Let us all now bow before the god of free enterprise, whose awesomeness was revealed in a recent news release announcing that the divine managers of fast-food deity McDonald’s achieved a profit of $1.5 billion in just three months this summer.
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Holy Big Mac! How does Mickey D’s do that? Peek behind the curtain and you’ll see that the secret power that McDonald wields is thee and me — America’s taxpayers.
The corporation rips off its huge workforce by paying poverty wages and no benefits, then directs the workers to the food stamp office and other government-funded safety-net programs.
Neat, huh? A major chunk of the chain’s cost-of-doing-business disappears from the corporate books and — shazam — reappears on the government’s books. In fact, the National Employment Law Project reports that McDonald’s’ phenomenal profits are bloated by an estimated $1.2 billion that we taxpayers will shell out this year to support its predatory wage-and-benefit policy.
Aren’t you “lovin’ it,” as the chain’s ads say?
But the golden arches are not alone in this fast-food flimflam. Yum! Brands, the conglomerate that owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, soaks us for $648 million to underwrite its poverty pay. Subway burrows into us for $436 million. Burger King, taps us for $356 million, little sweet Wendy’s grabs more than a quarter-billion bucks from us, and Dunkin’ Donuts dips into our pockets for $274 million.
And look here — it’s Domino’s pizza, whose extremist right-wing owner says he hates government spending. But he’s picking taxpayers’ pockets to the tune of $126 million to subsidize his “free” enterprise.
These corporate powers piously preach about the “magic” of the marketplace, but as these facts reveal, magicians don’t do magic. They perform illusions.
