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Bernie Sanders Intros ‘Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS)’ Bill
- 40acres 8y agoIf congress is good at one thing it's making an acronym for proposed bills.
- bmpafa 8y agoThe best example of this imo is the "USA PATRIOT" act, or: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"
- throwaway5752 8y agoWhat a moron. The idea Amazon is the problem... is he too much of a wimp to take on the actual subsidy recipients (ie Agriculture - particularly in livestock, Finance, and Oil/Gas). Bezos is rich because he had a huge position the company he started and presided over taking to a $1T market cap. He pays himself relatively little in salary and stock grants on an ongoing basis. You might as well go after Warren Buffett. Oracle stands out among tech companies, if anyone wants to create a cutely acronymed bill for them: https://www.asyousow.org/reports/the-100-most-overpaid-ceos-2018-are-fund-managers-asleep-at-the-wheel https://www.asyousow.org/reports/the-100-most-overpaid-ceos-... edit: "This brings me great sadness, as Sanders' career has been to improve the lives of his constituents, and American people as a whole. I think this is uncalled for." It brings me great sadness, too, because I think it's opportunistic grandstanding on his part, and far beneath the standards he has set. And what saddens me more is that it appears to be part of a trend for him in the past 3 years.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> What a moron. This brings me great sadness, as Sanders' career has been to improve the lives of his constituents, and American people as a whole. I think this is uncalled for. > Bezos is rich because he had a huge position the company he started and presided over taking to a $1T market cap. He pays himself relatively little in salary and stock grants on an ongoing basis. Then tax his stock grants at wage based levels. Your argument is that there are "bigger fish to fry". There's no reason not to start with a trillion dollar company.
- throwaway5752 8y agoDo you give him a refund if AMZN drops, then? Taxing change in mark-to-market wealth is a huge change in tax code and probably shouldn't be done reactively. His grants are probably taxed as W-2 income, as is his salary. Maybe he has accounting tricks for it and I won't speculate, but at issue is his longstanding, large position in AMZN that goes back decades because he was the sole founder and they only took two funding rounds.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- anothergoogler 8y ago> Do you give him a refund if AMZN drops, then? I hope you're aware that investors already get to write off their losses.
- throwaway5752 8y agoUnless you know something I don't, this is when they sell a position. If you tax the delta in wealth on the way up (absent an exit that creates a taxable gain), what do you do if wealth decreases? I.e. If I hold 100 shares of AMZN at $1,000 and it doubles to $2000 without me selling, and I owe taxes on the increase in net wealth from $100k to $200k.. what happens if AMZN drops by 25% the next year. Also, what does this do to the predictability of tax receipts for federal budgeting?
- madengr 8y agoStock grants, yes, as that would be income. Capital gains, no. The whole point of lower capital gains tax is that the principal has been taxed already, and it also encourages investment (risk).
- toomuchtodo 8y agoDisagree. Capital gains should be taxed at wage levels. Also, I don't care for incentivizing investment in enterprises that rely on abusive labor practices.
- madengr 8y agoGet rid of those mentioned subsidies, and the price of food and fuel will jump. It will only screw the working poor. I could care less about the price of fuel (electric car) and food (small % of my income), but others it is a large amount. I was initial against Trump's tariffs, but after reading what other countries have in place, I think he is justified. Other countries subsidize and tariff the shit out of certain industries.
- dang 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919329
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- paulcole 8y agoRemember when all of Sanders' supporters said he wasn't just another politician? Well he's certainly pandering to his base like one.
- xae342 8y agoIt’s dumbfounding how something so obviously fair about how we treat people as a society becomes controversial... a trillion dollar company’s employees shouldn’t have a hard time getting food and need government assistance. Period.
- behringer 8y agoHow do you think they got to be a trillion dollar company in the first place?
- lihaciudaniel 8y ago1. Creating value (AWS, Prime etc) 2. Capturing that value from the new market they created.
- oconnor663 8y agoTaxes aren't as simple as "take from A, give to B." People respond to incentives, and greedy evil megacorps do too. Also, categories are complicated. One reason Amazon is the target of discussion here, and not Google for example, is that Amazon operates warehouses, and warehouses hire low wage employees. If Google was running as many warehouses as Amazon, would they pay better? Maybe they would, but how much better? If Google's low wage workers are in factories in East Asia run by third parties we've never heard of, instead of actual employees on their payroll in the US, is that better?
- jadell 8y agoComparing Google's workforce to Amazon's is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The labor required at each is completely different. Instead, compare Walmart to Costco: similar operations, same skills required of their workforce. Yet Walmart, which makes much more money than Costco, pays its employees wages that require many of them to rely on government assistance. And Costco provides not only living wages, it also provides benefits even to part-time employees. And it does it with much less money. Why should we be subsidizing Walmart's workforce, when we don't have to do the same for Costco's?
- ithilglin909 8y ago> Meanwhile, thousands of Amazon workers rely on food stamps because their wages are so low I'd be interested to know if this is actually true/where they're getting their numbers from, and if these are full-time, or seasonal employees.
- behringer 8y ago"The Median Amazon Employee's Salary Is $28,000. Jeff Bezos Makes More Than That in 10 Seconds" - Time
- ithilglin909 8y agoSo...are those people on food stamps? And is this adjusted for part-time or seasonal workers?
- behringer 8y agoDepends on the state, but a family of 4 with one working at Amazon is eligible for food stamps. Not sure why part time and seasonal workers don't count since that's often the only way to even start working at Amazon.
- ithilglin909 8y agoIt's not that they "don't count" but that it's relevant to include the calculation.
- yellowapple 8y agoIt's not that they don't count, but rather that employers probably shouldn't be on the hook for benefits received while the employee wasn't actually an employee. If that employee is working two part-time jobs, for example, then both employers should be contributing. Same for switching between seasonal jobs; if I'm working for Sunshine Ranch as a ranchhand April through September, and I'm working for Powder Bowl Ski Lodge as a custodian October through March, those two companies would need to be taxed proportionately.
- gammateam 8y agoSo the bill just calculated how much federal benefits their low wage workers get, and sends that bill to the corproate entity? That is not at all what I thought when it said ending subsidies, this is nothing, its not the punishment that this article suggests it is. This is a great way to balance welfare budgets in a national spending debate, or get companies to raise their employee's salaries above eligibility for federal programs. The actual cost for companies though? Still negligible, but that only matters when it is improperly framed as a punishment.
- throwaway5752 8y agoShould call it the Disney, Walmart, or McDonald's bill...
- behringer 8y agoThe second step should be to then raise federal eligibility requirements to levels that allow somebody to survive on.
- oconnor663 8y ago> The bill is designed to create a “100 percent tax on corporations with 500 or more employees equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low-wage workers.” Not all low wage workers are equal in terms of the benefits they receive. If the new rule were as simple as this, employers would have an incentive not to hire e.g. parents with dependent children. Or not to hire people who are more likely to receive benefits in the future for whatever reason. I get that Sanders wants to enact transfers from the wealthy to the poor, but there are ways to do that that aren't a mismash of bad incentives. Edit: Not to mention that this would give low wage employers a huge reason to oppose any new legislation to raise benefits. It just seems really poorly thought out. (Maybe no one expects it to pass, so it doesn't matter what the actual effects would be?)
- anothergoogler 8y agoAgreed, it would be far worse if Amazon were discouraged from exploiting desperate workers. No social cost is too high for cheap and fast order fulfillment.
- oconnor663 8y agoIt's easy to be sarcastic, but it's hard to measure social costs. "Stopped exploiting desperate workers" could mean paying people more, or it could mean firing desperate people and hiring people who are less desperate. If we're encouraging some mix of those two things, it's pretty important to figure out exactly what mix it is. And if there are alternative policies -- like say just giving people money -- that don't have the same complicated issues, it's pretty important to compare them.