http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/15/1460458/-Appalling-how-much-lobster-did-Jeff-Bezos-eat-with-our-taxpayers-money?detail=email
A crack investigative analysis by the Huffington Post has unearthed one of the truly disgusting facets of public assistance in this country. The report finds that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has received about $4 billion in government assistance through Amazon’s longtime exemption from most sales taxes. According to the report:
The basic point is a simple one: the brick and mortar retailers with whom Amazon competes are required to collect state and local sales taxes on the products they sell. For most of its existence, Amazon was exempted from this requirement in most of the states it did business.
This amounts to a massive subsidy to Amazon at the expense of both big chains and tiny family operated business. For example, in a state like New York, where combined state and local sales taxes average over 8.0 percent, Amazon could charge a price that was 1.0 percent below its brick and mortar competition, and still have an additional profit of 7 percent on everything it sold. That is a huge deal in an industry where profits are often just 2-3 percent of revenue.
And just how much did Bezos profit in his twisted public assistance scheme?
We calculated how much Amazon's has saved over its existence by not having to collect sales taxes in most states for most of the twenty years since it was founded. While an increasing number of states do now require Amazon to collect the sales tax, we calculated the cumulative savings to the company as more than $20 billion in 2015 dollars. With Jeff Bezos owning a 20 percent stake in the company, his personal share would be roughly $4 billion.
you really can't blame him as much as you can republican politicians who allow legislation to stand that permits him to do this, though he is making mad money that is the idea of capitalism but you would think with such grand profits these people would at least lower prices to ingratiate their patrons if nothing else bring them back and creating more patrons. guess that is to slow for them.
we really need these stories to aware us not of more corporate greed but of what your politico's are allowing to happen tax revenue while they claim would not be enough to solve a problem but if we hit them all it would put one helluva dent in the deficit.
