It really has to be seen to be believed this complaint about Amazon’s taxes:
Jon Nordmark, founder of consultancy Iterate.ai, said Jeff Bezos’s empire was different. Amazon last year, he said, put nearly $30bn (£22.8bn) into R&D — twice as much as Apple, and almost triple Facebook’s outlay. That investment — Amazon said the $29bn it puts into “technology and content” is far broader than R&D — has gobbled up virtually all its $28bn in earnings before interest and expenses, Nordmark said.
The upshot is that Amazon pays little to no tax. Fair Tax Mark, an independent NGO, labelled it last week as the worst offender in Big Tech, claiming it had paid only $3.4bn in taxes in the past decade. That equates to just 12% of its already whittled-down profits. Nordmark said: “They’re using that $30bn basically to bankrupt all the people that don’t do R&D spending and pay their taxes.”
Spending on R&D is now considered to be a bad idea. Business investment in that future is a bad idea. Because, instead, taxes should be paid so that government can do the Mazzucato thing of the research and development that corporates aren’t doing.
These people are mad.
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In 2018 Fair Tax Mark had two employees, paid no corporation tax as they are not only a not for profit organisation they are actually operating at a loss, basically losers.
Amazon is confident that raw earnings spent on future development rather than carried down to the bottom line will result in new revenue streams. The money isn't burnt, it's growing the company, to the benefit of the owners; and they are investing pre-tax money. Healthier than using it to buy back and extinguish your own (presumably undervalued) shares, or disgorge it to your owners, who might have a clue as to good ways to invest it.