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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

They also caused me exactly zero suffering. In fact, they actually helped me since I was able to order from Amazon throughout the lockdown.

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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 employees used to become educated? Who pays for the entire social infrastructure that allows Amazon to even exist? That's what people mean when they say Amazon isn't paying their fair share. They depend on us and taxpayer benefits more than almost any other company in the country, why aren't they also paying a proportional share of their taxes?

Do they not pay payroll taxes for the nearly 100k people they employ?

That's not a proportional share

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.

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)?

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.

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.

Such a lazy deflection. When corruption happens you can be mad at both the corrupter and the corruptee.

What’s lazy is not holding the people who are supposed to represent your interests accountable.

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

I live in DC so I don't have any Senators and barely any say in how my tax dollars get spent.

Congress voted to do that. They could undo it and make everyone a citizen of Virginia if they wanted to undo it.

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.

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.

I didn't realize there was an income limit to statehood.

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.

Voting representation in America is privilege not a right after all. History shows us that time and again.

Also I like DC. Why do I have to choose between living in the American city I like and having a vote in Congress?

That's the entire point of this conversation, we want higher taxes and more people (voters) need to be convinced of this fact.

No. The people they employ pay the payroll taxes out of their salary. No company pays payroll taxes for their employees.

Businesses pay the same amount in payroll taxes as employees do. Self employed people pay double the payroll taxes.

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.

"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-gui...

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.

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.

> If suddenly the employer portion of the payroll tax disappeared...

That's what I'm saying. The piece that's added or removed is negotiated over, it doesn't just belong to whoever has their name on it.

1.3 million*

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.

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.

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.

Taxes barely go to roads and infrastructure they go to welfare and warfare.

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.

I'm not saying he is evil or that he doesn't deserve his success, I'm addressing his point that Bezos isn't just a product of his own talents, but that of his situation and the opportunities he was provided by our society.

That's the case for literally everyone in our society. Can I take your money then, since you're a product of a society I contributed to?

If you make less money than the parent does, and live in the same country, than you essentially are taking their money, through their higher tax burden that pays for services (like roads and public schools and firefighters) that you almost certainly use or benefit from.

And that's a good thing! But I think higher earners should have more money taken than is currently the case. Wealth and income inequality are largely a result of luck and opportunity, not raw talent. An equitable society should find ways to mitigate those effects, which have only gotten worse in recent decades, not better.

Uhm yes? Thanks for understanding my point.

Absolutely. In fact, I make more than most Americans ($300k household income) and I wouldn't mind more progressive tax brackets, especially if it meant we could provide our fellow countrymen with basic necessities like healthcare and continued education. My voting record reflects this sentiment. The funny thing is, Bezos has a lower tax rate than me and he's a billionaire.

Thats an opportunity provided by his parents, not "society". If he owes anyone then it's them.

I’d love to have had parents who could afford to dump $1m into my fledgeling startup.

That he did proves he owes others for his success as much as his own wits and hard work.

Everyone on Earth owes some of their success to their parents.

Right, he owes his parents as established. They likely owe their parents, who owe their parents. And there were certainly others that contributed along the way may or may not have been compensated for that help. But none of these people had help from an amorphous group of "society", they had help from specific individuals.

So none of them went to public schools or used public roads or relied on a fire department. Probably none of them could look forward to social security or medicare.

Or maybe that's not correct.

Would you say that it's reasonable that if you start a business, you get to keep 10% of the value created?

If you start a business, even a billion dollars is an unimaginable amount of money and a reward far greater than any other job in existence. People forget how insanely large a billion dollars is. If that isn't reward enough, then no amount is.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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