Whenever you hear a politician bemoan the mega retail giant, just know they are full of crap.

I was cleaning out some financial articles when I stumbled across this one I saved from Mark J. Perry over at the AEI Institute. He wrote a piece showing how Americans don’t grasp profit margins of business and how little they actually make. He used Walmart as an example and showed just how much government made off their sales compared to the company:

“Big Oil” companies (Major Integrated Oil and Gas) make a lot of profits, right? Well, that industry had a below-average profit margin of 5.1% in the most recent quarter. And evil Walmart only made a 3.1% profit margin in the most recent quarter (as I reported recently), which is less than half of the almost 7% average government take on retails sales in the form of state and local sales taxes. Think about it – for every $100 in sales for Walmart, the state/local governments get an average of $6.88 in sales taxes (and as much $9.44 in Tennessee and $9.16 in Arizona, see data here), while Walmart gets only $3.10 in profits!