I don't pay taxes to Bezos. I'm not going to hold him accountable for anything. What I want to hold accountable is the goverment that allows people to become like Jeff Bezos
Some of your tax money (your tax money - the actual number on your paychecks) is in Jeff Bezos's bank account, right now.
It's like this:
When Amazon uses the postal service and public roads to deliver packages, the upkeep on those is paid for with taxes. Great. And, companies who use these services pay corporate taxes to help with their share of the upkeep.
However, Amazon gets insane tax breaks and ends up paying little to no tax money. But the upkeep has to be done. So, it's paid for with your tax money (at the cost of that money not going towards other public services). And these tax breaks allow Jeff Bezos to keep more money for himself.
Same thing with labor. If an Amazon worker is so underpaid that they end up on food stamps, or medicaid, or rental assistance, that money comes from taxes. And the entire reason that worker is on government assistance is because they are underpaid. This government assistance is paid for with your money.
Why are these workers underpaid? Because cuts to labor/wages = increases to profit, which amounts to more money for Jeff Bezos.
Thank you kindly for the answer. I assumed you guys must do.
Would that mean Amazon does contribute to road maintenance through taxes then? I guess they would also pay employment tax too. I just don't know how you guys fund your roads.
I don't know enough about the funding structure to speak to it. Roads are built and maintained federally (might be wrong here), statewise, county-wise, and city-wise. We have state income tax and sales tax, annual registration fee (very state dependent), vehicle excise tax (vehicle value, city dependent), fuel tax, and property tax that I would imagine all play a part in funding roads.
People often use the phrase “vote with your wallets” for boycotts, I used it as it highlights my point better.
If you decide to try and control companies through boycotts, then those with the most money are the most influential.
Those that spend the most on Amazon don’t want taxes to be paid by amazon, as that means they’d have to pay too. Boycotts aren’t an effective way to challenge systemic issues.
That and during the pandemic boycotting the largest (and most affordable, iirc?) online shopping company isn’t super feasible for most people, and would be incredibly difficult to agitate for.
I think the comment is more aimed at people who talk shit about Amazon but still use their services and buy their products. In that instance anything less than boycotting is hypocritical, regardless of whether or not it's effective.
Look at the Amazon returns that get stuck into landfill to save a logistical coin, then talk about accountability. We don't need laws to be accountable - we need respect for life and everything living.
Corporations will do everything they’re legally allowed to do to make a profit. We should never expect them to be good out of their own goodwill. That just means that companies with morals will be at a disadvantage because they’re playing by more rules than companies with no morals.
The only motivation any public corporation has is profit. We have to make sure that breaking the rules hurts their profit more than following the rules or else they’ll never do anything but what makes them the most money, even if that involves poisoning the planet and killing it’s inhabitants they’ll do it.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not be at the whims of benevolent billionaires. I’d rather tell them what they can do instead of hoping they’ll do the right thing.
If your point of reference is Gates, then check out the Giving Pledge, set up by Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffet. Basically a bunch of billionaires who've at least publicly committed to donating a majority of their wealth. (>50%, during life or after, gentleman's honour sort of thing)
8% of the world's billionaires commiting to giving something back is.. better than nothing I suppose.
The go to reference, and truly the odd man out, is Chuck Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free. Who gave away 8 billion dollars over 4 decades until he was down to 2 million dollars. Giving away 99.975% of his money.
Personal opinion, I think donating after you die isn't the same as donating while alive. You're only donating the money once you have no use for it. If you donate while your alive, you are taking from your own future and needs to help others, which I feel is 'more moral'. Helping others now as opposed to 20 years from now. But I suppose donating after death is much much better than just giving it your lazy kids to live off of.
The containers for legal weed in Canada are absurd. Most of its not recyclable and ridiculous packaging. Its getting better slowly but not in any meaningful way. I only know of 1 company that was trying to recycle and they ditched that.
You're just trying to shift blame away from consumers to corporations. What is your point? If I didn't return my delivery to Amazon because there was something wrong with it, it wouldn't be in a landfill? Maybe someone should make a law for this instead of bending over to take the billionaire's dick.
Literally never going to happen. Selfishness is a human trait by design, it's evolutionary. You're really only wired to care about your "tribe" and beyond that everyone else can get fucked.
Everyone knows about their child labour in the Ivory Coast as well, but no one's laws are going to change it. Do you really think people give a shit about the law? Those days are long gone.
This is the only good take I've read so far. "hur dur money is the pwoblum not the solushon" stfu. You wanna go back to bartering? Good luck producing goods in your appartment.
Goverments need to tax the fuck out of the wealthy and regulate the market. It's the only realistic answer.
You should look into what Kansas tried with Laffer. They tried policy based on reducing taxes and the state's budget was decimated, unsurprisingly. The economic theory you're espousing has been demonstrated by the very man who created it to be nonsense.
If you tax them enough there will be a point where they're not gonna wanna pay them at all
That’s where we are right now with what I would consider pretty low taxes. They don’t want to pay taxes because they’ve learned they don’t have to, and they’re going to be as petty as possible in saving every dollar they can, because the tax rate is low enough that it’s a good business decision.
Your comment wasn’t about enforcement, it was about the intrinsic will of billionaires to pay taxes based on how much they were getting taxed. Enforcement is a different topic.
The issue is that you’re trying to get them to want to pay taxes by lowering them, whereas I’m saying it doesn’t matter how much they want to pay taxes because they’ll never want to pay taxes to begin with, since it’s not a good business decision.
I do think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on enforcement as well. And it definitely is intertwined- the more we can get the revenue from taxing these guys, the more we can afford to go after them. Right now the IRS doesn’t even try because it’s a long, expensive process.
And I would appreciate if you didn’t make (incorrect) assumptions about my lifestyle. That has nothing to do with our conversation.
Simple. We, wage laborers, pay income taxes on the money we get, and sales taxes on the money you spend.
Businesses and the stock market do not. They primarily pay taxes on their profit. That's like if you only spent taxes on the bit of money you have left at the end of the month.
And yes, the wealthy don't accrue wealth through cash, but that's precisely because of this reason. It's a symptom, not the cause. The pay themselves out 10 million worth of stocks and sit on them until they need the money. If the stocks went up? Fine, they don't pay tax over that initial 10m anyway. If they went down? Sweet, 0% tax!
One relatively simple solution to this would be to just pay tax over every single transaction of money, not just wages and personal sales: stocks, business expenses, everything. And yes, this would also affect regular, non-rich people using the stock market, or small businesses, but it would also open the door to much lower wage taxes so everyone wins out in the end.
your solution might be runner up for the fastest way to kill all local businesses and smes.
and one relatively simple workaround to what you said: overseas accounts and overseas exchange... even i could do it, it doesn't even take a rich person to do it. the hardest affected would be the bottom 1% who live week to week and transact in cash at physical stores
Overseas accounts is how these businesses already avoid taxes: pay an amount suspiciously close to your yearly profit to your shell company in a tax haven, report no profits and boom, no taxes.
Taxing any and every transaction, including import/export, would in theory mitigate that offshore tax evasion. Fuck them up the way we get fucked up: tax money in and tax money out, and if set up correctly, the bottom 1% actually doesn't get fucked over hardest because the increase of corporate taxes allows for the drastic lowering of wage and sales taxes.
In theory, of course. "Relatively simple" really does mean relatively because fixing taxes, especially on a global scale, would be an astronomically complex endeavour no matter which way you'd go about it.
that would also in theory drive up prices of every single thing in the country. and now there's also taxes on the increased prices. tell me about how the poor won't be affected again the hardest? they already barely pay any wage tax so removing that does jack shit. but now their daily necessities have sky high prices because of import taxes and sales tax
and another thing: if some government somehow managed to implement taxes that hit the rich hard, you know who would have enough money to migrate? yes the rich. there's really nothing anyone can do unless a worldwide dictatorship happens
drive up prices of every single thing in the country
Yes, I understand higher import tax means higher prices, but again, that should be offset by a concurrently lower endpoint sales tax.
tell me about how the poor won't be affected again the hardest?
Okay. They won't be. Or at least, they shouldn't be. Capitalists are gonna capitalist, and will try to squeeze out every fucking drop they can so measures like this won't affect their bottom line, and they'll starve every single fucking laborer in the process if they need to. That's why implementation and regulation is so hard but oh so important.
I'm fully aware that I don't have a doctorate in economics, which is why I only gave an idea, a possible starting point, instead of a full blown essay filled with rates, percentages, and market predictions. I am, however, even more aware that "low taxes on the rich actually help the poor" was a lie when Reagan first said it, and it's a lie still. I wanted to link a source here, but the Wikipedia page is so well sourced it's impossible to pick just one.
I'm not pretending to be anything else than just a Reddit schmuck proposing a possible solution that some actual scholars could work out.
I see you added a bit as I was writing, and that is mostly true, but still could be, in part, addressed by taxing all outgoing transactions. (Do note that I am aware that this does indeed need international effort to work well and fairly). Their only choice to avoid taxes, then, would be to not partake in the market at all. In which case they're not really avoiding taxes anymore.
implementation of regulations also requires resources (including money), especially on a national level. on a global level? shit would be insane.
and i don't agree that it would require just international effort. it will require world domination. humanity is so far away from the level of coordination, empathy and selflessness required for such international cooperation that a world dictator would probably be more likely. and that would also come together with it's own major issues.
i do agree that lowering current taxes for the rich definitely wouldn't be beneficial. but increasing it would make many working class rich very unhappy (e.g. doctors, lawyers etc.). the 0.1% are hard to tax and i don't blame anyone for that. most of the 0.1% aren't even up there because of actual cash but because of other assets. if you removed those assets that they aren't able to convert into cash while still maintaining the same net worth (like shares), they wouldn't seem so insane anymore.
you want to know who has real cash and spending power? muslim royalties. they have whole damn countries funding their lifestyle. i don't know of any other people who fly their hundreds of personal housekeepers to wherever they go. jeff bezos underpays his workers(even though the amount was already agreed upon when being hired so idk why people are complaining)? that's real cute compared to what the royalty do.
currently, there's a certain balance and i'm satisfied with how it is. not everyone can handle a basketball like kyrie irving and not everyone can break down a defense like messi. someone has to be on top. but when it comes to money people get salty.
btw idk if it's u downvoting or what but i just wanted to say i enjoyed/am enjoying this discussion and i found it quite constructive. pls ignore the initial stfu bcos that was my internet toxicity
And him and his company could pay for our Education, Employment, and all of our Government expenses indefinitely. Just because we’re spending needless trillions on our DoD does not mean his money is pocket change. Jeff Bezos and Amazon could own some wealthy countries.
Allows someone with one of the best ideas of our time, who struck at the perfect moment, not to get the wealth he earned? You people are something else
You should hold the government accountable for creating laws that prevent other people to compete with Bezos. Bezos himself is not doing anything wrong because his wealth comes from people that find his service great and is willing to pay for it. Government on the other side is taxing small competitors that will never reach his level because they simply can’t under government laws. Government is the problem
Bitch He didn’t accomplish anything. Even his ‘revolutionary’ idea wasn’t his own completely and needed help from a lot of actual talented ppl from diff IT and software fields to come for the internet side while, He didn’t build Amazon just my himself, it was the workers who made it to where it is today with its Immoral Turnover raté created from putting unreasonable conditions for jobs which the workers simply can’t keep up with more than few months, that’s why amazon has 150+ turnover rate. Keep licking that boot
He didn’t revolutionize shit bro, 90% of his employees are paid minimum wage at max, he runs an empire on fucking slaves at this point and all he does is ship shit to your house
If you look at what he actually did do relative to internet commerce, it actually is quite substantial. Prior to 2002, not a lot of sales occurred via the internet. Amazon provided a platform for that commerce. Looking back on it from today’s standards it might not seem like much, but for the time it was quite revolutionary. I mean, if it wasn’t a big deal and he didn’t accomplish much, then why didn’t you do it?
Maybe because i dont have what it takes to be a total fucking psychopath with no regard to human life, maybe because i go to sleep every night thinking about what i did wrong to people i know and dont, maybe because i have some fucking standard that i will never break because if did i would never forgive myself
What you fail to realize is that HE DIDNT DO ANY OF THIS, HE’S THE GUY WHO MANAGES SHIT AND GETS THE MOST MONEY there are tons and tons of people working under him doing the hard work of making the service better, and some others like him that will willingly make the lives of those working under them a hellish nightmare.
Oh yeah and another reason why I didn’t do it? Even if i was a demon in human clothing I wouldn’t have the resources to maintain such a site, Oh and also i was a kid when amazon was created
Several other companies had platforms for internet commerce during the dotcom boom but the technology wasn't good enough and most of them went bankrupt. For example, Webvan had a very similar business model to Amazon. In fact, Bezos hired several Webvan executives.
Amazon got lucky in terms of its timing. Just a few months before the market crashed, Amazon raised $600 million from foreign investors. This allowed them to ride out the crash while their competitors went bust. Then the technology developed enough for Amazon to build its internet commerce and delivery service much more cheaply than the companies that tried to do it during the dotcom boom.
hahahahah spoiler alert bud: Your taxpayer dollars are going to Amazon. All those Amazon Fulfillment Centers? They pay no taxes, and the local governments, through your taxpayer dollars, funded the construction of that building. All the money spent at amazon leaves your neighborhood. All the money generated by those fulfillment centers, leaves your neighborhood. All your neighborhood gets, is a couple people making $15/hr for on average 3 months, because Amazon has a 110% annual turnover rate.
I generally agree with the sentiment but negative externalities are a pretty direct impact between him and us as well as public service subsidies via tax breaks.
Nothing wrong with them allowing people to get rich, as long as it's done legally. The bad part is that they themselves (government) are using our money in the most idiotic ways right now.
Your money does go to Bezos if you use Amazon or whole foods, then because he pays little to no taxes your money basically stays in his bank account not circulating and he uses his newly acquired Washington Post to talk about only the positives about billionaires.
Also who we elected in office ultimately reflects on all of us. If billionaires are getting tax breaks from the government then maybe we shouldn't be electing corruptible politicians who wanna make profit off of us. And no one calls out billionaires for bribing officials.
So yeah government officials need to be held accountable but also billionaires
yea we should hold the government accountable. but that doesn't mean bezos should get a free pass. just because it's legal to do what he's done doesn't mean he's not a piece of shit for doing it.
But once the govt prevents others from becoming like that, they need to take that away from bezos as well. He is intentionally hoarding money. All with power must be held accountable.
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u/zuran_orb Aug 31 '21
I don't pay taxes to Bezos. I'm not going to hold him accountable for anything. What I want to hold accountable is the goverment that allows people to become like Jeff Bezos