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Bernie Sanders Introduces 'Stop BEZOS' Bill To Tax Amazon For Underpaying Workers (theverge.com)
A public spat between Amazon Sen. Bernie Sanders over workers' wages escalated Wednesday as the Vermont independent introduced a bill aimed at taxing big companies whose employees rely on federal benefits to make ends meet. From a report: Sanders' Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (abbreviated "Stop BEZOS") -- along with Khanna's House of Representatives counterpart, the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act -- would institute a 100 percent tax on government benefits that are granted to workers at large companies. The bill's text characterizes this as a "corporate welfare tax," and it would apply to corporations with 500 or more employees. If workers are receiving government aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), national school lunch and breakfast programs, Section 8 housing subsidies, or Medicaid, employers will be taxed for the total cost of those benefits. The bill applies to full-time and part-time employees, as well as independent contractors that are de facto company employees.
I like Bernie's politics in general, but this is not the solution. This is just being a political wingnut 101. Yes, Amazon has a market cap of over $1T, but it is not, by a long fucking shot, the only company out there underpaying workers. It's not even that profitable. Underpaying workers is an institution, it's built into literally everything about corporate hygiene. You don't leave money on the table, you don't pay your labor more than you have to. An extra $1k a year to 563k people is a lot of damn money, particularly on an actual net income of 2.53B (i.e. about 22%). They CAN afford to do this, but they're not going to, shareholders will pitch a fit.
You can't penalize one company and ignore all the others. You can't force shareholders to be less greedy. We don't even want this, while we extol the benefits of capitalism, we rely on this competitiveness and greed to create a more efficient economy. Companies need to play to win, government needs to mitigate the cost of winning. We play to our strengths. Instead we figure out what services can be provided to the underpaid masses, and deliver them, using taxes we collect, particularly from the very rich to fund it. This is where socialism fits in. Free the companies from having to deal with this problem, which they're ill equipped to solve, and instead let them do what they do best.
The democrat party should lean in his direction, but letting the far left of the party drive the bus is a terrible idea.
Sanders is hardly "far left". Single-payer health care and higher tax rates on the upper class are mainstream left-wing ideas. "Far left" would be actual Communist ideas like the general population (as represented by the government) taking ownership of factories, research labs, etc. There are people in the US who support those ideas, but it's such a small minority that they are completely negligible when it comes to elections. If you think that you're a moderate liberal and that Sanders is far left, then you're really a centrist.
I'm still waiting for the left to figure out that you can have mass immigration or you can have nice things like universal health care but you certainly can't have both.