The Patriot Post® · Bernie Sanders Threatens Walmart

See, it’s working! Having recently gotten Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to “capitulate” to demands to raise the company’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) is now targeting Walmart. With his newly proposed legislation — subtly named the “Stop WALMART Act” — Sanders seeks to strong-arm the massive retailer into meeting his demand for a $15 minimum wage or be banned from buying back shares in its own company, as well as having CEO pay capped at 150 times that of the median employee’s pay.

Investor’s Business Daily explains, “Sanders says he’s building on the success of his Stop BEZOS Act, which would have dictated that large companies ‘pay back’ the cost of any government benefits received by any of their workers. That idea, so ill-conceived that even liberal economists wouldn’t endorse it, had no chance of passage. Nevertheless, Bezos responded by raising his own company’s minimum wage to $15, which won him short-term praise from Sanders but hurt many hourly workers by eliminating bonuses and stock incentives.”

If Sanders was genuinely concerned about the plight of American workers, he would recognize the folly in pushing the $15 minimum wage trope. Unfortunately, Sanders’s commitment to leftist ideology that promotes the interest of the state and its power over that of individual freedom prevents him from seeing (or admitting) just how economically destructive his demands are. In Sanders’s view, since he got Amazon to fold, he can demand the same of Walmart, and Bezos will be his biggest cheerleader as anything that limits his competition helps him.

Meanwhile, anyone with any economic sense knows that forcing a “livable wage” onto businesses will only serve to limit job creation, leading to more unemployment. The reason that wages are rising with more people working and record-low unemployment is precisely because of Trump’s deregulation and the Republican tax cut, which Sanders opposed. Sanders’s proposals would only serve to put the brakes on this booming economy.