VIDEO: CEOs’ Corporate Welfare Scam Exploits Low-Paid Workers

Turns out, it’s not recipients of SNAP and Medicaid who are scamming the system: it’s greedy CEOs.

In a powerful video from More Perfect Union, IPS CEO pay expert Sarah Anderson explains that poverty wages, which give workers no choice but to rely on public assistance, are a form of corporate welfare that subsidizes huge CEO paychecks.

As Sarah’s research shows, the average CEO-worker pay gap at the top 100 low-wage corporations in 2024 was 632 to 1. Yet while CEO pay skyrockets, many low-wage workers are forced to rely on safety net programs to make ends meet — and often then spend these modest taxpayer-funded benefits buying essentials from their own low-wage employers.

That means our tax dollars are essentially subsidizing these pay gaps, Sarah says. “The real freeloaders here are the big profitable corporations that are shifting the costs of people’s basic needs onto taxpayers. They are the leeches on the system,” she argues.

Worse still, many companies have put the profits they made from arrangements like these into supporting legislation like the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” which paired tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy with draconian cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and other safety net programs their own workers rely on.

“The cuts to SNAP are part of a bigger package that was about continuing to give huge tax cuts to big corporations and the wealthy,” Sarah explains.

Most SNAP recipients work to make ends meet, and they have to jump through a ton of hoops to get $6 per person per day under the program. Now, harsher work and reporting requirements could cut off access to SNAP for millions of people — particular caregivers with young children, the elderly, veterans, and people with disabilities, who would struggle to meet those work requirements and have historically been exempt from them.

“The real goal here is just to bury people in paperwork. We’re looking at something like 4 million people probably losing access to this critical benefit [SNAP] in the coming years,” Sarah warns.

Watch the full video below.