STOP BEZOS
US law (acronym) names are often very interesting, especially since many of the laws do the opposite of what the name says. It pays to have a look at them.
The Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (STOP BEZOS) now proposes that companies who pay such low wages that their employees need help in the form of e.g. food stamps to survive, should pay back the money they suck from taxpayers.
After all the worker’s wage is what is supposed to allow the workers to be able to work for the employer instead of having to harvest food. If the wage can’t even do that, why should the society subsidize such business behavior?
The law would likely hit McDonald’s and Walmart the most, since those two companies have the most SNAP-reliant employees in every state, according to nonprofit New Food Economy.
I think this is an interesting idea: Make bad wages less profitable than better ones. It sounds like it would be an awfully hard to balance and calculate thing though. Your opinion, dear readers?
We're already so far from anything resembling a "free market economy" in this country that it's a stretch to even call it capitalism. I'm not sure more complicated regulation is the solution, but the world is complicated, so what do I know?
As a European, every time I hear this I have to suppress a chuckle.
What do you think such a law would result in?
Do you mean, because you have so many more regulations in Europe?
Well, I don't know. Like I said, it's complicated, and these things always have unforeseen consequences. I was working for a corporation when a law was passed that required all employers to provide health care for their full time employees. The result? My company fired all the full time employees, and forbid us from scheduling anyone to work more than 20 hours a week. Not only did nobody get health insurance - nobody got the chance to make a decent living either.
In the case of the law you mention, I would imagine companies might cut back on hiring and reduce the number of jobs, investing more in automation and robotics. And then there's all kinds of thorny questions about how to enforce it. If a company complied with the law, and an employee worked there, would they then be forbidden from accepting any government subsidies? What if their needs were different? What if they had children? Would an employee with several children be allowed to collect benefits and work, while someone without children couldn't? There would be burdens of reporting compliance, and these almost always fall on the people a law like this is meant to protect.
Yes. And our economy still didn't grind to a halt 50 years ago.
Would you consider this good or bad?
What we have is crony, oligarchic capitalism. It aint democratic, and it definitely aint capitalism.
It's a system that will suck itself dry and kill itself. The sooner the better.
Even an oligarchic capitalism is capitalism ;) Sorry that I don't know the english word for this grammatical constellation.