Good! Amazon is a multi-trillion dollar organization - they should pay tax.
Profit is just a proxy for business activity, it's not handed down from the gods as the correct way to assess tax. Doing billions of dollars of business a year is a pretty good sign you're doing business and can not only afford but ought to be paying tax.
All the HN bros who started businesses selling dollars for 90c clearly hate this take. Businesses right now pay CC companies 1-3% on every transaction to Visa, a small tax on revenue clearly hasn't killed all businesses. I know in your mind "taxes" means "Uncle Sam takes 30%" but when you're taxing a much much bigger number the percent can be lower, and flat.
If they’re reinvesting in the business and front line employees, that should be exempt.
If people want to buy into the whole “a corporations job is to maximize profit” then governments job is to encourage them to be good corporate citizens.
cause that's how you kill 50% of the businesses.
Besides, the state typically does take a cut of every transaction, in VAT or sales tax. This holds true even in the UK, and it's 20% which is close to the corporate tax rate on profits at 25%.
What are sales taxes? Because VAT is only applied to the final transaction. VAT fraud is probably the most common tax fraud because of its availability for anyone without morality who own a business (or is close to a business owner), as it's easy to write off VAT.
You get how crazy that sounds, right?