Payroll tax, including the nominally “employer” portion, is really a tax on worker pay (the employer portion just makes the rate seem lower; for an honest accounting, it would be counted in both employee pay and employee taxes) as it comes out of what the employer is willing to pay for the work.

It effectively raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits.

It's functionally shows up as a cost, but that doesn't make it a tax.

Consider: if a company had no profits at all, then for some period of time it would still (1) pay its employees (2) pay the payroll tax on behalf of those employees. The amount of payroll tax is 100% determined by employee compensation, not corporate profit (even if those two are indirectly connected).

You're more or less arguing that employee compensation is a tax too, since it also "raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits".

Employee compensation does indeed raise the price the company has to pay. However, it doesn’t end up in government coffers, making it not a tax. This isn’t rocket science.

> It effectively raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits.

Just like any other tax on employee income does, yes; unlike taxes on company profits, and like other taxes on employee income, it's effect on the company can be minimized by finding (or developing) and adopting less labor-cost intensive business methods even if they are higher (before tax) total cost.

Payroll taxes are for the most part paid by the employer on behalf of the employee. That's not Amazon's tax bill. Amazon's tax bill is what they would pay over their profits at year end and they do what they can to pay nothing at all, like almost all other multi-nationals.

You can say nothing about the many other taxes they pay because there aren't any that are more than round-off error. What, they pay sales tax when they buy pencils?

Property tax is a round-off error?

I would absolutely expect that the total amount Amazon paid in property taxes in 2019 to be round-off error compared to their income, yes. Particularly because local governments seem happy to reduce their property taxes to zero or even negative percentages, but even if that didn't happen.

$2.4 billion in subsidies for these taxes, says one accounting: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/technology/amazon-new-yor...

A bunch of warehouses by the airports do not actually create any large property tax bill.