What Walmart could do if it really cared about fighting hunger

Walmart is out with one of those corporate ad campaigns where some tiny fraction of one's purchases will go towards some pressing issue. This time it's hunger, so the money will go to support food banks.

As far as corporate pseudo-charity goes, one could certainly do worse. But there's a much more useful strategy Walmart could employ, and one that would actually boost its bottom line: Use its massive lobbying heft to push for increases in food stamps.

Here's the ad:

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It's equal parts genuinely aimed at an important issue and patently unrealistic. Of course the "hungry" kid has to be living in a clean, middle-class single-family house, and of course she goes right back to doing her homework on an empty stomach. Real poor people tend to be not very photogenic, so you got to have wealthier actor stand-ins to build sympathy, I guess.

But all that aside, the obvious problem here is that the scale of the program is not remotely close to the need. According to the Department of Agriculture, 14 percent of U.S. households — or some 48.1 million people — were "food insecure" at some point in 2014. Of those, about two-fifths — or 5.6 million households with 8.8 million people — were "very food insecure." Contrary to the Walmart ad, even in the latter households the children almost always eat first, meaning it's typically adults who are going seriously hungry. Still, there were still nearly a million children who were very food insecure in 2014. And as usual, minorities and single mothers have it the worst.

This little Walmart program isn't going to give food to 48 million people, especially because it ends on April 26.

In fact, things are probably only going to get worse this year. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 500,000 and one million people will lose their food stamps in 2016, due to recent cuts and the loss of time limit waivers as the economy improves. The people getting kicked off have an average income of 17 percent of the poverty line, and mostly do not qualify for other benefits. The strain has already put massive pressure on food banks across the country. (Incidentally, the time limits were yet another terrible part of Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare reform bill.)

The only problem with food stamps is that they aren't generous enough to completely wipe out hunger. But that's simply a matter of fiddling the amounts and eligibility upwards. And that's where Walmart comes in. If they really cared about hunger, they'd start lobbying Congress for a big expansion of food stamps. Get rid of the time limits, loosen the eligibility rules, and make them more generous (currently, the average benefit is a piddling $125 per month).

Walmart could, and probably would, regard this as a purely mercenary interest. It is the largest retailer in the country, and it would certainly be the place at which a big fraction of those food stamp dollars were spent. It's a win-win.

Some liberals have an ideological problem with arguments like this. They regard food stamps (and other welfare programs) that are spent at Walmart as a sort of subsidy of that company, particularly if they are spent by their own workers. Instead, the argument goes, Walmart and every other company should be forced to pay a living wage so that its workers don't have to use food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and so forth.

It's true that wages and unionization should be increased wherever possible, and so should the minimum wage, so as to prevent direct employer capture of a subsidy through decreased wages. But that's a very different thing from regarding the spending of food stamps at a particular store as a subsidy of that store as well. Walmart will benefit from more food stamps, of course, but that's a simple byproduct of the fact that it sells a lot of cheap low-margin goods. A change in the income distribution that benefits the poor is not a Walmart subsidy simply because it happens to cater to poor people.

At any rate, the bottom line here is that wages are never going to be enough to tackle hunger, because like poverty generally, the vast majority of its victims are unable to work. So if Walmart actually wants to reduce hunger in this country, they should ditch the penny-ante corporate pablum, and start pushing for food stamps.