This is utter nonsense. Companies can also opt to pay zero income tax if they reduce their taxable incomes to zero by donating all of their profits to charities. The only difference is that the charity Amazon supports is called "consumers".
It's not that Amazon is giving its money to customers. Bezos is very cleverly taking advantage of a loophole in how taxes/accounting works. Over long periods of time, cash flow and income will generally converge. But in the short term, they don't have to. Bezos runs the business around cash flow while minimizing income. Corporate taxes are based on income. The reason for that is because the tax code wants to make sure a business actually has the cash to pay taxes, before owing them. Straightforward enough.
As Bezos bluntly states publicly, he focuses on free cash flow. That number is going through the roof, and while portions of it go into lower prices, a lot more of it goes into investments in new products/infrastructure that will further grow cash flow while effectively deferring net income. That balance is extremely difficult to manage, and Bezos is probably the best the world has ever seen. All that said, it's not quite right to say that they're donating profits to consumers.
This is not really the full picture. For example:
>...Project Goldcrest, which is still in place, uses a series of complex intercompany contracts to transfer intangible assets—vital software, trademarks and other intellectual property (IP)—to one of Amazon’s Luxembourg companies, Amazon Europe Holding Technologies. A separate subsidiary, Amazon EU Sarl, then pays AEHT huge sums every year in royalty fees, reducing the amount of taxable income within the company.
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/07/22/amazon-jeff-bezos-taxes-4...
I see society as a resource that my company exploits to generate revenue - most companies would fail miserably if we didn't have education, the rule of law, roads and national security to provide a stable market for our goods and services. So we celebrate paying our taxes, because we're helping the thing that makes us money. So why doesn't Amazon and it's ilk?
OK, Amazon is huge enough that your argument that society in general benefits as much from their zero-profit policy as it does from the taxes is tenable. But Amazon deciding how it will best benefit society is exactly like a billionaire arguing that only she should say where her tax goes. That just doesn't work - relying on philanthropy alone would give us awesome animal sanctuaries, with raw sewerage and mentally ill people running down the street outside.
Because they have competitors who don't and it isn't reasonable to compete with them on uneven terms.
The problem isn't corporations paying no taxes by following the law, the problem is that the law allows them to pay no taxes.
The shell game is very simple in principle. Microsoft Offshore owns the copyright to Office. When Microsoft US sells a copy of Office, they collect money from the customer and then pay Microsoft Offshore almost that much for the right to sell it, so Microsoft US makes no profit.
The solution is equally simple. Replace corporate income tax with VAT. Then when Microsoft US sells a copy of Office, they pay VAT on the full purchase price and can deduct any US VAT already paid. Since Microsoft Offshore doesn't pay US VAT there is nothing to deduct and they have to pay their taxes.
Though Amazon in particular is actually a different case -- they don't pay taxes because they spend all their revenue expanding their business. They're not diverting profits offshore, they legitimately don't have any. This is completely unproblematic and meritorious, because as long as it continues they're creating jobs and growing the economy, and the instant they stop and actually turn a profit they owe taxes.
Ah, but that's not how it works. It's not a $1 for $1 tradeoff -- you can avoid paying 35 cents of tax by contributing $1 to a charity (or, in the case of Amazon, subsidizing consumers by $1).