Incoming proposal for 100% tax on welfare given to large business employees - Polidicks

Amazon CEO and world's richest man Jeff Bezos makes more money in ten secondsthan his company's median employee makes in an entire year, and thousands of Amazon workers are paid such low wages that they are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid, and other forms of government assistance to survive. Declaring that this ever-growing gulf between the obscene wealth of top executives and the poverty wages of workers—which is hardly unique to Amazon—is morally unacceptable, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) announced on Friday that he will introduce legislation next month that would impose "a 100 percent tax on large employers equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low-wage workers" in an effort to pressure corporate giants into paying a living wage. To Force Billionaires Off Welfare, Sanders Tax Would Make Corpor..

Good idea, just a shame it's considered *socialist* and won't be accepted in the US.

Mitch McConnell won't even let this bill hit the floor.

ya they'd have to awkwardly justify companies forcing employees on welfare to be compedative.

Not even. Companys are hit with these big ass taxes all the time and you know what they do? They just offshore their money and pretend they don't have as much as they really do when the taxman comes around. In other words, this sort of thing would change absolutely nothing but look really nice on paper. Yay! Rich people are pulling their fair share!

How would offshoring the money work in this case?

It wouldn't. I haven't read the bill but it would tax their income, so having money in accounts in bermuda doesn't really help here.

I doubt that's how it works if the proposal is to bill companies 100% of the value of welfare that the government paid out to the workers. If they hid all their money in some foreign bank and still couldn't afford to pay for this, they'd go legally bankrupt.

Imagine if they started firing people who received welfare while employed to offset this tho.

amazon wouldn't have a workforce

If the republicans lose their majority, the turtle won't be able to do much about it being reintroduced, at least that's my understanding. In the meanwhile, it'll act as decent ammunition against the republicans.

It'd honestly end up blowing up in their face because they're straining already to hire people. This is actualy not a joke, most places that have low to mid skilled work are having an ass of a time actually finding workers because they treat their previous workers so crappy that word spreads and people avoid it. That's what happened to my grocery store.

No one can earn that much money, change my mind.

Nothing wrong with making the big bucks as long as you're not exploiting your workers in the process

I remain a fan of linking the income of the highest paid worker in a company with the income of the lowest paid worker. You can make as much as you want, but you are forced to drag worker wages up with you.

On that note, I had no fuckin' idea Jeff Bezos had 131 billion dollars worth of wealth. I mean I knew the guy was rich, but that is an absurd amount of money. If he sacrificed with 5 of those 131 to his employees, each and every one of them could have 5 grand more a year. Not a damn dent in his own fortune, but a massive difference to those slaving away at his warehouses. Goddamnit, fuck capitalism.

Except not many dems would vote for the bill either. Theres corporate shills on both sides of the fence. Why would wallstreet only buy one faction when they can easily own both?

I can see how this could icrease some the cempanies' efforts towards workforce automation.

That's no reason to continue mistreating workers. The response to an automation nightmare could only be a universal wage; people have to have money to buy their products.

And the robot revolution isn't arriving for decades, if it even does happen in our lifetimes. So in the short term, they'd be absolutely screwed.

considering his value grew 30 billion in the last year, I think the point holds up

This is kid of ridiculous. His value grew so much that every employee could get a check for $56,000 and he'd still be gaining money. Just cut that shit in half and you can practically double the wage of the people on the bottom while he still gets a cool 15 billion. It's absolutely disgraceful that one man is making such an astronomical amount of money while the people that form the backbone of his company are on welfare.

His fortune doesn't magically stop growing at 131 billion. He nearly doubled his net worth since last year. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/110384/d1bac28c-d647-42da-84f8-00abe06ccd54/image.png

Nobody said it was simple. I'm saying it's possible, and wouldn't make a dent for the company or Bezos' personal wealth. I'm saying he could afford to do it and still come out a 3-digit billionaire.

Republicans are unlikely to lose the Senate in this interval. The House, on the other hand, is wildly in play and not looking that great for the GOP..

Your alternative is to keep padding your own coffers and hope things go chugging along long enough for you to personally be fine Who the fuck really cares at that point you're just looking to enrich yourself.

No no, it will make a dent in their stockholder profits because the stockholders AND Bezos hate their employees. Both groups don't want to do it because it'd look 'bad' on the stockmarket. You forget that the US operates under the principle that the stockholder is more important than the employee thanks to some assholes at Dodge.

The stockmarket is one of the principal evils of American capitalism. It's a good idea, but the current implementation just reinforces the idea that greed is good and employees are expendable.

Or you can create an elite utopia where you don't need to sell your product, becuse you live in a self-sustainable paradise made for a few chosen, kick the rest out and letting them rot as you enjoy your luxurious life served by self-maintaned robots and other few slaves who agreed to submit to your new law, and occasionaly culling those who rebels with overwhelming tecnological advanced weaponry. I wonder if it would make a good film...

Ultimately what has to happen there is companies either need to pay a tax for using an automated work force to fund a universal basic income, or they need to pay a production tax. That or the US govt needs to figure out a way to pay off trillions of dollars in debt and become profitable enough to fund its citizens.