If there’s a subtext that only the poor should receive stimulus / aid during a natural calamity, that’s grounded on commie notions that have no place in a free market capitalism like USA.
The pandemic outbreak has caused huge losses. Every strata has suffered losses. No strata has created the losses. Hence, in principle, every strata deserves aid. Especially since the said aid is coming out of taxpayer money, to which only some stratas have contributed.
One strata might be in a better position to face the losses compared to another strata and might want to waive the said aid but that has to be the decision of that strata and that strata alone. By no means can it be a factor used to decide who should get taxpayer funded-aid and who should not.
What is true of stratas is true of companies.
Therefore, if the US government has given stimulus / aid to Walmart and Amazon, that’s a just decision.
While on this subject, let me preempt another TCBS (Total Commie BS) narrative floating around related to founders of Amazon and other large companies.
American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic
These reports sound as though Amazon et al forcibly took away money from tens of millions of Americans who lost their jobs recently and stuffed it into the pockets of their founders like Jeff Bezos.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The networth of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires has increased during the pandemic outbreak because they hold a certain percentage of shares in these companies – I think it’s 11% of AMZN in the case of Jeff Bezos – and the price of these shares has gone up during this period. That has happened obviously because the public has bought shares of these companies. They probably did so because the man on the street feels his money is safer with these big companies during these uncertain times and has moved his money away from other assets and parked it in the stock of Amazon et al. Since these billionarires are not sole shareholders in their companies, it’s evident that along with the rise in their networth by billions, the networth of millions of common folks has also gone up because they also hold shares in these public companies. So everyone has benefited. To quote my all time favorite fiction character Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22, “everybody has a share”.
It's fashionable to diss the system & say Jeff Bezos's networth rose by $80B during the pandemic. But that'd be forgetting that millions of common people who own Amazon stock got 80% of the $401.1B increase in Amazon's market cap. https://t.co/oGxAPbXLOw pic.twitter.com/ngKAjYAvDW
— GTM360 (@GTM360) August 24, 2020
Finally, a word about “cash rich”, the adjective used to describe Amazon and Walmart in the original question.
Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenues. Amazon is among the ten largest companies in the world by revenues. So they’re surely “very large companies”.
Amazon has amongst the highest – if not the the highest – market cap of all companies in the world. I’m not sure about Walmart’s market cap ranking but safe to say it’s definitely among the Top 100 companies on that parameter. So they’re surely “very valuable companies”.
However both companies reportedly punch well below their weight on profits, and, by extension, free cash flow.
Therefore, while Walmart and Amazon are surely among the largest and most valuable companies in the world, I’ve never seen the adjectives “highly profitable” or “cash rich” applied to them.