RELATED:
archive.fo
archive.fo
archive.fo
archive.fo
One week after a war of words erupted between Bernie Sanders and Jeff Bezos, the vendetta between the Vermont Senator and the world's richest man escalated on Wednesday when Sanders introduced a Senate bill called the "Stop BEZOS Act", that would require large employers like Amazon and Walmart to pay back the government for food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and other federal assistance received by their workers.
The bill's acronym is a direct dig at Bezos and stands for Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act. It seeks to establish a 100% tax on government benefits received by workers at companies with at least 500 employees, Sanders said on Wednesday according to the Washington Post.
"In other words, the taxpayers of this country would no longer be subsidizing the wealthiest people in this country who are paying their workers inadequate wages," Sanders said at a press conference announcing the bill. "Despite low unemployment, we end up having tens of millions of Americans working at wages that are just so low that they can't adequately take care of their families."
The proposed bill came one day after Amazon briefly hit $1 trillion in market cap, just a month after Apple did the same, although a quick look at recent price appreciation suggests that Amazon will soon eclipse even Apple to become the world's most valueable company.
Bezos, who founded Amazon, is the world's wealthiest man: he has added $67 billion to his fortune in 2018, giving him a $167 billion net worth on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The median Amazon worker, meanwhile, was paid $28,446 last year, according to company filings.
The increase in Bezos' wealth has outpaced the rest of the billionaires tracked by Bloomberg by an obscene margin.
archive.fo
zerohedge.com
