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by theandrewbailey 3202 days ago
A lot more tax money goes to non-military parts of the government[0], like welfare and education. I'm not happy that Amazon doesn't pay its fair share.

[0] https://www.usafacts.org/government-finances/spending

3 comments

Seems bizarre to only think taxes go into the Military Industrial Complex. I mean, sure they take their cut--but I'd like to think that our taxes go towards maintaining our civil society as well!

Edit: Seems very much cutting off your nose to spite your face, if one is 'happy' a corporation isn't paying taxes

Per my other comment, the military's cut is 16% of 3.8 trillion.

Energy, Environment, and Science take a combined 2%.

Social Security and Medicare take a combined 60% (!), which are funded by entirely separate taxes (payroll taxes). Amazon still pays those.

Trust me, you don't want a corporation paying income taxes.

It just results in dead Iraqis and global surveillance.

What's not fair? They are following the law.
Fairness (distributive) != Lawfulness

Justice != Lawfulness - contested

Justice ≈ Fairness - contested, but developed world's post-war political-economies are based upon this either explicitly or implicitly. A lately weakened norm (post-Thatcher/Reagan) that Amazon and others are breaking further.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-virtue/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/

Amazon can't escape paying Medicare and Social Security taxes. So, they are definitely paying into that, along with everyone else who pays payroll taxes.

So, if you exclude those two things from the budget [0], you'll see that military expenses and interest on debt greatly outweigh education and NASA and etc.

Now I personally think Amazon is a great source of good in this world, compared to Lockheed Martin or Halliburton [1]. So if those guys aren't paying anything in taxes, I am biased, they should be paying more, not Amazon.

[0] https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/total_spending_...

[1] they make missiles and weapons that kill people wholesale.