Sarah Anderson and Frank Clemente<\/em><\/p>\n Low-income families weren\u2019t the only ones hurt by\u00a0cuts to food stamps<\/a>\u00a0last fall. Top Walmart executives also took a hit.<\/p>\n The cutbacks ate into the discount giant\u2019s\u00a0sales<\/a>\u00a0because so many of its low-income customers rely on this public assistance program to help pay for their groceries. And that made it tough for the company\u2019s top brass to meet their bonus targets.<\/p>\n But that wave of anxiety didn\u2019t last long. Walmart\u2019s board simply rejiggered bonus criteria so that executives could still reap \u201cperformance\u201d payouts,The New York Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n Why are most corporate boards determined to maintain sky-high pay for executives even when they perform poorly? The most common explanation is that board members are often overpaid corporate leaders themselves. The last thing they want to do is provoke scrutiny of their own fat paychecks.<\/p>\n Another, lesser-known reason is that corporations actually have a perverse incentive for overpaying top-level executives. This is due to a tax loophole that allows corporations to deduct unlimited amounts from their federal income taxes for the cost of so-called \u201cperformance pay\u201d for executives. The more corporations pay top officers, the less they pay Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n Guess who makes up the difference? Taxpayers.<\/p>\n A\u00a0new report we co-authored<\/a>\u00a0for the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness calculates just how much this bonus loophole benefits Walmart. For example, we found that Mike Duke, the big box retailer\u2019s recently retired CEO, pocketed nearly $116 million in exercised stock options and other \u201cperformance pay\u201d between 2009 and 2014. That translates into a taxpayer subsidy for Walmart of more than $40 million.<\/p>\n By lowering the performance bar for Walmart\u2019s executives, the company\u2019s board has kept the bosses happy and secured a nice big tax break. Consider the tradeoff here: This $40 million subsidy could have covered the average cost of food stamps for 4,200 people over that six-year period.<\/p>\n Congress should end this subsidy for bonuses at the top of Walmart and other publicly held U.S. corporations, which\u00a0costs $50 billion<\/a>\u00a0over 10 years, by simply eliminating the \u201cperformance pay\u201d loophole.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the government is continuing to gut food stamp benefits. As part of a Farm Bill compromise this year, lawmakers agreed to reduce the program\u2019s benefits by an average of$90 a month<\/a>\u00a0for 850,000 families.<\/p>\n Walmart\u2019s low-wage workers are likely to be among those affected. Near-poverty wages and part-time schedules have forced the company\u2019s own employees to rely on\u00a0$6.2 billion<\/a>\u00a0worth of food stamps and other taxpayer-funded benefits per year, Americans for Tax Fairness estimates.<\/p>\n For a company that hauled in\u00a0$16 billion in profits<\/a>\u00a0last year, this is shameful.<\/p>\n Walmart\u2019s workers are speaking out more than ever before. In the past two years, about 1,000 Walmart stores have faced strikes or rallies for better pay and working conditions. In January 2014, the\u00a0National Labor Relations Board<\/a>\u00a0charged the corporation with illegally disciplining and firing workers who participated in these actions.<\/p>\n Barbara Collins, a single mother from Placerville, California, wrote in\u00a0Salon<\/a>\u00a0about her decision to join strike actions after struggling for years to make ends meet while earning $12.05 an hour as a Walmart stocker. For years, she was never guaranteed a 40-hour workweek. During some weeks she worked as few as eight hours. Following a confrontation with a Walmart board member about the company\u2019s poor pay and working conditions, she got fired.<\/p>\n Despite the intimidation, Walmart workers and their allies are organizing a new\u00a0round of strikes<\/a>\u00a0that began before the corporation\u2019s June 6 annual shareholder meeting<\/p>\n Taxpayers should support these workers by demanding an end to subsidies for Walmart\u2019s inexcusable pay practices \u2013 at both the bottom and the top.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We’re all footing the bill for bonuses the company’s executives pocket and food stamps its underpaid workers obtain for survival. Sarah Anderson and Frank Clemente Low-income families weren\u2019t the only ones hurt by\u00a0cuts to food stamps\u00a0last fall. Top Walmart executives also took a hit. The cutbacks ate into the discount giant\u2019s\u00a0sales\u00a0because so many of its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-122733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-business-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}