Does Amazon Corporation and Jeff Bezos on the United States Government? Is Amazon in fact the nation’s largest corporate taxpayer? Should we be concerned about Amazon as a potential global terrorist? If so, what kind of public policy can we expect from Amazon?
In the recent case of McVeigh v. Oklahoma City bombing defendant Timothy McVeigh, his lawyers had asked him to acknowledge that he was in fact an American. However, when McVeigh raised the issue of government funding, he was rebuffed. The government claimed they had no control over who received money. Should we assume this is the same argument applied to Amazon and Jeff Bezos?
Amazon is one of the nation’s largest corporations and they may not like it. However, their tax practices are quite different than say the aforementioned anti-government terrorists. Amazon does not accept any federal funding – much less billions of dollars in Federal grants for the “education of our future” as the Obama Administration claims.
Still, Bezos owns over $14 billion in education purposes. He also owns The Washington Post with a combined circulation of over five million copies. Therefore, is Amazon really an American company?
In truth, Bezos and his associates are probably very good at exploiting loopholes in the federal laws in order to provide very good products to customers. For example, Amazon was recently caught using the “made to order” policy when placing orders for certain items. In other words, they would place a bulk order, order in large quantities, and then simply make it for sale.
This is perfectly legal but has created a tremendous amount of income for Bezos and his associates at Amazon. Inaddition, their per-unit price for their items will cost less than the cost of manufacturing them. In other words, Bezos is making a very good living by using his vast financial resources and impressive influence to provide very good products to customers.
Finally, another question we should ask ourselves is whether or not these profits are used in any way to influence government policy in favor of the company? Why is Amazon allowed to keep their tax rate so low? They have a large number of customers in the US and do not seem to be causing too many problems.
With all this said, will Amazon use their enormous profit as leverage against us as consumers? Will they use their political power to influence government policy in favor of their own business interests? These are all questions we need to ask ourselves.
