Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind. – Vt.) wants to tax corporations (more than 500 employees) 100% for each employee who works at the company but receives any low-income government benefit: section 8 housing, food stamps, Medicaid, children in school lunch program, etc.
At first this seems entirely reasonable. Sanders says that because the company is not paying the employee a high enough wage, taxpayers have to supplement this low wage to allow the person (or household) to stay above the poverty level.
But because most socialists are economic illiterates or poisoned by their own ideological beliefs, they can’t grasp how such proposals work in real life with real human behavior.
First of all most Americans would agree that (1) self-sufficiency is a good thing and (2) that the path to self-sufficiency is to have a job. But to get a job, the person must provide the employer with greater value than what the employer will have to pay in compensation. Any company that adds a job and hurts itself financially won’t be around very long.
This means that the most impoverished person, the individual who is receiving the greatest number of low-income programs would now, under the Sanders’ plan, be the most expensive person for the employer to hire. His or her cost to the employer would not only be the compensation paid, but would include 100% of every government benefit that person continues to receive.
Read moreSocialist Bernie Sanders wants to make low-income people harder to hire
New Jersey is in very bad financial shape, mostly due to stunning mismanagement of its public pension system. Though it has promised the moon, it has chosen never to pay more than $1.9 billion in the plan in any year. Now it needs about three times that to keep the pension system solvent.