This entire comment seems absurd to me, am I missing something? > You forget the effects of the "full reinvestment" policy. Amazon barely paid any tax at all

This entire comment seems absurd to me, am I missing something? > You forget the effects of the "full reinvestment" policy. Amazon barely paid any tax at all Is there anything stopping other companies, Amazon competitors like Wal-Mart or otherwise, from following this same policy? If no, your claim that companies like Amazon are government sponsored holds no water. > Jeff Bezos DID get enough money out of it to become the richest man on earth, but not through profit. Rather he got "capital gains on his shares", which is the same thing in practice, but a very different thing for the IRS Except it is not even remotely close to the same thing in practice. Jeff Bezos doesn't have $150B sitting in a bank account somewhere. How do you propose to tax money that he doesn't have access to? The very second he accesses any of it by selling shares, it is taxed. Are you proposing that everyone who has any kind of appreciating investment (so, anybody with a 401k) annually pay taxes out of pocket on the gains? You're going to piss off a lot of ordinary Americans if so. > People think the internet businesses got successful because it's "just a better way to do business", but it gets a ~20% government subsidy. 30% if hailing from China (for instance, free shipping really is free from China, or I should say, paid by the US taxpayer mostly) You completely lost me here. Where is this 20% government subsidy for being an "internet business" coming from? As somebody who's helped run an "internet business" I wasn't aware of such a subsidy, was I completely missing out?? And as somebody who currently is working on supply chain logistics involving shipping items to the US from China, I was also unaware that there was a program where the US taxpayer would fund our costs. Can you point me to such a program please? It would help me tremendously. > Microsoft, selling software "locally" (ie. tax free in the Bahamas) but internationally, and even more so, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, ... selling services "locally" (in Delaware, Ireland and the Bahamas) is a homongous tax loophole. This is the only part of your comment which seems grounded in reality - big corps absolutely take advantage of fancy accounting and overseas tax havens. What this has to do with "internet businesses" is utterly beyond me. > As an analysis of the cost structures of these companies will tell you : if these loopholes were all closed, the internet "revolution" would end. All these companies would rapidly shrink to 10% of their current size. This seems absurd to many, but rewriting the financial statements of these companies taking normal tax structures into account will tell you this. To make such a bold claim, surely you've done such an analysis, or at least have read such an analysis that you can link to?