Walmart has received over $1.2 billion in taxpayer subsidies and counting.

Walmart initially creates jobs when it opens new stores, but after an initial boost, studies show a net loss of jobs and an erosion of the better jobs in the area

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, counted a net loss of 150 jobs after a Wal-Mart opened. Wal-Mart didn't create jobs; it destroyed them. For every person who got a job at Wal-Mart, 1.4 other retail workers lost theirs.

Wal-Mart has an effect on manufacturing jobs. Its cost-cutting makes it a leader in moving production overseas. The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., think tank interested in protecting middle- and low-income Americans, estimated the loss at 77 U.S. manufacturing jobs for every Wal-Mart.

As the competitive leader in the retail market, Wal-Mart sets the tone; studies have shown that when Wal-Mart comes to town, the wages of workers at other businesses also drop. Research out of the University of California, Berkeley, found in 2007 that total wages in a given county decline by 1.5% for each Wal-Mart that opens.

When an economist crunched the numbers, he traced a loss of 200,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs to China just by looking at Wal-Mart's additional sales for the six years ending in 2006. That's 33,333 jobs per year, or 641 every week.

Those numbers don't include the hundreds of thousands of jobs already lost to meet existing sales, he said. Nor do they take into account U.S. manufacturing jobs that suppliers to Wal-Mart moved to other countries, such as Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand and India.

"Total job displacement may be two or three times as high as what I estimated there," Scott (the economist) said. "The question is who is going to make the goods that go in those shelves, and that's what's being overlooked and hidden in the PR statements from companies like Wal-Mart."