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

[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."

Sounds Fair

[WillAffleckUW]

Need to do it for Walmart too.

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?

[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?

[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,.

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.

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.