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'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.
Go Walmart! Can't believe they're on higher ground...
Isn't it funny how corporate America is joking with each other about how they screw the American people. What a great country that they feel free to do this publicly!
You know how companies declare their profit in their investor meetings? That's a public declaration.
Tax based on that. Or whatever they fill in their tax forms - whichever is greater. No having your cake and eating it too - no more Hollywood accounting and still claiming record income.
Ryan Fenton
The fact that they apparently properly owe $0 in taxes despite $11b in profits might be a failing in the taxation system, but it doesn't mean they aren't paying what they are legally required to. They are clearly using loopholes and the like to dodge what would otherwise be a considerable tax bill, but just because they are doing that does not mean it is actually illegal.
Instead of appealing to Amazon to pay their taxes, they should instead be appealing to Washington to get the taxation laws changed so that this sort of thing can't continue happen.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Not every job is meant for an adult to try to support a household from....
Nope. If you work a job full time then you deserve to be able to live off of it. Anything else is slavery.
Regardless of who has 'the high ground' in this pissing match, it's clear Bezos is being snarky, probably without realizing his own hypocrisy here.
Like how he threaten to move jobs out of Seattle because the local council wanted to add a head tax to fund housing, etc. and then made himself look noble by promising to donate several $million, if not more, to charities to help out with poverty and housing.... which, oh by the way, would net him a nice charitable tax deduction too - double win for him: no new head tax, and gets to claim a charitable deduction!
AC comments get piped to
I'll let F.D.R., the president who signed the first federal minimum wage bill into law comment:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery Act)
Minimum-wage jobs are vital to the smooth functioning of our society, we can't just eliminate them - which is what would happen if all the current employees somehow managed to get better jobs. The average age of minimum wage employees is 30, it's not a bunch of high school kids making spending money after school.
If you really want high school kids to be employable at lower wages - put a lower minimum wage for minors into the law, while requiring a living wage for everyone else. See how long it takes before the kids realize they're being cheated and walk out when the adult working next to them is getting twice the pay for the exact same work.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Go Walmart! Can't believe they're on higher ground..."
They are? Amazon is playing by the rules in regards to what taxes they pay just like every single other company I've ever heard of. Otherwise the IRS would be after them big time. The problem with Amazon not paying taxes isn't Amazon, it's our broken tax system.
Meanwhile, for the type of unskilled labor both Walmart and Amazon employ a lot of people for, a $15 minimum wage and decent benefits is extremely generous in the context of what you often see in this sector of our economy. All Walmart does is give their employees a stack of pamphlets explaining how to take advantage of federal and state welfare programs because they know their employees need them.
To put it differently, sure, you can say that Walmart is just playing by the minimum wage rules but they also probably pay as little in taxes as they possibly can as well.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
That is completely ridiculous. It means that if I choose for my job to play the guitar in the park or throw rocks in the pond, I am entitled to a 'living wage' for my work.
Incorrect. If somebody hires you to play guitar in the park or throw rocks in the pond, then that person must pay you a living wage.
If you don't like your job you go find a better one. If you can't find a better job because (education, training, travel, etc.)? Fix your problem.
Right now about 20% of Americans can't do it, living on a wage that is close to minimal wage. This is basically a disaster in waiting.
An employer is never obligated to fix your life problems for you.
Nope. They just must pay a living wage. If they can't do it, then they go out of the business. End of the story.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Are you really saying that low skill people shouldn't be hired full time? Is it ok if they work two part time jobs?
No. I'm saying that the salary paid for work must be enough to be livable if worked full time.
98% of full time worker earn more than minimum wage. The other 2% are almost all entry level workers in their first 6 months of employment. So obviously employers are nearly all paying more than they have to.
You are lying by omission. This is the number of workers earning exactly the federal minimum wage and most of states have local wages that are higher. If instead you raise the cutoff to $10.10 per hour (still below the livable wage) to account for the state-specific minimum wages then you get an appalling picture: https://www.pewresearch.org/fa... - 30% of all workers are paid less than $10.10 per hour.
Go to the Home Depot parking lot at 7 AM and try to hire an illegal Mexican for less than $10 per hour. Good luck. Even desperate people know the market value of their labor.
I will never do that, I value the labor. That being said, domestic help is often illegally paid less.
And if you start trying to force living wage on all full time jobs? Guess what?
No more minimum wage jobs...all part time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Illegal aliens occupy those jobs now, and they make less than minimum wage. It's OK though, the Americans who get displaced are the deplorables. No loss there. Fuck the working class losers. They need to learn to code.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sounds like Germany's tax starts at a marginal rate of 14%, you're presumably paying no more than that for a minimum-wage job.
No more full time jobs? You mean a whole lot of people are paying for a whole lot of work that doesn't need to be done? Unlikely. No doubt some jobs of marginal utility will be cut, but all those people making twice as much money (because you doubled the minimum wage) are going to be buying several times as much stuff, now that most of their paycheck isn't going to rent and bare survival. Which means you need a lot more people serving them. The thing about increasing the minimum wage, is that such people tend to spend money as fast as they get it, rather than putting a lot into savings and investments that generate no economic activity.
>What will you do next? Outlaw part time work?
Minimum wage isn't about how much you take home at the end of the week - it's about the minimum amount you can pay for one hour of someone else's life. The idea being to keep you from using their desperation for a job to cheat them out of a living wage - that's not an ethical negotiation tactic.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Not every job is meant for an adult to try to support a household from....
True. In fact, the other jobs are not, either. No jobs are "meant" at all.
They are offered, and either accepted or rejected by potential employees. And that acceptance may be canceled, if the employee finds the employer is not satisfactory. And that offer may be canceled, if the employer finds the employee is not satisfactory.
Frequently, low-paid jobs for low-skilled or unproven workers are held by people who are not adults, or by adults who are not trying to support a household with that job.
But that's an observation, not a decree from whoever is in charge of deciding what jobs "mean".
Yeah, I'm kinda quibbling. But casual phrasing that was not intended to be taken literally often leads to sloppy thinking on the part of those who read it.
For examples of that sort of sloppy thinking, you won't have to look far. This thread, for instance.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.