Sen. Bernie Sanders set the policy world ablaze a few days ago by introducing a measure he called the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act.” If you noticed that the title reduces down to the “Stop Bezos Act,” congratulations: Sanders and his co-author, CA Rep. Ro Khanna, meant to focus attention on how Bezos’ enormous company, Amazon.com, employs thousands of workers at such low wages that they turn to public assistance programs such as food stamps and Medicaid for their basic living needs. (For example, estimating that Amazon employs approx 100,000 in low wage jobs, Bezos, worth $160 billion, could gift every one with $100,000, and he’d still have $150 billion left over.) The truth is that proposals like theses serve a very clear purpose in our political system. They’re not designed to end up as the law of the land, but as prompts for debate.
At www.latimes.com
