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Who pays for the roads that Amazon depends on for deliveries and employee commutes? Who pays for the k-12 educations and public universities that these employee

• TechBro8615 5y ago
  Do they not pay payroll taxes for the nearly 100k people they employ?
  • eli 5y ago
    That's not a proportional share
    • qeternity 5y ago
      Without getting into a debate about progressive taxes, Bezos pays far more than his fair share in taxes. The social burden that he creates is microscopic compared to the tax revenue he pays. If he disappeared tomorrow, the national budget would be in worse shape than it is today.
    • BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
      Complain to your senators, then? Congress is who sets the algorithm defining how taxes are owed, not the taxpayers themselves. Have you ever written the IRS a check for more than what you owe them (or declined to accept a tax refund)?
      • ModernMech 5y ago
        I've been trying to get a meeting with my Senators to express my opinion, but they won't have me. They regularly take meetings with corporate lobbyists though. I wonder what it is they're telling my Senators? Sure wish I had $10 million to spend on lobbyists like Amazon.
        • pb7 5y ago
          You elected Senators that don't care about your opinion. Maybe you should be more mad at them and less mad at Amazon who provides millions of people with exactly the goods and services they promise.
          • andrepd 5y ago
            Such a lazy deflection. When corruption happens you can be mad at both the corrupter and the corruptee.
            • pb7 5y ago
              What’s lazy is not holding the people who are supposed to represent your interests accountable.
          • jollygoodshow 5y ago
            Brazen assumption that the senator they voted for is the one in power. It is a democracy after all, they could have been on the wrong side of it
      • eli 5y ago
        I live in DC so I don't have any Senators and barely any say in how my tax dollars get spent.
        • mensetmanusman 5y ago
          Congress voted to do that. They could undo it and make everyone a citizen of Virginia if they wanted to undo it.
          • eli 5y ago
            Oh great let me just lobby my no senators and single non voting house delegate to fix it. How about in the meantime I don’t have to pay federal taxes if I don’t get a day in how they’re spent? Also: neither VA not DC want retrocession and you can’t force a state to change its borders. So no, the answer is DC statehood, which is something Congress can do. It’s long past time.
            • mensetmanusman 5y ago
              I doubt Congress would vote to give the wealthiest people in the country even more power, they would rather it just ctrl-z what was done.
              • eli 5y ago
                I didn't realize there was an income limit to statehood.
        • AngryData 5y ago
          I agree with your other points but isn't it kind of your choice to move to DC, knowing full well that they lack full representation? It isn't like DC is this massive landscape of a bunch of natives who have lived there for generations and are too poor to move 10 miles away.
          • eli 5y ago
      • Salgat 5y ago
        That's the entire point of this conversation, we want higher taxes and more people (voters) need to be convinced of this fact.
  • techrat 5y ago
    No. The people they employ pay the payroll taxes out of their salary. No company pays payroll taxes for their employees.
    • pb7 5y ago
      Businesses pay the same amount in payroll taxes as employees do. Self employed people pay double the payroll taxes.
      • prepend 5y ago
        Technically, self employed people pay less than double because they can deduct the employer contribution. So I think it’s like 12.4% for self-employed vs, 7.5% for just an employee.
    • Zelphyr 5y ago
      "There are a variety of payroll taxes, some paid by employers, some by employees, and some by both." https://www.paychex.com/articles/payroll-taxes/employers-guide-to-payroll-taxes https://www.paychex.com/articles/payroll-taxes/employers-gui...
    • lordnacho 5y ago
      This is more complicated than you make it out to be. The person who literally sends the money according to the law is not the same as the one who pays in the economic sense. For instance, you could transfer the legal obligation to the other party, but that would change the negotiating position between the employer and the employee. Similarly, you can add a sales tax to some product, and make the company that sells the product collect it and forward it to the government, but that doesn't mean that the company is worse off the that amount. The pie is split according to some negotiating position.
      • lr4444lr 5y ago
        Not really. Firms hire based on the cost of an employee. If suddenly the employer portion of the payroll tax disappeared, there would immediately be an incentive to funnel those funds into the salary to make job offerings stand out against what the employee's other options would be. Sure, some firms would pocket it, but it beggars belief that most of them would, when they've already made a decision to open a hiring line based on the funds available and projected revenue.
  • pb7 5y ago
    1.3 million*
• pb7 5y ago
  They are paying exactly what they owe otherwise the IRS would come after them. You have equal access to the same infrastructure. Feel free to start a trillion dollar company.
  • Salgat 5y ago
    No ones saying otherwise, what we're saying is raise the taxes to something reasonable. >You have equal access to the same infrastructure. Feel free to start a trillion dollar company. And this is such a lazy cop-out that ignores that Bezos had parents who funded his company (to the tune of half a million in today's money) during a time where he was in the right place at the right time. It insane how ignorant people are to how much luck in one's situation plays into their success. I'm not saying he isn't a talented businessman, but that alone is never enough to reach his level of success.
    • pb7 5y ago
      VCs hand out millions to all sorts of companies that fail, every single day. This is another common talking point that holds no water. I'll give you $250K (or $500K equivalent) myself if you bet your life on turning it into a billion, let alone a trillion.
    • dantheman 5y ago
      Taxes barely go to roads and infrastructure they go to welfare and warfare.
    • bluedevil2k 5y ago
      Who cares if he had parents invest in his company?!? Why do people jump to that immediately trying to prove what an “evil” guy he is. Guess what...Bezos’s parents paid their taxes on their incomes and saved the money and chose to invest in their son. Why is that a negative? Right place at the right time - there were millions of people in their 20’s in the late 90’s, thousands had $250,000 in cash to start a business, but only 1 turned into the biggest most efficient company in history. It wasn’t luck man, it was talent. The ignorance seems to be on your end believing it was luck.
• bluedevil2k 5y ago
  > Who pays for the k-12 educations and public universities that these employees used to become educated? Ummm...the people living in that community pay for the schools in that community. I’m not sure why you think Amazon is responsible for paying school taxes in some location where they have no offices.
• bluedevil2k 5y ago
  > Who pays for the roads that Amazon depends on for deliveries and employee commutes? If they’re the interstate highways, then the gas tax pays for most of that. And Amazon buys a LOT of gas.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > If they’re the interstate highways, then the gas tax pays for most of that. That's mostly a subsidy from passenger cars to larger vehicles, because road wear goes up much more rapidly with vehicle weight than fuel consumption does (IIRC, the former with roughly the fourth power of weight, the latter sublinearly.) Since Amazon mostly isn't using passenger cars as part of its delivery fleet, its actually being subsidized by gas tax, not paying its way.
    • pb7 5y ago
      What you say is true but they're just passing those subsidies on to their customers (the majority of the US). And they're still paying a significant amount contrary to the very popular belief, even if it's not proportional to the consumption which I agree with you on. Amazon e-commerce is not all that profitable. Most of Amazon's value comes from AWS.
      • caeril 5y ago
        > Amazon e-commerce is not all that profitable. Most of Amazon's value comes from AWS. AWS represents 43% of net profit, per the most recently posted quarter. It used to be on the order of 75%, but pandemic-related demand for physical products changed all that. Retail is back, baby.
• andrepd 5y ago
  You're getting downvoted (sad that people can't engage in argument and resort to burying differing points of view) but this is the truth. THERE ARE NO SELF-MADE MEN! Everyone, Bezos included, owes their "success" to the sum of everyone that is living and has ever lived before them. (i) Amazon wouldn't exist without all the technological and societal advances made in the past 4 millenia. It wouldn't exist without Aristotle, Plato, Jesus, John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and thousands of other thinkers. It wouldn't exist without the Watt engine or the Caravel or Gunpowder or thousands of other technological breakthroughs. It wouldn't exist without the millions of workers who build roads throughout the world, who drained the swamps, who cultivated the lands. All of this is hidden, but it's there! (ii) Amazon also wouldn't exist without the direct collaboration of 100,000s of people and the indirect collaboration of millions. The things in (i) are the common heritage of all mankind, which no person can claim more than another. The things in (ii) should be fairly compensated, but they're not because of the coercive and violent system of capitalism which compels the workers to surrender most of the value they produce to the owners of capital (capitalism ≠ markets, cannot stress this enough).