Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars

https://newrepublic.com/article/146540/amazon-thriving-thanks-taxpayer-dollars

by jriot • 9 years ago

37 20 9 years ago

danjoc2• 9 years ago

I've always wondered what it's like. Wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say to myself, "I personally have enough money to end world hunger for three years." And then not do it. Instead, just go off to work, a little spring in my step, knowing the US government would foot the bill for food stamps for my employees instead. While 600,000 children starve to death worldwide in the new year. I wonder how that would feel? Would I be conflicted about it?

rdm_blackhole• 9 years ago

When you have 100B surely, you can spare some to help. I understand that you need to be rewarded for creating a company that employs a lot of people but there has to be a time when you have to ask yourself, why would you want even more money at this point? I don't have a million, let alone a Billion and yet all I can think of when I imagine having this kind of money is how many lives I would be able to improve by giving some of it.

foxyv• 9 years ago

When I read or hear this thought I always think of the Futurama episode where Bender uses the Egyptian alien slaves to build a giant statue of himself that yells "Remember Me!" and breathes fire.

whb07• 9 years ago

Then what happens after those 3 years? Nevermind what would happen if Bezos liquidated 100% of his stock.

There are side effects of him creating such wealth. Maybe you can’t see them directly but they are there. Advances made in tech allow for people everywhere in the world to benefit. Look at smart phone penetration which allows people knowledge, greater communication, etc.

None of this comes about by what you’re commenting on. Take a look at the Gates foundation and how many tens of billions which are pledged by the world richest.

It’s very easy to judge and comment from the stands. I’d love to see what your daily activities are to help the world’s poorest. I’d dare say what they want is a job that comes from foreign investment rather than a sack of UN grains for the month’s rations.

danjoc2• 9 years ago

It seems you guys missed the point of the comment. It's not a generic rant about Bezos being rich. That would be against HN posting guidelines.

Bezos has enough money to feed the world BUT doesn't even pay his own employees enough to feed themselves. "Evil corporations" like AT&T and Comcast have taken their Trump tax windfall to pay bonuses to all hands. Amazon takes the money and pockets it... while their employees are food insecure.

hkmurakami3• 9 years ago

How do we know he's not giving significant amounts anonymously?

Also a more pertinent decision is how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid, and its effectiveness. Those dollars include taxes from the likes of Bezos

8note• 9 years ago

it's probably not much different than waking up and saying "I personally have enough wealth to keep 100 people fed for three years" and not do it.

lurr2• 9 years ago

They will get more once they figure out which city they can use to extort seattle. Then more again when they use Seattle to extort tax breaks from their new HQ.

MollyR• 9 years ago

I hate the fact that's probably exactly what will happen. We need better ways from keeping corporations from taking advantage of the tax payer unfairly.

Spivak• 9 years ago

What else can you do when cities want/need large corporations more than more than the corporation needs them? I mean one of the wealthiest areas in my metro area is sustained mostly by a single fortune 500. If they threatened to leave you better believe they'll grovel at the font of wealth that allows their entire community to exist.

hkmurakami3• 9 years ago

The answer (perhaps unfortunately) is to tax individuals who work at said company, because corporations can move around very freely. People, much less so.

yakitori• 9 years ago

Just like NFL/NBA owners. Threaten to take the team to another city.

dr1337• 9 years ago

Welcome to Feudalism 2.0 - your new overlords are no longer the Duke of Aquitaine, Lorraine or Normandy but Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple.

p2t2p2• 9 years ago

Nobody forces anybody to buy or use for free anything from those companies. Try not paying tax to your duke though...

ulrichstic• 9 years ago

I'm not anti-Amazon or anything, but I do think that characterization is inaccurate, and the article is raising legitimate concerns. It's not the way these problems work.

No, no one is forced to buy from these companies, but that's not how the coercion works. How it works is that there is a coercion in making an offer too good to refuse, where the costs to others of that offer are hidden in some way or another. Then because those other people are getting hurt, they have less, which forces others to take a cut to stay viable, which hurts them, and so forth and so on.

It's a kind of runaway process, and how monopolies often come to be. They don't come and threaten you if you don't use their services, they make an offer that is too good to be true, because it is, except that the costs of that fraud are borne in production, not the product, or in the long-term.

The fraud comes in the form of avoiding financial obligations by hiding them. It's how a lot of these financial inequities develop: Corporation X hides the costs, especially where those costs are long-term, fuzzy, or loosely monitored (ecologically, in public health, in welfare), and then profits by passing those costs on to society more broadly. It's like someone saying they can build a house for you cheaply, then hiding all the short-cuts they use to do so, and then disappearing when you're left to foot the bill 10 years later for their irresponsibility and lies.

With the financial crisis underpinning the Great Recession, it happened by firms passing on the risk costs to the public through bailouts. Various manufacturing and energy-sector companies get out of the real ecological costs of their activities by plausible deniability in lawsuits, etc.

Here, Amazon is hiding the costs of that free shipping, etc. by not providing their workers fair conditions and by passing those costs on to the public. So their employees get injured every day, and they shouldn't pay that?

The reason people become irate when a certain level of financial success is reached is because so often, the greater the inequity, the higher the likelihood that inequity was obtained through unfair means. It's not guaranteed, but the probability increases rapidly, and society is full of these extreme forms of inequity. Corruption isn't driven toward impoverishment, and human attributes are usually bell-shaped, not grotesquely skewed.

These companies become so bloated and their monopolies so extreme that often it is understandable that government give into their demands. So we end up with companies "too big to fail"--really, isn't that a euphemism for "too big to stand up to"?--and rationalizing the bullying and unfairness by telling ourselves these companies are really making a better place, as if it's only these companies, no one else, that no one else would have done these things if they could compete fairly, that we're buying from this company in particular because we preferred that company, and not because the choice was really to buy or go without, and that it's justified that the profits should be unevenly distributed throughout the company.

Isn't, after all, Amazon's success due to Bezos? Isn't he the one doing all the work?

inspector14• 9 years ago

this article is highly misleading and is clearly shoehorning particular statistics in to paint a rather manipulative and damning portrait of a greedy jeff bezos and the soulless company he's running. that's okay, i assume anyone here would have the mental wherewithal to discern this sort of trickery and not allow such drivel to influence their opinions too much.

the reality is that the few people in the first world (let's face it, if you're reading hackernews, you're probably in the first world) aren't benefiting directly from amazon in someway, whether it be directly or indirectly.

it's frustrating to see this generalized hatred towards anyone who surpasses a certain level of success, as if what he's doing to make the world a better place isn't quite enough and he should be off in africa spoonfeeding starving children. it's such a cartoonish and unrealistic notion that anyone with that amount of money would be able to solve the most complex issues that we face as a species simply because he has a high net worth.

i'd take facebook, google and amazon as my technocratic overlords over just facebook and google any year of the millenium.

Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars

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