This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 17th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Senator Bernie Sanders' new Stop Bizos Act is legislation aimed squarely at large employers that employ people who receive public assistance.

The Act would attempt to tax away what the Senator believes are subsidies to the employer.

Cato's Ryanborn says Senator Sanders' effort, even if well-intentioned,

would have the opposite of its intended effects.

As members of Congress love to do, they like having the first word of every letter of a piece of legislation they file, form an acronym.

In this case, it is the Stop Bezos Act.

What are the words underlying that acronym and what are the goals of

Senator Sanders in filing this legislation.

Well, the Stop Beezels Act, the acronym represents stop bad employers by zeroing out

subsidies act.

And this is part of the senator's long running campaign against corporate America

over the issue of what he perceived to be worker pay being too low and in particular

at major companies such as Amazon and Walmart.

So the idea through the bill is that you can kind of cajole businesses to pay their workers more in terms of hourly pay or full-time pay by

threatening them with a corporate welfare tax that would say if you have more than 500 employees and your employees

are in receipt of certain federal benefits, food stamps, school meals, rental

assistance or federal contributions to Medicaid, then if your employees receive those benefits,

you will be taxed at a dollar for dollar amount for the value of those benefits.

So that's at least on the face of it what he's trying to achieve with the bill.

I think in reality this has got little prospect of passing through Congress and so what

...