{"id":117525,"date":"2021-04-08T14:28:34","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T21:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.46.6.243\/?p=117525"},"modified":"2021-04-08T14:28:34","modified_gmt":"2021-04-08T21:28:34","slug":"jeff-bezos-just-endorsed-corporate-tax-hikes-heres-why-amazons-support-should-be-a-giant-red-flag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/?p=117525","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos Just Endorsed Corporate Tax Hikes. Here\u2019s Why Amazon\u2019s Support Should Be a Giant Red Flag"},"content":{"rendered":"

Atlanta, GA…The Biden administration and some (but not all<\/a>) of their Democratic allies in Congress want to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. They say this would help the working class and hurt Big Business, finally making corporations \u201cpay their fair share.\u201d But if that were true, giant corporations like Amazon wouldn\u2019t be endorsing the change.\u00a0 Yet that\u2019s exactly what Jeff Bezos just did.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe support the Biden Administration\u2019s focus on making bold investments in American infrastructure,\u201d the Amazon CEO wrote in a public statement. “We recognize this investment will require concessions from all sides\u2014both on the specifics of what\u2019s included as well as how it gets paid for…\u00a0we\u2019re supportive of a rise in the corporate tax rate<\/strong>.\u201d (Emphasis mine).<\/p>\n

Amazon has also\u00a0lobbied aggressively<\/a>\u00a0for other big-government policies like a $15 federal minimum wage. At first glance, this might seem like an endorsement of the policies:\u00a0see, they wouldn\u2019t be so bad for business after all.<\/em>\u00a0Yet it\u2019s actually a giant red flag.<\/p>\n

When Big Business comes together to collude with Big Government, it usually means everyday people are about to get ripped off.<\/p>\n

When CEOs and politicians are able to agree on seemingly anti-business policies, it\u2019s often because they know the government roadblocks instituted will entrench their market dominance and ultimately redound to the C Suite\u2019s benefit. Amazon knows it can weather the storm of higher corporate taxes (right now it\u00a0pays very little in corporate tax<\/a>\u00a0because it exploits tax breaks) but many of its smaller competitors cannot. Meanwhile, Bezos also knows that his company can afford armies of tax experts, accountants, and lawyers to exploit every loophole to minimize the damage; a luxury many less-dominant rivals won\u2019t have.<\/p>\n

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And, most importantly, a\u00a0wealth of economic research<\/a>\u00a0shows that workers and consumers really bear the majority of the costs of corporate taxes through lower wages and higher prices.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe elementary fact is that \u2018business\u2019 does not and cannot pay taxes,\u201d Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman\u00a0once explained<\/a>. \u201cOnly people can pay taxes. Corporate officials may sign the check, but the money that they forward to Internal Revenue comes from the corporation\u2019s employees, customers or stockholders.\u201d<\/p>\n

More specifically, a study by the Tax Foundation found that Biden\u2019s proposed corporate tax hike would\u00a0shrink the overall size of the economy, reduce wages, and eliminate 159,000 jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, Bezos would hardly notice a blip in his bank account. The workers left unemployed would have a different experience.<\/p>\n

Amazon is not truly altruistic or \u201cwoke.\u201d The company knows that the costs of proposed corporate tax hikes would mostly fall on workers and hurt smaller retail competitors. Amazon just hopes that you don\u2019t know that\u2014and that Americans mistake its cronyism for altruism.<\/p>\n

By Brad Polumbo
\nBrad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Atlanta, GA…The Biden administration and some (but not all) of their Democratic allies in Congress want to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. They say this would help the working class and hurt Big Business, finally making corporations \u201cpay their fair share.\u201d But if that were true, giant corporations like Amazon wouldn\u2019t be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":117528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,20,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-featured","category-news","last_archivepost"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Bezos.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/117528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}