▪️This is dumb, Walmart is the biggest employer in the US, and biggest by a lot. So it would make sense they have the most employees on food stamps, especially since they employ more low-skilled workers than anyone else (2-5X the other biggest retailers and restaurants).
▪️This talking point came out in 2020 after Bernie Sanders commissioned a Govt Accounting Office (GAO) study on workers receiving Medicaid and SNAP benefits. It looked at a sample of 9 states and the characteristics of these workers.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/d2145.pdf
▪️Walmart didn’t top every state; in WA it was Safeway, McDonald’s in NE, Dunkin’ in MA, Hannaford’s in ME, etc. Basically, the largest employers in each state had the most workers on SNAP, not really that surprising. State govts, public schools, universities & hospitals even made the list.
▪️While Walmart had the most SNAP workers overall, it was still just a tiny minority, only between 1-3% of all working adult SNAP recipients in each state measured. Working SNAP recipients are very spread out in the economy.
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
