I am the Director of Total Rewards at Amazon, and my entire job is one sentence: make sure your taxes pay the half of our payroll that we would rather not. I want to be precise, because Total Rewards is a phrase I chose, and it is working. Total, as in the whole thing. Rewards, as in a gift. Neither word is true, and that is the design. What I actually run is the seam between what we pay a worker and what a worker needs to live, and the width of that seam, to the dollar, is my performance review. Here are two facts, and they are both mine. This year we are spending $200 billion, up from $131 billion, most of it on data centers and chips and the machines that will eventually do the jobs. And the number of our workers on food stamps has nearly tripled since 2020. People read those two numbers and assume one of them is an accident. Neither is. I built the second one so we could afford the first. Watch the mechanism work, because it is clean and nobody made me hide it. I do not underpay you. That is a crime, and I am not a criminal. I co-pay you. I set the wage at the exact altitude where you still qualify. Qualify for SNAP. Qualify for Medicaid. Qualify for the credit you file in April. The federal government keeps a whole menu of programs for people who work full time and still cannot eat, and I price your labor to land you squarely on that menu. Your paycheck is the part I cover. The rest is a public program, and my job is to make sure you need it. It is not only us, which is the part I am proudest of, because it means it is not a scandal, it is a market. A government audit this year, the one a senator ordered because he thought it would embarrass us, found that 13.8 million working adults are on Medicaid and 10.6 million are on food stamps. Employed. Clocking in. Those are not the jobless. That same audit ranked us the second-largest employer of Medicaid recipients in the country. Second. Behind exactly one other big-box name, and you are already picturing it. The senator held it up as a failure. I filed it under benchmarking. So when the $200 billion headline and the food-stamp headline land in the same week and you feel lied to, understand that you are not. You are being told the truth twice. The $200 billion is what we do with the money we save by not paying the second half of the wage. You pay the second half. That is not a figure of speech. There is a line in the federal budget with your name on it and my logo on the other end. Here is where it gets elegant. The $200 billion is going toward the systems that will let me need fewer of the workers you are currently subsidizing. Our own plan, the one that leaked, is to avoid hiring 600,000 of them by 2033 and let the machines do the shifts instead. Follow it around the circle. You top up the wage of the worker. We spend the savings on the machine. The machine retires the worker. And the worker, now former, stays on the same food stamps, except there is no longer a shift attached to them. You were subsidizing a job. Soon you will be subsidizing the absence of one. I have that transition in a deck. It has a green arrow. When an economist points at this, we say we are proud to offer competitive pay and a full benefits package, and both halves are technically true, because competitive means the same as everyone else, and everyone else runs my playbook. The wage cut has a nicer name. We call it benefits navigation. I keep a team whose whole job is to help you enroll in the government aid that exists because of the wage I set. I pay that team more than the workers they enroll. I had to. Their work is skilled. My own compensation is not on the menu. I am salaried, I am equity-heavy, and I qualify for nothing I route other people toward. I know the exact income where the subsidies switch off, to the dollar, because drawing that line is the job, and I made certain I was sitting comfortably on the far side of it. There is a woman on the early shift, and I know her only as a point in the lower tail. She works full time. She is on SNAP. Her building is 20 minutes from a data center we are raising that will cost more than every wage in her facility will earn in a century. She does not know that the structure going up over the parking lot is funded, in part, by the hole in her own paycheck. I know. It is on my dashboard. I check it in the morning with my coffee, which is not subsidized, because I can afford it, because of the line I drew. There is one more turn, and I save it for the board. You can spend those food stamps with us. We take SNAP at the register in 45 states. So I set the wage that puts you on the program, and then I sell you your groceries through it. The dollar leaves Washington, lands in your benefits account, and comes home to me at checkout. I did not only move your wage onto the government. I built the store where the government's half gets spent. So keep chipping in. The program you fund is running exactly as designed, and I designed the part that makes you fund it. The $200 billion cleared this morning. The food stamps clear on the first. Different account, same desk. We do not underpay. We co-pay. The other payer is you.