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.

Comments

Good

[XXongo]

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...

Re:Good

[XXongo]

...and, even better yet, they'll hit Walmart as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
https://qz.com/695763/a-web-of-terror-insecurity-and-a-high-level-of-vulnerability-hm-gap-and-walmart-are-accused-of-hundreds-of-acts-of-worker-abuse/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart

Re:Good

[Oswald McWeany]

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...

Amazon is taking hits from the left and the right here. Amazon doesn't have a fan in the current white house either. They don't have many allies in DC.

Re:Good

[omnichad]

Should Amazon be responsible for the full-time worker who chooses to have half a dozen children he/she can't afford on their salary?

Nice straw man. Look at both Amazon and Wal-Mart employees. You'll see single mothers with one, maybe two children who need benefits to survive. In the Wal-Mart case, they keep most employees "part-time" because they offer benefits to ALL full-time employees and they don't actually want to offer it to very many. It's very rare to get 32+ hours as a Wal-Mart employee - which drops your wage even further below a 40-hour worker from the start, even at the same hourly rate.

Re:Good

[omnichad]

When you systematically give 30 hours per week to a larger number of part time employees just to avoid having full time employees, you really should be responsible for the fallout. There are very few of these employees that don't want full-time hours. Instead, Wal-Mart can claim that 100% of full-time employees get all these great benefits and they're a great place to work - all while only having a handful of full-time employees.

Expecting a job that takes 30 minutes to train with no skill needed to support a single parent (not sure why you had to specify mother instead of parent - I'm a widowed dad of 2 kids) and that parent's family is ludicrous.

I specified single mother just because I'm thinking of specific, real people and not statistics. That 30 minutes to train really only applies to people who have much better intelligence and education - it takes longer than that. Giving up all of your working hours to anyone should be worth the huge percentage of a human life that it is. There is no excuse to cheap out just because a job is too "lowly."

Re:Good

[cfalcon]

> And in the end, that's all that matters, isn't it?

Power and money are somewhat translatable to the other, but ultimately power is power.

My core problem with this Sanders bill is that it makes it unprofitable to hire poor people.
Ex: Single woman is willing to work for X. Unwed mother is willing to work for X, and makes up the difference with WIC. Right now, you hire who you think is best. With this bill in place, you are heavily motivated to pick the first woman, because she costs you X, and the second woman costs X+W, where W is the cost of the WIC. The more children, the more the company pays. The poorer the person, the more the company pays. It strongly disadvantages poor people when they go to compete economically.

Re:Good

[ahodgson]

The ACA (Obamacare) mandates employer-provided health care to all full time employees. FTE defined as anyone who works an average 30 hours or more weekly over a year. It was widely predicted this would lead to an explosion of sub-30-hour weekly jobs, and it did.

Re:Good

[liquid_schwartz]

And they are a scam in every case. Free money for the mom, children still often go without. Until this money has accountability don't expect good outcomes.

breaking news

[Thud457]

Old Man Yells at Cloud!

Better than most ideas

[EndlessNameless]

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.

Re:Don't we have a free market system?

[DigiShaman]

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.

But how does this square with UBI?

[presidenteloco]

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.

Sounds Fair

[WillAffleckUW]

Need to do it for Walmart too.

Re:Don't we have a free market system?

[dunkelfalke]

Oh, that can be applied in so many ways.
Like, for example, "don't like this kind of laws, find another country".

Re:Don't we have a free market system?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Will it help?

[Roger W Moore]

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?

Re:Will it help?

[Linsaran]

I mean, ideally setting a living minimum wage would be ideal; but this particular bill might be more palatable to the right. The concern that people would get fired is probably overblown. For one thing it'd probably be a protected clause like how you can't fire someone because of their race or ethnicity. Second if people need benefits they're going to claim them regardless; people need to eat and have a home. Thirdly chances are the government isn't going to be so granular as to tell big corporations which employees are claiming benefits, they just get a tax bill for the totals.

Re:Will it help?

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:Will it help?

[apoc.famine]

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.....

Re:Will it help?

[Monster_user]

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?

Re:Will it help?

[mnemotronic]

... we might see some real change in the corporate monsters that are destroying the middle class right now

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".

Re:Will it help?

[mysidia]

might end up with employees claiming benefits getting fired by the company

If the bill doesn't address it, then my suggestion would be: Tax on benefits does not end with termination --- If an employee receiving government benefits is terminated, then the employer continues paying Tax for all government benefits that employee receives - Including any unemployment benefits or increase in SNAP or other program benefits caused by unemployment - for the earlier of 4 years, or until that employee is hired and maintains jobs for a total of at least 2000 hours of work with new employers, at which time the last year's "Benefits tax" amounts paid on that person's benefits by both their new and previous employers will be credited or refunded to their previous employer.

Re:Will it help?

[apoc.famine]

Yes. And where did that wealth come from? From investments in businesses and the stock market. Both of which have been doing excellent due to record profits from businesses. And why do they have record profits? Because their labor costs are shrinking.

These bills don't immediately fix the problem at the top, but they do provide a bit of a safety valve on the wealth concentration pipeline.

Re:Will it help?

[AuMatar]

That wage includes all the very high salaried engineers in the same pool as the warehouse workers. Nobody is claiming the engineers need assistance. Its the scores of warehouse workers that need it.

Re:Will it help?

[The-Ixian]

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.

Re:Will it help?

[aaarrrgggh]

Median wage would likely be more representative.

Re:Will it help?

[bistromath007]

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.

Re: Will it help?

[dfenstrate]

"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)

Re:Will it help?

[Immerman]

Investments don't create wealth - they capture it. Wealth is generated by the person on the factory floor making something someone will buy, or the person providing a service that someone will buy. Everything else is just a question of how that wealth gets distributed,.

Re:Will it help?

[cbeaudry]

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.

Re:Will it help?

[Solandri]

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

That's mostly a self-created problem. The top 1% only makes about 19% of the income. That they're able to leverage that to attain 40% of the wealth (integral of income minus expenses over time) tells you that (1) the 1% are more likely to spend their income on things that retain or grow in value, rather than disposable or transitory things like entertainment, and (2) the 99% are willing to pay exorbitant interest rates to borrow money from the 1% (that interest becomes income for the 1%). I call it self-created because this is something the 99% can solve on their own. They don't have to spend as much of their income on things which quickly or immediately lose value. And they can put off major purchases for some years while they save up money, rather than take out a loan to buy it right now.

The bigger concern should probably be that the bottom 60% also makes about 19% of total income. That is, the income of the top 1% just about equals the income of the bottom 60%. That is, for those income valuations to be correct, an individual in the top 1% has to be 60x as producitve as someone in the bottom 60%. I'm a fiscal conservative, and that sounds pretty hard to believe. Unlike spending, the bottom 60% aren't really in control of their income. Making it much more likely that the problem as that they're simply being underpaid.

Re:Will it help?

[Frobnicator]

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.

Re:Will it help?

[Immerman]

And where did the money come from to make those investments? People bought products made in previous factories, by previous laborers.

Re:Will it help?

[BrianMarshall]

Love the beginning of the summary...

A public spat between Amazon Sen. Bernie Sanders over workers' wages...

Um... Bernie Sanders, the senator from Amazon, is having a spat with whom?

Re:Will it help?

[shaitand]

I couldn't. People who don't need those benefits won't take employment at these wages, people taking employment at these wages by definition are going to require these benefits.

The only exception I can think of are retirees who can work a certain number of hours a week without losing benefits but they amount they earn is docked from their benefits now anyway.

Who are they exploiting?

[Locke2005]

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.

Re:How did Bernie Sanders become wealthy?

[Guyle]

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.

The law of unintended consequences

[PackMan97]

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.

Sanders

[fyngyrz]

This is a ploy to extract donations from his base for his next reelection run. And that's all it is.

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.

Re:Sanders

[Dragonslicer]

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.

Re:Don't we have a free market system?

[eth1]

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.

Don't hire poor people act

[roccomaglio]

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.

Re:Not the solution

[DRJlaw]

You can't penalize one company and ignore all the others.

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.").

Data Point

[ElizabethGreene]

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

Warren Buffet already answered your question

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Consequences of Predatory Taxes

[viperidaenz]

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?