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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

>- roads & infrastructure for shipping

Their whole point was that the shipper would pay taxes. Which they do. This applies to most of your points as well, they do get taxed on their warehouses.

What I find most comical about all this is there's already a 20% VAT on everything Amazon sells there. They do pay taxes already, France simply wants more, and this tax is written in a way where it will have a much larger effect on external companies than internal.

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As far as I understand VAT's role in the economy, the Value Added Tax is offset to the last link of a value-adding chain: the consumer.

This creates the incentive of further adding value to a product/service and thus creating more economic output.

Amazon may be paying other taxes, but VAT is paid by the consumer.

It's a sales tax. In the EU it's fitted into the price the consumer sees. From every sale Amazon makes 20% of that is going to the government.

You could easily argue every tax on Amazon is a tax on the consumer. If you increase the cost of Amazon doing business, prices go up.

Just because the seller is responsible for transferring the tax revenue to the tax office does not mean that the seller is the one paying it.

In France businesses do not pay VAT, only consumers do. Business do collect it (on behalf of the state), but they never have to pay it themselves (technically: they get a refund when they do)

Vat isn't paid on the ad space these companies sell to other foreign businesses.

They do though?

>https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/forums/t/been-charge...

>https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201748700?...

VAT is an interesting one, since Amazon isn't even affected by VAT. It's easy to reduce VAT liability altogether.

This tax is a crude corporate income tax replacement.

Amazon cannot go around VAT, it is paying it in full to the state; Amazon's customer can deduct VAT if the customer is a business and it is using the product in the production of other products or services that are sold and VAT is collected. The state collects VAT in the end, no matter what.

Amazon doesn't pay the VAT it collects it for the state.

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