Yahoo Finance, that liberal trove of sell-side broker/dealer propaganda-- and shill for the Obama administration-- is running a "story" today in which a left wing think tank says that Walmart should give raises to all their employees rather than buy back stock and increase dividends.
From Yahoo Finance:
Walmart spent $6.6 billion on buybacks in 2013 and another $3 billion on dividends just for Walton family members; Demos senior policy analyst Amy Traub says the money would've been better spent giving Walmart workers a raise.
Traub recently co-authored a report that concluded if Walmart and other major retailers raised the average salary of their full-time employees to $25,000 per year "it would lift 437,000 women and their families out of poverty and create more than 100,000 new jobs in addition."
Ignoring the fact that it's the administration's own fiscal and tax policies that are responsible for companies engaging in balance sheet arbitrage, like stock buy backs and dividend increases, to return value to shareholders, I'm wondering how any business media outlet keeps its credibility by lending a platform to ideas like this.
The purpose of a corporation, like Walmart, in a real and legal sense, is to return value to shareholders, not to engage in liberal social engineering. It's especially ridiculous to suggest this type of corporate policy when the administration's own policies are largely to blame for the hiring strike going on by capital in the country.
That a business outlet like Yahoo Finance would think that they are serving readership by propagating anti-business policies that are quite honestly at odds with maximizing shareholder value, just shows how little you can trust the establishment media today.
They little know who their readers and they little care.