Amazon Publicly Calls Out Joe Biden After He Targets Their Tax Rate
It’s a popular thing for politicians to call out companies they want you to think don’t pay enough taxes. Companies, after all, are even more faceless than the “ultra-millionaires” that are also popular targets. If only they would pay their fair share, things would be all right.
Amazon is probably the most popular target these days. Those of you who remember parts of the April news cycle will recall the outrage drummed up by a liberal public policy group that reported Amazon paid zero federal income taxes despite being profitable. It even got Alyssa Milano worked up. (That’s not terribly difficult, but still.)
This wasn’t entirely true, as The Wall Street Journal reported, but again, bashing one of the world’s largest companies for hiding their wealth from the government will never be unpopular for liberals — including Joe Biden.
The problem is, the internet giant wasn’t having any of it, calling him out in a strongly worded Twitter riposte.
The Democrat presidential nominee front-runner went after Amazon using the same numbers that triggered Alyssa Milano, which originated from the partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
I have nothing against Amazon, but no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers. We need to reward work, not just wealth. https://t.co/R6xaN3vXGT
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 13, 2019
“I have nothing against Amazon, but no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers,” Biden tweeted Thursday.
“We need to reward work, not just wealth.”
It didn’t take long for Amazon to hit back.
We’ve paid $2.6B in corporate taxes since 2016. We pay every penny we owe. Congress designed tax laws to encourage companies to reinvest in the American economy. We have. $200B in investments since 2011 & 300K US jobs. Assume VP Biden’s complaint is w/ the tax code, not Amazon. https://t.co/uPUv1Tzlma
— Amazon News (@amazonnews) June 13, 2019
“We’ve paid $2.6B in corporate taxes since 2016,” Amazon News’ Twitter account quickly replied.
“We pay every penny we owe. Congress designed tax laws to encourage companies to reinvest in the American economy. We have. $200B in investments since 2011 & 300K US jobs. Assume VP Biden’s complaint is w/ the tax code, not Amazon.”
As Billy Binion at Reason pointed out, the company paid $1.18 billion in taxes in 2018 — just at the local, state and international levels.
“Federal corporate taxes are a different story, since Congress specifically devised them with a set of deductions meant to incentivize investment, create jobs, and spur economic growth,” Binion wrote in a Friday piece.
“And Amazon does all that. In 2017, for instance, it invested $22.6 billion in research and development — the highest of any company that year. That huge number is just one such deduction included in the tax code, which explains how Amazon skirted federal taxes even with an impressive $11 billion in profits.
“It’s misleading for Biden to lament that these numbers indicate that the tax code is rewarding wealth instead of work. Research and development are work, after all. If Amazon were getting a tax break for letting money gather interest in the bank, his complaint might make sense, but that’s not what’s going on here.”
And that’s the catch: What part of the tax code would Biden propose to change? How is that going to make everyday Americans more prosperous? How is that going to make the corporations that give them jobs better off?
If Joe Biden wins the White House, my guess is going to be that he doesn’t change a bit of this. In fact, very few candidates would — and they do so at their own peril. Reinvestment is something we ought to be rewarding, not punishing.
By the way, if Biden wanted to push for the reversal of these policies, he had the ear of the most powerful man in America for eight years and did nothing about it.
While the Trump tax cuts may have reduced Amazon’s burden, a lot of these policies were in place well before the Obama administration, and what did Joe Biden or his immediate superior do about them? Nothing. But it certainly makes for good rhetoric these days, doesn’t it?
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