $77 billion in profit while the number of its workers on public aid nearly tripled. They are not failing companies. They are among the most successful enterprises in human history. They can afford to pay their people. They have chosen instead to let the rest of us cover the difference. I do not say this to turn you against the woman ahead of you in the checkout line paying with public benefits. She is doing nothing wrong. She is working. The mistake we are encouraged to make, again and again, is to look down the line at one another instead of up at the arrangement that put us all in it. A country can be talked into resenting the poor. It is a much harder thing to get it to resent a quarterly report. We pay for this twice. Once at the register, for the low price. Again in the spring, on our taxes, for the public aid that makes the low price possible. The savings were always real. We were simply never told who was paying for them. None of this breaks the law. It is no comfort. It means the law was written to permit it, and a law can be rewritten. It means this was a choice, and a choice can be made another way. The people who do this work are not asking for charity. They are asking for the old promise to be kept, that a full day of work should be enough to live a full life. It is not a radical thing to want. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, and it should trouble us that it has come to sound like too much. They will open the store again tomorrow morning. The least we owe them is to stop pretending we do not know why they are still poor.

Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz

2026.07.29 13:02

I set the schedules at Walmart. 66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it. People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay. I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me. Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of. Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall. Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers. The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line. We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares. We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have. The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short. I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door. You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store. There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying. The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour. Monday through Sunday, we pay our half. The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program. It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.

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