Workers Against Wage Theft stage a New York protest after the state failed to enact new anti-wage theft rules. Credit: Shutterstock / Steve Sanchez Photos

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

“The ‘law and order’ people want to put street criminals in jail to make room for the business criminals.” — George Carlin, What Am I Doing In New Jersey?, 1988

In 1776, the same year an upstart union of colonies were busy declaring independence from the British Empire, a wise Scot by the name of Adam Smith published his magisterial work The Wealth of Nations. Generally regarded today as the foremost theologian of free market capitalism, Smith’s warnings about the dangers of concentrated wealth often fall upon clogged ears.

The fates of “those who live by wages,” he wrote, are “strictly connected with the interest of the society” as a whole. In times of economic stagnation or recession, working people’s “wages are soon reducted to what is barely enough to enable them to bring up a family.” But for “those who live by profit” instead of paycheck-to-paycheck, the return on investment “is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”

In other words, even the bad times can be good for wealthy elites, while the rest of us must rise — or collapse — together.

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from” those elites “ought always to be listened to with great precaution,” Smith concluded, “and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

In keeping with Smith’s advice, the Wharton School — Donald Trump’s alma mater — scrupulously analyzed the reconciliation bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The top 10% of the income distribution receives about 70% of the total value of the legislation,” the analysis found, with the poorest 20% of us expected to lose over 14% of our after-tax-and-transfer income next year, while the top one-tenth of 1% adds almost 3% to theirs — or $390,000.

Talk about one big beautiful bill for billionaires.

“Households most affected by the cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — those in the bottom income quintile — experience the largest losses under this bill, averaging almost $30,000 in lifetime value for the working-age population,” the Wharton School continued. Yet, with massive increases in military spending, deficits are still projected to soar more than $2 trillion over the next decade.

Should the U.S. Senate send what even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, called a “disgusting abomination” to the President’s desk, we’re set to witness the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the United States.

However, moving beyond the moment’s soundbites and headlines broaches a more fundamental question: why do SNAP recipients, most of whom work, need food stamps to begin with?

Well, in nine states alone, Walmart — which generated $648 billion in revenue last year and whose family owners enjoy a combined net worth exceeding $400 billion — had 14,500 employees on SNAP and 10,350 on Medicaid, according to a Government Accountability Office study commissioned five years ago, with McDonald’s and Amazon posting comparable rates of welfare dependency. In essence, then, taxpayers are subsidizing the starvation wages of large corporate employers.

“Shouldn’t any reasonable capitalist society be organized in such a way that a single full-time worker can raise a family, put their kids through school, take an annual vacation, and have a reasonable retirement?” radio personality Thom Hartmann asked last week, channeling the great Adam Smith. “Why is it that anybody working full time in the richest country in the history of the world should need any sort of government assistance just to eat and stay healthy?”

And when Washington, D.C., devolves into drunken bacchanalia for the obscenely rich, what recourse remains for cities like San Antonio, which struggle with generational poverty?

In a fiery debate at Stable Hall last month, incoming Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones expressed justified concern about “having police officers, local law enforcement, who are not trained ICE agents, being used” to carry out the less-than-human immigration crackdowns engineered by Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott.

“If you’re calling about a domestic violence incident, if you’re calling about wage theft, you should know what would happen to you,” Jones warned.

To the point, people shouldn’t get deported for simply asking their bosses to pay them what they’re owed.

“There aren’t ‘women’s issues,’ there are issues that disproportionately affect women that leaders fail to address — attacks on reproductive rights, lack of investment in childcare, wage theft and domestic violence, to name a few,” Jones said in a March 8 Facebook post celebrating International Women’s Day.

There’s that curious turn of phrase again: wage theft. Examples include paying less than minimum wage, not paying appropriate overtime, withholding tips, making employees work while off the clock, withholding someone’s final paycheck after they quit and requiring work-related purchases such as tools and uniforms without reimbursement.

“Wage theft steals more from working people than any other crime in the U.S.,” the Peoples Dispatch, an international news outlet, relayed last September in a report on protesting Waffle House workers in Georgia. Estimates put the total at “as much as $50 billion each year, which dwarfs the amount of money stolen via robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle theft.”

Transcending the two-class hierarchy of wage-earners and profit-extractors is unlikely to come up for a vote in the near future. But even as we hold the line against right-wing authoritarianism at the federal and state level, let’s hold Jones and other municipal leaders to their word and insist that her mayorship at least gets people paid.

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This article appears in Jun 12-25, 2025.