So, this minimum wage post is chok full of trouble - mostly of the traditional "humans are horses" and "monopsony power don't real" variety. But look around hard enough and you'll find a specific thread that has something fresh!

To quote /u/Delphizer (and to add my own bolding):

If [the] minimum wage is not sufficient to provide a livable wage then at that point the government is subsiding the company who can't afford to pay their employees [a] living wage

[... further down thread ...]

The end result of them not being able to support themselves would be that they would start falling into the social safety net. At this point the rest of us are effectively subsiding your employee so you can make 3$ more an hour.

If we are coming up with arbitrary jobs that a person isn't productive enough to make a livable wage on, then society should be able to choose what companies/sectors/jobs get those subsidies instead of blanket giving it to any company(especially companies making a profit off that labor). Maybe have a sliding scale depending on how long the person has been unemployed of a minimum wage(below living wage) we'll subsidize? Assuming the freemarket could come up with a more productive employee then it would maximize when that person is the most "productive".

So, the big question: are welfare programs a subsidy for employers in any meaningful economic sense? Let's investigate.

First, we need to agree on what a subsidy for employers is. I say that a subsidy for employers is any payment from the government that either a) is received by employers as an increasing function of their number of employee hours, or that b) is a payment to workers or potential workers that causes wages to fall.

So, are welfare programs subsidies for employers? Let's consider a couple of different welfare program designs and answer the question for each one. I suspect a splash of basic theory is largely all we'll need for each. Note: real welfare programs can draw upon elements from more than 1 type I list below, so bear in mind I'm not giving you a full on partition here.

Welfare program type 1: programs offered to people with low incomes which then phase out gradually (ie, without a cliff). Example programs include SNAP, arguably social security, and (for part of its schedule) the EITC.

For programs that gradually phase out benefits as income increases, within that phase out range, these programs encourage people to reduce their labor supply by effectively raising the marginal tax rate phased by the people receiving them. To the extent that people respond to these incentives, we would expect people to work fewer hours and for employers to bear some of the incidence of this marginal tax rate hike in the form of increased wages.

Verdict: these are not employer subsidies.

Welfare program type 2: programs offered to people with low incomes that then disappear entirely after some threshold income (a cliff). Mainly, this is Medicaid, but we can also include old timey welfare (AFDC) and the like.

This is tricky. Obviously, the cliffs create work disincentives, but the effect on wages is going to depend on annoying parameters like what the distribution of workers relative to the cliff would be without the program and the degree to which workers can adjust their intensive margin labor supplies (their number of hours worked given they work at all). Instead of thinking about theory-with-cliffs and being sad (I leave that exercise to the reader), here's some empirical evidence that Medicaid apparently doesn't put downward pressure on wages in general: 1 2

Verdict: these are not employer subsidies.

Welfare program type 3: programs offered to people with low incomes that have a work requirement of some sort. Example programs include the EITC and (depending on the state) TANF, Medicaid (per a very recent policy), and other programs.

When programs have work requirements they serve as extensive margin employment subsidies (that is, they provide a subsidy to you if you choose to work, period) and when benefits increase in hours worked (as in part of the EITC schedule) they also subsidize the intensive margin of employment (how many hours you work). Barring unrealistic labor supply and labor demand elasticities, you should expect the incidence of these subsidies to fall partly on the worker and partly on the employer, in the form of reduced wages. Indeed, this effect has been confirmed at least for the EITC by Rothstein. I'm not aware of evidence on the effect of work requirements for TANF and what not on wages, though, so take that part with a grain of salt.

Verdict: these are employer subsidies, with the caveat that I am aware of little evidence to confirm the theoretical prediction about work requirements.

Welfare program type 4: programs that require you to be unemployed, such as unemployment insurance.

These programs create incentives to remain unemployed and so raise the opportunity cost of work, discouraging employment on the intensive margin (do I get a job?) but not on the extensive margin (how many hours should I work?). In a good ol fashioned supply and demand model of the labor market, this is a negative labor supply shock that pushes up wages. In a search and matching model, this increases workers' outside option to employment, thus increasing their threat point in negotiations and allowing them to command higher wages (while increasing unemployment). In any case, there is upward pressure on wages.

Verdict: these are not employer subsidies.

Welfare program type 5: programs that are universal (or targeted based on some characteristic people cannot manipulate). Examples include Medicare and the Alaska permanent fund.

This is a bit trickier than the above policies, seeing as these programs are not a function of income at all. I would point out, however, that if utility is concave in income, in a search and matching model, these universal programs can notably improve the threat point for really broke people since, well, u(ubi salary) - u(ubi) < u(salary) - u(0). That suggests the availability of these programs improve worker bargaining power and put upward pressure on wages. Also, Medicare is a special case here since problems with health insurance markets make it difficult to buy decent insurance in the individual market, generating substantial bargaining power for firms --- Medicare takes that away.

Verdict: these are not employer subsidies.

Welfare program type 6: direct subsidies paid to employers, as found in various active labor market programs that include payments for hiring various types of workers (eg, the formerly long term unemployed) or in sweet heart deals made between politicians and favored industries (eg, coal mining).

Verdict: these are employer subsidies.

What have we learned from all of the above? We've learned that welfare programs do not in general constitute employer subsidies. Rather, welfare programs only function as employer subsidies when they a) literally include an employer subsidy, b) offer benefits that increase in income, or c) feature work requirements (probably - put less certainty on point c when you update your priors).

As a side note, ironically enough, OP is (accidentally) right about minimum wage increases reducing the extent to which welfare programs function as subsidies -- at least in the case of the EITC, per Rothstein, min wage hikes really do have that effect!

I would also like to acknowledge that my RI is in some sense intentionally missing OP's moral point. When people complain about employer "subsidies" I think they often don't mean anything in particular in terms of having their words correspond with facts and reality. Rather, they intend a moral point and have a "moral economy" model of sorts in mind where employers have an obligation to guarantee that their employees meet some minimum living standard and that welfare programs "subsidize" them in some sort of moral sense in that the welfare programs are helping to get their employees past that minimum living standard. By using the term "subsidy" to point out that it is a government program doing this rather than the employers, folks are just pointing out that employers may not have legitimately fulfilled their moral obligations since they did not get their employees' minimum living standard up to par on their own.

I think this is a fine enough point to make morally and am highly sympathetic to it, but I believe it should be made clearly and on its own terms, rather than by mixing positive and normative statements into a cocktail where they blend together and no longer can be distinguished. Moreover, slapping a moral parity onto the term subsidy is probably not a good idea: there are plenty of things we should be comfortable with that are subsidies (eg, the EITC seems to have all around great consequences) and I'm not sure anyone is better served by turning the word "subsidy" into a slur.