> Corporations are made up of people, and people have causes they want to be charitable towards.

almost none of the people that make up a corporation are free to decide where money goes. the few people that do take the money out, the board of directors or whatever, could just donate their own money to whatever charity.

> It’s only weird if you assume all corporations should be amoral money exchange systems where by money is exchanged for labor and capital which in turn is exchanged for more money

What you’re missing is the final step in the chain, which is the part where profits are distributed to shareholders. If I’m one of those shareholders, I might very well take a large chunk of those dividends and donate the money to charity. But instead of paying me more of those dividends to donate to my preferred cause, the company’s management has decided that they should be the ones donating my money to their preferred cause.

Aside from that, it’s just a failure of specialization. Philanthropy is hard, making money is hard, and building a single organization that does a good job at either of them is even harder. I’d rather have corporations that focused on doing a really good job at whatever they did and non-profits that do whatever they do as efficiently as possible, rather than a corporation trying to do both.

The way I understand it is that Amazon offers an affiliate fee to affiliates. When you don’t go through an affiliate they get to keep the small percentage. Smile was basically Amazon’s own affiliate program that paid out to NGOs. It did reduce their tax liability but it’s not like it’s free money. Assuming a corporate rate of 15%, when Amazon pays a charity $100, they save $15 on taxes. That mean they spent $85, so not exactly tax avoidance unless the charity they donate to is also owned by Amazon or some such.

or a talking point. government and business work very closely together and when these two negotiate, the government likes to see philanthropy.

Only in the sense that money that would have been taxed as income was instead paid to charities. Simplified example, they took in $200 and paid $50 of that to a charity. At 10% they paid $15 in taxes instead of $20. If you think charities are overall a net positive (and especially if you think they’re more efficient at getting money to the right places than the government) a loss of $5 in government revenue for $50 into charities seems like a good deal

How so? Taxable income is pretty much always better than 0 income

There's a comment on reddit by someone who claimed to be working on this when it was started - the entire program was to avoid paying money to Google for searches resulting in sales on Amazon, by making Amazon the first place to go instead of Google. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...