"In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. [...]In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children."

http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/01/america-195-week

And this is with a minimum wage.

Bull. The store didn't create the problem. The numbers may be correct; the conclusion is yellow journalism.

The store may even help alleviate the problem, by providing Some income for these people.

Its not very clever to ask WalMart to just pay these people more; how about UCBerkely show some sincerity and pay them themselves?

The numbers are the only thing that's quoted. The conclusion is that if they paid lower wages, the amount of government support to employed people would rise unless those policies were changed also. Government support paid by taxes, including the taxes of those who work at UCBerkeley.

The statement was squarely that it cost the public money to have WalMart in our town - they expressed it as the cost per WalMart.

For example, they could have expressed how much is Saved the public per WalMart. They didn't express it that way. Because it made a more sensationalist article the other way.

People made unemployed by the minimum wage require more benefits than they would if they could be gainfully employed at (e.g.) 50% of minimum wage.

There is no empirical evidence that introducing a minimum wage causes job losses on a scale where the increase of unemployment benefits would outweigh the benefits of its introduction.

The whole idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment is a myth that is based on incorrect labour market models.

There is little good empirical evidence about the minimum wage, period. I'd have a hard time showing any harm, and you'll have a hard time showing any benefit.

That's because the minimum wage is usually set at such a low level that it applies to very few workers (<1.5M in the US, as of 2007), so very few natural experiments are available.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2007.htm

I'll give you one natural experiment, however. A min wage hike in American Samoa caused unemployment to increase by at least 6% (= 2041 workers fired by Chicken of the Sea / (65k American Samoans x 52% labor force participation rate)).

http://washingtonexaminer.com/node/127791