Congressional Democrats yesterday released a report highly critical of Wal-Mart, claiming that the company’s stores cost the government money. “Wal-Mart imposes a huge, often hidden, cost on its workers, our communities, and U.S. taxpayers,” said a press release from Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat who commissioned the report from his perch on the Education and Workforce Committee. The report claims that the federal government winds up making up the difference for the low wages that Wal-Mart pays its employees, paying to subsidize school lunches and health insurance for the children of Wal-Mart workers. Other federal programs subsidize housing and winter heat for those making Wal-Mart wages.

It all might be routine Democratic business-bashing but for the wonderful irony that, according to his most recent available federal financial disclosure form, Senator Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Wal-Mart. Or his wife owns it. The distinction is pretty much meaningless — Mr. Kerry and his ketchup-fortune heiress wife share the fortune that allowed him to buy a luxurious Louisburg Square townhouse in Boston. He mortgaged the Louisburg Square house to infuse millions of dollars into his lagging campaign. The Wal-Mart money, in one way or another, is helping to pay for his presidential campaign.

To which we say, more power to Mr. Kerry. For the truth is, hundreds of millions of Americans and growing numbers of foreigners have shared in the prosperity and growth that Wal-Mart has helped to create. Whether they are shoppers with more money left over at the end of the week because of Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices, or investors whose retirement funds have swelled with the success of Wal-Mart stock, the legendary efficiency with which the company is run has benefited America.

It’s not just wages, after all, that Wal-Mart is careful with. Wal-Mart buyers are famous for pressing their corporate suppliers for the lowest prices, too. Even Wal-Mart executives at company headquarters are reported to empty their own office trash baskets and sometimes to share hotel rooms on business trips to save the company money. The savings ultimately get passed along to shareholders and customers.

Some Democrats, like Mr. Miller, want to focus on what Wal-Mart costs America. Mr. Miller seems to imagine that if the company didn’t exist, its workers would all be earning salaries comfortable enough to live without government subsidies. But it’s also possible that the workers would be out of work entirely.

Mr. Kerry himself, while campaigning in New Hampshire on October 10, 2003, said, “I think Wal-Mart’s health care practices are unconscionable, and the way they treat employees is not fair.” But the same Associated Press dispatch that reported that comment also quoted a Wal-Mart spokeswoman as saying that more than 90% of the company’s 1.4 million employees have health insurance, 50% through the company and the rest through spouses and other sources. The spokeswoman told the AP that of those participating in the Wal-Mart health plan,40% had no medical insurance when they were hired: “These are people who would’ve fallen through the cracks.”

So Senator Kerry and his wife have nothing to be ashamed of as Wal-Mart shareholders — a fact of which they might remind their colleagues like Mr. Miller.