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posted by mrpg on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the corporations-are-people-too dept.

DannyB chased by a bunch of wild rabid kangaroos writes . . .

Bernie Sanders introduces 'Stop BEZOS' bill to tax Amazon for underpaying workers

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. Sanders' Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (abbreviated "Stop BEZOS") . . . 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.

Sanders announced his plans for the proposal last month. He emphasized today that "this discussion is not just about Amazon and [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos." But as the bill's name would suggest, he's been particularly critical of Amazon and Bezos who became the richest person in the world (and modern history) last year. "The taxpayers in this country should not be subsidizing a guy who's worth $150 billion, whose wealth is increasing by $260 million every single day," [ . . . rest omitted . . . ]

Food stamps, School Lunch, Medicaid, great . . . but what about employees who must shop at Walmart?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:39AM (4 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:39AM (#731106)

    how come the number of Americans working low wage jobs is increasing?

    Don't ask a question unless you want an answer.

    Globalism. When you are forced to compete with some dirt world person who will work their ass off for a bowl of rice, and there are billions of them, that kinda puts downward pressure on wages for any job that can be outsourced to those guys.

    Atlas Shrugged is one giant joke.

    It was, like 1984, written to make a political point. The characters are all overly exaggerated stereotypes but with enough Truth in them to recognize the reality in them being exaggerated. Successful Capitalists generally are hard driven types, not quite to the extent as in Miss Rand's fictionalized world but we all recognize the reality there. The bad guys are also over the top but turn on C-SPAN and you can see where those characters are drawn from as they too are eternal archtypes who actually exist, just not in quite the pure forms in the novel. Galt is a too perfect hero, not so much a Mary Sue for Rand, more like an idealized Heroic Man's Man she really kinda wishes would come and screw her brains out and put the babies she never had in her womb. You won't see me defending Miss Rand, her Objectivism or generic Libertarianism overly much. Point being the modern Progressives are taking cautionary tales and bringing them, if not to life, to legislation. Not a good thing.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @04:38AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @04:38AM (#731165)

    Globalism is just an excuse, other countries don't have this level of disparity, the reason for it is greed and a tax/regulatory structure that encourages it.

    Other countries don't let corporations book losses on money that hasn't been repatriated and other countries have universal healthcare that prevents employees from going bankrupt due to health conditions. Other countries also have laws to protect the citizens from predatory lenders and offer a real education to the youth.

    Globalism didn't cause this, corrupt and incompetent leaders allowed this market failure. Done right, globalism could have been great for Americans.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 07 2018, @12:22PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 07 2018, @12:22PM (#731727) Journal

      Globalism is just an excuse, other countries don't have this level of disparity, the reason for it is greed and a tax/regulatory structure that encourages it.

      What is wrong with the level of disparity? Particularly, when most of the disparity is based on goods that aren't universally desired and disparity would happen anyway? Almost no one I know wants exotic financial derivatives or bitcoins, for example.

      Other countries don't let corporations book losses on money that hasn't been repatriated and other countries have universal healthcare that prevents employees from going bankrupt due to health conditions. Other countries also have laws to protect the citizens from predatory lenders and offer a real education to the youth.

      Other countries don't have broad taxation laws where repatriated money gets taxed. And universal health care routinely doesn't fix the underlying health problems, meaning you still can go bankrupt from the health problem even in the presence of universal health care. And the US has those laws against predatory lenders and those "real education" to the youth.

      Globalism didn't cause this, corrupt and incompetent leaders allowed this market failure. Done right, globalism could have been great for Americans.

      Market failure? You haven't mentioned a thing that involves markets, much less failures of markets.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:27PM (1 child)

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:27PM (#731285)

    The US had production inside the country from slave labor in the form of prisons in the 1950s, and there was nothing stopping them from buying junk made by South Americans for a bowl of rice or local equivalent per day. Try again.

    I'm not an ally with state socialists. Instead of asshole oligarchs fucking everyone else you have asshole bureaucrats fucking everyone else. My own sympathies lean towards anarcho-communism: small mostly independent communities with the same anti-capitalist ideas as the socialists but the only government is local direct democracy instead of a bureaucracy that spirals into Stalin + Mao: Electric Bugaloo.

      But if you think modern capitalist leaders have more in common with John Galt and Dagny Taggert than they do with James Taggert, you're out of your mind. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Page and Brin, Walt Disney, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, the Koch brothers - they all have colossal work ethics, but they also have the morals of Al Capone. The only reason they don't hire assassins to take out the competition is that they're not certain they could get away with it. False advertising, FUD campaigns, monopoly deals, bribing government officials, screwing business partners, working employees until they're burned out or sick and then tossing them aside like trash, knowing employees qualify for federal assistance programs and keeping wages low, burying competitors in junk lawsuits.

      "They worked 70 hour work weeks for years and are incredibly smart!" So what? That describes my plumber too, why don't you give him 15 billion dollars?

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 07 2018, @12:36PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 07 2018, @12:36PM (#731729) Journal

      But if you think modern capitalist leaders have more in common with John Galt and Dagny Taggert than they do with James Taggert, you're out of your mind. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Page and Brin, Walt Disney, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, the Koch brothers - they all have colossal work ethics, but they also have the morals of Al Capone.

      This is another way Ayn Rand hits the mark. The villains in her books always use moral arguments when they have no other basis on which to propagate their odious behaviors and beliefs. Morality is the last refuse of the immoral. Here, you mention almost a dozen people, who happen to make your list merely because they were wealthy and well known, and assert without any sort of factual basis that they'd be killing people, if they thought they could get away with it. It's not an insightful moral observation, it's libel.

      False advertising, FUD campaigns, monopoly deals, bribing government officials, screwing business partners, working employees until they're burned out or sick and then tossing them aside like trash, knowing employees qualify for federal assistance programs and keeping wages low, burying competitors in junk lawsuits.

      Notice that not a one of those things, even when it is somewhat immoral, is on the level of assassinating people.

      "They worked 70 hour work weeks for years and are incredibly smart!" So what? That describes my plumber too, why don't you give him 15 billion dollars?

      If he creates the next business worth several tens of billions of dollars, then I would have no trouble at all with doing that.