At the end of the day a lot of this seems like sort of an accounting question. Since Amazon uniquely doesn't earn much profit, preferring to invest / spend as

At the end of the day a lot of this seems like sort of an accounting question. Since Amazon uniquely doesn't earn much profit, preferring to invest / spend as much of their revenue as possible, one could argue that there is an opportunity cost to collecting more money from Amazon in taxes vs leaving it to them to spend how they see fit. The cost is whatever alternative use they would place on that money... more employees hired, higher wages / benefits, more R&D, more capital expenditure, more construction, who knows. Or course, in every one of those cases, there would likely be taxes involved anyways...