Wal-Mart Heiress Pays $35 Million For Painting, Then Gets $3 Million Tax Exemption
Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton paid $35 million for a single painting, and then convinced Arkansas to grant her a $3 million tax exemption on the purchase.
...as Wal-MartWatch.com points out, that the price of the painting equals what the state of Arkansas spends every two years providing for Wal-Mart's 3,971 employees on public assistance; or that the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, since Wal Mart likes to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week for an annual income of $11,948 -- so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting without taking any salary out for food, housing, or other expenses (and a few hundred more years to pay the taxes, if the state legislature didn't exempt our semi-immortal worker).
I would say it's unbelievable, except it's not.