'How About Paying Your Taxes?': Walmart Responds To Amazon's Challenge Over Pay (nbcnews.com)

Amazon and Walmart are in war over worker pay -- and now corporate taxes. After Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos on Thursday issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match Amazon's pay and benefits, Walmart snapped right back. From a report: "Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It's a kind of competition that will benefit everyone," Bezos wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. "Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?" tweeted Walmart's Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs Dan Bartlett on Thursday morning, sharing an article about Amazon paying $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profits last year.

Comments

Re:Aren't wages better than taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one rule for Industrialists and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Highest. Wages. Possible.

That's not a typo or a misquote. Ford understood that long-term, you gotta pay your workers for them to be able to afford the goods being produced. Anything else isn't sustainable.

Re:Actually, they probably *ARE* paying taxes...

[DCFusor]

The real issue in all this is that the multinationals can choose to report those profits anywhere they want, and there's always that one or two countries that consider that collecting a tiny percentage of that is better than nothing, which is how all those fancy "tax sandwiches" come to pass - and lobbying is around a 100:1 payoff to get those "loopholes" made into law - this is well known and not limited to these guys by any means; how'd we get to a point where Medicare can't negotiate drug prices in the US, you know, like very other country can do, and who all get vastly lower prices?
.

In effect due to internal unity of purpose, they beat the world governments in power - "All you need" is for all governments to agree on some uniform way of taxing. As we used to say here, GoodLuckWithThat.
I'm not sure the assumption that governments are the best way to redistribute money is a good one anyway. Seems to be a lot spent on military adventures we could do without - while it's a jobs program, I think we can come up with something better. If we agree, that is. See the issue? We don't and won't, as a world.

Re:Burn

[Anonymous Coward]

they aren't, really. they're still $11.00 an hour here with banners all over outside begging for workers at that rate. since *that* was a bump for just about everybody when it happened, long-time employees got a 'raise' to that figure, but nothing extra for their years of servitude. they have like 2 or 3 full time hourly workers in the whole fucking store, everybody else that isn't store management is sub-30 hours, not allowed to work more than that, and receives no benefits other than the in-store employee discount card (when eligible). when holidays roll around and staffing needs increase, they keep existing workers at 30 hours or less and bring in 'seasonal' temps that are 'ineligible' for benefits and won't be around long enough for an unemployment claim.

walmart can claim the high road all they want, but it's still just a rut in the sewers.

Re:LoL

[Immerman]

Of course it does - when talking numbers, "the average" almost always means the arithmetic average, otherwise known as "the mean" - add everyone up, and divide by their count. 1 guy makes $100M, while 100,000 guys make $1, the average pay is $1,001

That's very different than how the term is used in common conversation, where it typically means "the median" - line everyone up from smallest to largest (by whatever measure is being used), and pick the guy in the middle. He's probably fairly typical - "the average guy". In my above example, he'd be making $1.

The mean almost always skews higher than the median, simply because the large values tend to be very much larger than the mid-range values, looking at the difference between mean and median gives you a rough idea of just how uneven the distribution is. For a linear distribution, where someone making more than 80% of the population is making twice as much as someone at the 40% mark, and 4x as much as someone at the 20% mark, the mean and median will be the same.

By contrast, in the U.S. the median household income is $56k - half of all households make more than that, half make less. But the mean (average) income is $79k, 41% higher, thanks to the very few at the top who make massively more money than most. And because the US income is fairly linearly distributed until you get to the top ~10%, that means that (very) roughly 41% of the entire income in the country is being redirected to those at the very top, above and beyond what a you would expect from looking at the income distribution of the rest of the population.

https://wallethacks.com/averag...

Re:harrumph

[Immerman]

I like how you neatly fail to mention that these "unpopular experiments" that have been so successful have set the minimum wage in Germany to roughly $15/hour, which along with free health care for everyone makes for a pretty reasonable living wage, given modest living expenses of $1000/month.