Obamacare is, after all, the perfect scapegoat. Large, unwieldy, already a failure so pathetically at odds with its goals that the President himself has had to apologize repeatedly. Obamacare is, for the moment, the 90-pound weakling of domestic policy, so it's not surprising it has attracted the attention of bullies looking to kick more sand in its face.
That's how you get the nation's largest retailer, Walmart, blaming Obamacare in part for its disappointing financial performance. Walmart's CEO said dip in same-store sales was attributable to consumers worried about the tsunami of healthcare bills facing Americans. The Wall Street Journal reported that True Value, a private company, also blamed Obamacare for bringing financial troubles to the economy.
Here's why Walmart's attack on Obamacare – and any other company's – is ridiculous. Walmart has about 140 million customers a week in the US, and 245 million customers a week globally.
A tiny, tiny fraction of that – roughly 130,000 people, nationwide – have signed up for Obamacare. In fact, the number of people who have signed up for Obamacare is but a small fraction of Walmart's own workforce, which numbers 2.2 million people.
Even if every single person on Obamacare stopped shopping, Walmart would still serve more than 139.8 million customers a week. Obamacare isn't even a blip within that. It's a rounding error.
The thing is, this search for a financial scapegoat is a pattern, the kind of fantasist imagining best dreamed up while the corporate jet – of which Walmart has 19 – sits idle on the tarmac.
Walmart, once a Wall Street darling, has spent all year exuding excuses for its disappointing financial performance in the same way that an isotope of uranium emits radiation. In January, Walmart's bete noire was the payroll tax. In June, it was government uncertainty. In the fall, it was cuts to food stamps. This week, it's Obamacare.
Two things Walmart has reliably avoided mentioning: that rivals like Costco and Family Dollar have been doing pretty well all year, which undermines all the conspiracy theories, and that Walmart has been struggling with its own divisive labor issues. One of those labor issues – its infamously low pay – has led some Walmart stories to start a food drive, asking workers to donate food to their own colleagues.
When Walmart is implicitly acknowledging that its wages won't let people afford one good dinner, its financial issues are way beyond Obamacare. But, while you can in fact blame Walmart for trying to pin its troubles on Obamacare, it's far from the first. Earlier this year, a kind of mass hysteria hit a number of companies, including most recently David's Bridal, as they used Obamacare as an excuse for laying off employees or moving them to part-time work.
Needless to say, that doesn't hold up either: if there's a business need for workers, businesses will keep them on. The number of part-time workers is not growing significantly enough to provide proof that such a mass corporate protest is having an impact, even if the corporate idea of "impact" is to devastate an already struggling economy.
In addition, the bigger question there is why employers feel entitled to employ people, often at low wages, without providing healthcare for them. Is the idea that when they get sick or die, they'll be replaced like lab rats? That's a pretty diseased view of how capitalism should work.
The "blame Obamacare" meme has one origin, and it's not the economic impact of one new, modestly sized policy. Instead, there's an underlying streak of smugness that overtakes corporate executives after enough big bonus checks and trips on the private jet: they start to believe that success is in their control, while failure is due to evil outside forces. When companies are earning a lot of money, it's because they're smarter and better. If they're facing rough times, it's because someone – usually the government – is thwarting the purity of capitalism.
It's all bunk, of course. Nearly all the roadlocks put up by government – taxes, gridlock, policy failures – are easily hurdled by today's megacorporations. Government also provides enormous practical subsidies – in agriculture or for minimum wage workers – that somehow corporations never seem to complain about. Those companies have also reaped rewards from the stock market, which is hitting new highs regularly and is up 26% this year, despite the weakness of the economy.
It all goes to show that the high end of the economy has truly become about the haves and have-nots: those who make excuses, and those who have better sense than to try. The latter are in very short supply.
