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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...
Old Man Yells at Cloud!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
Two axiomatic problems with Socialism
1. Those in power that advocate socialism never live by he very rules they set for everyone else.
2. Eventually you run out of other people's money.
Life is not for the lazy.
I think the spirit of the proposed bill is "Don't make the rest of the US pay for your penny-pinching bad practices". Which I'm totally in favor of.
The same applies to capitalism, it's just masked through a premise of false entitlement.
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! --
That's the problem of averages you can have a small minority receiving huge amounts of money while the majority workers are receiving a pittance and when averaged will still appear as if they pay their employees more.
Oh, that can be applied in so many ways.
Like, for example, "don't like this kind of laws, find another country".
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Um, hello!!
We've already reached socialism. Huge companies like Amazon and Walmart don't pay their employees enough to live on, so they MUST go on public assistance, which is... (*GASP*) government assistance! Which YOU and I pay for through our own taxes. It makes much better economical sense to tax these corporations to recoup the costs to the taxpayer. This won't bankrupt these companies. It just means that Bezos will only have access to nine diamond-encrusted, golden butt-scratchers a week instead of the usual ten.
My heart truly bleeds for him.
This is for people in the warehouses, doing all the logistics and shipping work essentially. They make a little more than minimum wage. Yes you are correct that those that work in the corporate HQ make a ton of money, it is the line workers Bernie's bill is looking out for.
I applaud the aims but I can't help thinking that it might end up with employees claiming benefits getting fired by the company and the rest ending up getting crap pay and being too afraid to claim any benefits for fear of being fired. Isn't the better way to do this to set a living minimum wage?
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.
taxing companies as a way of penalizing them for not paying their employees enough: hello socialism.
We HAVE socialism in the United States, AND it's supported by taxes on employers. We call it Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The last one even has the word SOCIAL in it!
I noticed this years ago when I had a housemate that had a part time job at Banana Republic, but yet she qualified for SNAP. I found it disgusting that essentially the government was subsidizing mega-rich corporations because they paid so poorly. It's about time someone actually tried to do something about it.
You can cry and cry about that big bad word "socialism" all you want, but to the vast majority of us, this is just desert for the massive benefits we already give to mega-corp. It seems entirely fair that the government should tax companies that pay so little they literally can't afford to feed themselves.
Let me Google that for you. I didn't research his whole life's story for you, but there's a simple reason he's a millionaire now: he wrote a book and is banking on the royalties.
Two axiomatic problems with Socialism
1. Those in power that advocate socialism never live by he very rules they set for everyone else.
2. Eventually you run out of other people's money.
Number 1 is correct. The old Russian joke of a man standing on the corner expounding communism:
Man on soapbox: "Communism is great! If I have two cars, I give you one. If I have two houses, I give you one"
Man in the audience: "What about shirts? If you have two shirts, will you give me one"
Man on soapbox: "No"
Man in audience: "Why?"
Man on soapbox: "Because I have two shirts."
In the case of Bernie, he lives quite the hypocritical life for a socialist.
But onto point two:
It is straightforward to fund UBI, so long as you do it gradually (ie - not all at once).
Set aside $1 million for each UBI awarded, invested in index funds. Give out $25,000 annually from that fund, and it will still grow faster than inflation in perpetuity. Hold a lottery to pass out the UBI benefits.
Each $1 billion investment in UBI would remove 1,000 people from the workforce, which over time would greatly improve the working conditions for the remaining workers.
Over the course of a few decades, this would transition a large portion of the workforce over to UBI, while not relying on "other peoples' money".
For comparison, current welfare costs about $492 billion and serves 39 million people. Allocating $100 billion to a UBI would reduce that number by 100,000 people each year and fund them in perpetuity, reducing that particular taxpayer burden by 1/3 of one percent each year until it is no longer needed. That 1/3 of a percent reduction actually grows over time, as the $100 billion/100,000 people represents an ever larger percent of the people involved.
As opposed to costing $492 billion in taxes each year for the same number of people - in perpetuity.
How does TAXING the company help with giving them $2 more.
Because if they give them a higher wage and the employees don't need benefits, the tax goes away. This is more like having a variable national minimum wage - that varies by cost of living (Since if you don't make enough to survive in your area, you are eligible for benefits).
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.
I hope it works. AFAIC, Bernie Sanders would make (and would have made) a much better president than either Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. Ideally, both houses of congress would change hands as well, so he could actually get some things done. It's well past time for a pendulum swing, IMHO.
My cynical side says that people, despite recognizing that congress as a whole is dysfunctional, will still vote the same congress-critters right back in, just as they have been doing pretty much most of the time. Round and round we go.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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 "just find another job" at the rock bottom of the pay scale is that any other job they find is going to put them in the same boat. You have a whole class of people that are desperate, and basically have to take whatever bend-over-and-take it paycheck they can get.
One of the big benefits of UBI would be the elimination of this class of people, so that employers can't get away with this crap any more.
I don't like government meddling, either, but I also don't like supporting social safety net programs with my taxes so that big companies can use it as a subsidy.
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.
He is an author. He made over a million in royalties from the books he has authored, in just the last year alone.
Let's not overlook the fact a senator is having an issue with a single company (Amazon). Bernie, you're not the CEO of the company (nor could he handle it), so don't tell them how to run their business. Last time I checked you can't keep your budget in order.
Here is the real issue:
The push for businesses to be able to regulate their own pay and finances. Who says these people qualify for these programs listed above? The government. So, you know what you're seen? Huge expansions in the people who qualify for the program. Now, since the government can't keep paying for it and the programs are failing (everyone wants free stuff, buy them votes) they do the usual next step to blame the businesses. It's their fault! They don't pay enough! So let's force them to pay more. But, this isn't just for Amazon, please look at all who would be snared by this.
Example of this:
Seattle city council tried the "Amazon Tax" earlier this year. Again, a socialist pushed this as they need to pay their fair share. Ignore the 40k's job they pay in Seattle which are mostly development jobs, not low paying jobs. The tax was a per head cost per year for businesses at a certain number of employees (sound familiar?) What they didn't think was how it impacted others besides Amazon. Dick's drive in burgers was a prime example. A main stay for many years, they work on a razors edge with profits. By the way, tax them suckers like Amazon, and don't forget, this place provides benefits and college tuition funding for employees who flip burgers. That will show that business.
The more we regulate and control business, the harder and more costly it is to run. And since government can't run itself correct, why would they know what to do best. Right, they don't.
You're right, you can't. You can, per TFS, have it "apply to corporations with 500 or more employees." Just like the Family and Medical Leave Act applies to private employers with 50 or more employees.
You fell for the catchy abbreviation and didn't even read the summary, much less the first sentence of TFA ("Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced a bill that would tax companies like Amazon and Walmart for the cost of employees' food stamps and other public assistance.").
That's apples and oranges.
1. Obviously, it's vastly more difficult to leave a country than a job. In the U.S., we have a free market system, which means you can use your legs and pocket books to cast your vote for or agains a company.
2. You can change laws (i.e., government policies) through a number of channels: voting, protesting, lobbying, ballot initiatives, etc...
Happens all the time.
It would break the PHP on some news sites.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The average pay at an Amazon warehouse for a fulfillment worker is $12.35 per hour. Working full time that is more than $24k/year.
WIC eligibility is up to 185% of the federal poverty level, $30,451 for a family of two.
SNAP eligibility is up to 130% of the federal poverty level $21,398 for a family of two.
The federal poverty level numbers are
$12,140 for individuals
$16,460 for a family of 2
$20,780 for a family of 3
$25,100 for a family of 4
$29,420 for a family of 5
$33,740 for a family of 6
in 2018
Your $250,000 figure and $14,750 was based on a middle-class income. For lower income, the figure comes closer to $9,700 per year. Somehow housing is a full 29% of the middle-class figure, but on the lower end poor people don't move when they have a child. Somehow transportation for a 2 year old is a full $200 more per year than no child. These figures are pulled from thin air, but loosely tied to consumer pricing. Children cost money, but these numbers are padded out well beyond any real-world budget scenario.
You're going to have to accept that the continuance of humanity actually requires reproduction and that you're talking about some sort of elitist eugenics.
Many THOUSANDS of which receive snap benefits?
Largest employer in The USA
Largest chunk of the budget of the government of the USA
And, many of the active duty service people in the different branches of the military receive welfare.
I like Bernie's politics in general, but this is not the solution. This is just being a political wingnut 101.
You're not paying attention. Sanders is introducing this bill, written in this way, because Trump has been railing against Bezos. If the Rethuglicans don't support this bill, it makes it look like they don't support the president. If they do support this bill, then it makes it look like they support Sanders. Either way, Republicans lose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Presuming it was birth-without-adequate-means-of support, it'd be perfectly fine with me - more than fine - if she could go get them back if she could then demonstrate an ability to support them.
Children are people, not a toy possession for the rich. Maybe you can lose your home in bankruptcy, but not your family. That is just horrible.
I forget where, so forgive the paraphrasing and lack of citation, but it boiled down to: "Just because you tax me doesn't mean I'm going to stop making money, so go ahead and tax me". He also pointed out that he pays less taxes than his $70k/yr secretary.
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against discriminating on the basis of parenthood, so good luck with that. Bernie's been in the Senate for decades and has teams of staff members. You don't think maybe he thought of that?
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I'm sure Amazon will have no trouble filling those positions with independently wealthy, heiresses and the Nouveau riche. I look forward to seeing Bill Gates, Warrent Buffet and (dare I dream?) Donald Trump packing the socks and chewing gum I buy off Amazon.
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There seems to be some real conflicts in the laws here.
How is it possible , someone who is earning minimum wage would be below the poverty level and qualify for SNAP?
I guess that is part of Senator Sanders point here.
It seems however , contradictory to add an additional tax to a company as basically a penalty for following the law. If it is unfair to pay wages that low , it would be better to simply raise minimum wage. The fact you can't get enough support to do that should tell you maybe you are thinking about it wrong.
I hope there is also a clause in the law that prevents a company from firing someone when they apply for SNAP or I would expect amazon to write it into their employment contract that , while working for them , you may not apply.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Conservatives have been propagandized to be skeptical of the minimum wage - but that doesn't mean they want to pay more in taxes so more-money-than-god corporations like Amazon can make even more quarterly profits. So, you might not get Rand Paul's vote to raise the minimum wage, but you might get it to tax. And Trump has been bashing Amazon for some time now, so it might get some grudging support from the MAGA hat set.
The low paid workers in these big companies are warehouse workers at Amazon and checkout operators at Target. Can't really shift those jobs overseas.
If they shift the costs on to the consumer, that's increasing their prices compared to smaller companies.
Replacing humans with robots isn't going too well, and Amazon have been trying to do this in their warehouses for years.
If they could get away with hiring fewer staff, why haven't they done it already?