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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'
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.
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.
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.