I took every write off I could last year to minimize my tax burden. Am I also a bad person?
I can actually respect Amazon. They reinvest a huge chunk of the change into new business verticals and create new jobs.
Let’s say Amazon paid another $N billion in taxes. Where would the money go? To Washington politicians who’ve been promising change and reform in education, infrastructure, healthcare - at least my entire existence on this planet of not longer. Why should we give them money? Who holds them accountable, and regardless of your politics, how well has that worked out? Americas politicians optimize for their reelection. None of them, not the career officials or the one or two term presidents, regardless of political party, have done much to optimize for the marathon.
Bezos was apparently going to go bankrupt and Amazons model just wasn’t sustainable - according to the same media that cheerleads the two political parties. Yet, here we are, and the failed politicians and divisive media has no ideas other than blaming successful companies.
You could take every penny of Amazon and Apples total market cap and hand it to Washington and state governments. You believe anything will change and will stop overspending every year and adding to the national debt? Who will politicians blame then? Tesla? Ha!
Sure, individuals and companies can use the rules of the system to minimize the tax they're paying. Everyone does that. But companies like Amazon also have a responsibility to the country they operate in and in my opinion should pay taxes there. Just because some financial wizard figured out that that there is such a thing as a double dutch sandwich or what it's called doesn't mean everyone has to eat it.
In my opinion anything larger than a medium sized city (think one of the many cities in SoCal) is basically guaranteed to use its funds poorly.
Do individuals and companies not?
You are talking out of your ass and revealing your xenophobia. The Dutch Sandwich tax dodge works mostly for firms who can pretend that Caribbean post box firm own their "intellectual property" (i.e. tech and pharma firms) and who can then pretend that their actual operating entities are loss making. And no, the German car and industrial companies don't do that.
https://www.focus.de/finanzen/steuern/fiskus-geht-leer-aus-m...
I couldn't find a source for Siemens et all that quickly, they are doing it as well so. As is any other DAX listed company (that isn't loosing money).
> doesn't pay taxes
Yes, that's what R&D investment is. They "make" billions but reinvest all of it into growth so they pay no tax. If you somehow split off AWS and taxed its profits separately Amazon would just increase its R&D spending on AWS and go back to paying $0 in tax.
This is a good policy, by the way. You want to encourage companies to make use of their money rather than returning it to shareholders. That creates more jobs and results in more technological and economic growth.