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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.
Good. Amazon is abusive. And they don't pay taxes. Stop the abuse, make them pay their share, both at once. https://thenextweb.com/insider...
If you don't think you're being paid enough, find another job. I don't like this idea that the government is going to get into the business of micromanaging how much companies pay their employees. A minimum wage is one standard for all, but to begin taxing companies as a way of penalizing them for not paying their employees enough: hello socialism.
The problem with regular taxes is that they apply to everyone, regardless of how well they treat their employees and their clients. Normally, the good actors must pay to fix problems caused by the bad.
This targets companies specifically when their policies push employees toward poverty. With the death of unions, something needs to balance corporate power to ensure workers are treated fairly.
The law should waive the penalty when an employee has a spouse who is unable to work, however, as that contributes to poverty but is not the fault of the employer---and we don't want employers to have an incentive for discriminating against people whose partners are sick/disabled.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Universal Basic Income is thought by many to be a necessary response to increasing replacement of human work by automation and A.I.
We could easily see scenarios not too far out where 50% of "able" adults are no longer required by the automated economy, because automation and AI are more cost-effective and possibly just outright more effective/high-quality than their labor.
A feature of UBI (the Universal part) is that it is supposed to apply to people whether or not they are supplementing UBI with employment income.
Can we say that the Bernie tax is the first attempt to reclaim from profitable automated industry the funds needed to support UBI?
If so, I think the incentive alignment is wrong with this tax. This tax is making it more expensive to KEEP employees, and cheaper to automated more.
A UBI-supporting tax should instead be a tax on automation-driven productivity, and should be REDUCED when more human employees are retained.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Need to do it for Walmart too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Bernie thinks Amazon is underpaying workers, and he's fighting for social justice - he's not doing this for Trump.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/...
> In one video, titled "Get Amazon Off of Corporate Welfare," he highlighted that CEO Jeff Bezos is the world's richest person and earns $260 million a day, while many of his workers are on food stamps.
Amazon sorting centers pay $12.50/hr to anybody who can show up and pass a drug screen, no skills required, no resume asked for. How is that exploitation? Yes, the problem is that you work at Amazon's convenience, not your own, but I don't see them as taking advantage of anyone -- nobody has a gun to their head making them work there.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Two candidates for the same job, they have equivalent experiences and qualifications for the job. Candidate one is a single worker with no children. Candidate two is a single mom with four children. The wage is a "living wage" of $15/hr. Guess which candidate is going to generate a ton of under the Sander's tax plan? That's right, the single mom with four kids. All of a sudden, it's in a companies best interest to find out if you have kids, to find out the size of your family, to find out if you are going to generate any tax liability because of who you are. When you start to tax companies because of the people they hire, they will change the way they hire the people. The end result will ALWAYS hurt those the law intended to help.
The mandatory acceptance of trade unions at these companies is one way of stopping this. As long as workers act as individuals they can be picked off one by one; if they can organise collectively they you can have equal forces. I know that many do not like this, but without unions you have the large forcing the small.
I think the danger here is this could be the "Don't hire poor people act". If they are punished for hiring people receiving government benefits, then they won't hire them. So this act might just wind up preventing people from being able to take jobs that allow them to get off government benefits.
And fourth, so many of their employees are claiming them that they wouldn't have enough employees left if they let them all go.
Between this and Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act, we might see some real change in the corporate monsters that are destroying the middle class right now.
That is, if either ever make it into law.....
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That actually makes it sound like a good thing. If Amazon or the like refuses to hire "at risk" employees who might need welfare or other benefits to sustain themselves, then they will likely eliminate their hiring pool and it should result in forcing them to raise their wages.
Meanwhile for teenagers starting out, who don't need welfare or a "living wage" this wouldn't prevent them from being hired for jobs or gaining experience, etc.
It seems like an ideal solution. My only concern is whether the jobs needed are sufficiently profitable to sustain the population without redistributing the GDP. If our country can sustain a population, but if there is no work of sufficient value to redistribute the wealth generated by the nation as a whole, then this tax could destroy the marginal growth in GDP we might experience. Will it tip the scales back towards recirculating the GDP throughout the entire nation by increasing the value of labor, or will it tip the scales towards a jobless economy by making the work not worth the cost?
I'd like to think that the destruction of everything below the upper-class is somehow related to the top 1% of americans controlling 40% of the wealth. It allows a select group of americans to sway the outcome of elections and buy the loyalty of our elected "representatives".
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Bernie Sanders would make (and would have made) a much better president than either Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Bernie would be disastrous as President, worse than the other two, and I can't stand either of them either.
The idea that Bernie, a failed everything before politics guy, can run anything is laughable. His only contribution to society is the butt of jokes about "The 1%", and showing how corrupt Hillary actually is.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
And yet everything he's said is backed by ivy-league economists, and you're basically just an old faggot whinging on the internet, not running or in charge of anything including even a cogent opine. You can't even credibly impugn the man, lol.
I am thinking that the government doesn't have to necessarily *tell* the employer who is specifically claiming benefits... they would just know that some people are. I would think that a company as big as the ones being targeted would have several employees claiming assistance.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Median wage would likely be more representative.
Amazon doesn't know who gets government cheese. The government does. As a result, unless this bill is a trainwreck in implementation, Amazon can't really do anything but raise wages or pay the bill.
"The curious task of economics is to teach men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
How could you possibly think this wouldn't choke out almost all hiring and impose impossibly high costs? Corporations don't have unlimited funds, this sort of crazy plan would ensure employees who pose even the slightest risk of being a burden would never get hired.
Have you considered lifting people up individually? It's popular to cry for a "living wage!", but plenty of people already make that kind of money without your help.
Perhaps it's best to raise the skills and professionalism of people making minimum wage to match the abilities of the folks who make a good wage without your help. (See Mike Rowe)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
$20,424 is the annual income to obtain federal SNAP assistance. If the average salary at Amazon is $28,446, what's the median? Without that, we know nothing.
In 1986, the average starting salary of a UNC Geography graduate was something like $100,000. If you look at the median in that example, it's much much lower, but Michael Jordan was a graduate of UNC with a degree in Geography in 1986. Bezos's salary of something like $1.2 million/year (that's the actual salary, what he makes off the stock is another story) would be included into the average salary at amazon, as would the board members, the engineers, the higher paid office workers, etc.
How do you have a factory without investments?
Factories do not create themselves. It requires investments and risk management, planning and creativity as well as pioneering abilities.
The factory floor person is paid according to his market value, based on his skill set and ambitions.
Those who are not ambitious and wish only to show up at work, do their 9 to 5, be out the door without a worry in the world, do not get to reap a share of the wealth generated by the TEAM, except for the portion which represents his labor. His labor is compensated for in his salary and benefits, full stop.
If he is worth more, he can go find a job elsewhere, where someone will recognize his worth.
No one OWES anyone anything. Its an exchange of services. If you have no marketable skills, you cannot command premium pay. If you are too lazy to work on your skill set, either by putting in effort or going for training, it is no ones fault but your own.
I know that many do not like this, but without unions you have the large forcing the small.
Unions have their own set of issues. Now, don't get me wrong, I think both Amazon and Wal-Mart have gotten to the point where a union is needed to provide a counterbalance, but the folks who have issues with unions don't have those issues because they believe large corporations should be able to do whatever they want to their employees.
Unions help negotiate contracts for workers. That's generally a good thing. However, union strikes cause issues for people who aren't part of the problem - think transit union strikes that cause people who rely on them to be late for work for a week straight...unions in general have a poor track record for attempting to mitigate collateral damage.
Unions defend their employees. This is great for those times when employees need a lawyer to combat a false accusation claim. However, many of the police officers who shot unarmed citizens managed to avoid any sort of consequence because the union went to bat for them. For less extreme examples, it's highly exceptional for a union to refuse to defend an employee who is legitimately unproductive and causes other employees to have to pick up the slack. The phrase "good enough for union work" is not a resounding affirmation of excellence. Similarly, when a job is legitimately done and fewer workers are needed to complete the work, instead of fighting for a good severance package and networking with other unions to facilitate a seamless employment experience for everyone, unions will instead fight to retain positions for employees who really aren't needed.
After a while, unions do what they're supposed to do and get things back to a reasonable balance between employers (who expect productivity in exchange for money) and workers (who want enough money to pay their bills and have a reasonable expectation of not landing in the hospital from a work-related injury). However, unions seldom step back once things are in order; given enough time, most unions will start to focus on self-justification. Once this happens, unions start to become liabilities to everyone. Unions start to become more demanding than the employers from whom the employees needed protection. This makes non-union options more appealing to everyone, including the members.
The pendulum is now at the level with Amazon and Wal-Mart where unions are very likely to do some good. Though tangential, I'd even throw Uber into the mix as well. However, the "unions aren't a good thing" mentality isn't coming from a disdain for workers, but the realization that "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"is not a paradigm which considers unions to be exempt.
You're an idiot. Investments are made to capture wealth, the actual wealth is created by selling things produced on the factory floor or by providing services.
Nobody gets to be in that to 1% by working hard. You have to take many other people's production a well.
It never stops amazing me that people still by into this bullshit. Economies function just fine without a parasite class stealing the proceeds of the working class.
Why only list entertainment on consumable and transitory things? The category also includes things like food, clothing, medicine, and transportation. It also includes costs of rented things, like rented housing versus home ownership, and the cost of loans and interest.
You're right that the upper echelons have more discretion to where they put it, they have the option to put it into income-generating and growth-generating items instead of consumable. To be sure they'll still buy more consumables, but they have the option to buy things that grow. The farther down the totem pole people get, the less of that option people have. Some have a small portion on the top, like a small amount of profit generated from selling food, but selling them is a wealth-gathering exercise to those who own the business already.
And that's the crux of the cycle. If you are poor you remain poor, you cannot cross that gap, you cannot buy a home but must rent housing, you cannot buy value-generating or value-retaining things because they are too expensive, you must rent where the value goes to someone else. If you are wealthy you can buy more of those things that further generate wealth, buy another home or even buy an apartment complex to rent out, letting the wealthy capture even more in successive rounds.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
And where did the money come from to make those investments? People bought products made in previous factories, by previous laborers.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.