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Amazon Pulling Out of Texas Over $269 Million Tax Bill
ralphart writes with this excerpt from the Dallas Morning News:
"As a result of an ongoing tax dispute with Texas, Amazon.com has decided to take its ball and go home. The online retailer said Thursday that it would shutter its Irving distribution facility April 12 and cancel plans to hire as many as 1,000 additional workers rather than pay Texas what the state says is owed in uncollected sales tax. Texas wants $269 million from Seattle-based Amazon in past-due sales tax. It sent the bill to the company last October."
We've discussed the online retailer's tax battles with other states in the past.
Last I checked, that makes Amazon tax evaders. They broke the law, and are now fugitives from justice. So I assume the state of Washington will be aggressively tracking them down and extraditing them to Texas for trial. Or maybe the state of New York will seize their assets on Wall St to pay the bill. Or maybe the feds will be getting involved and garnishing their profits.
Oh, wait. Sorry. That would be if a real person didn't pay a $269,000 tax bill. This is a corporation not paying a $269,000,000 tax bill, so they might get a slap on the wrist.
I am officially gone from
The only state that's NOT having budget problems is North Dakota. Ellen Brown says North Dakota is sitting pretty because they own the Bank of North Dakota.
See How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street.
All the other states are slaves to their financiers on Wall Street. For example, the City of Phoenix (Arizona) borrowed a billion dollars over the past 5 years to build out the water system. Now the water department wants to raise an extra $24million a year by raising water fees... 'Cause the usury always gets paid first.
I calculate that the interest charge on a billion dollars a year (at 5%) is $50million. If Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the Bank of Arizona would have financed the Phoenix water expansion (at, say, 3%). Most of the $50million the city is now bleeding out to Wall Street would instead be flowing into the state's treasury.
The financial crisis is easily fixable, with the right solutions. Money and the Crisis of Civilization, and ... Richard Clark's A Bailout for the People are also on my recommended reading list.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
These tax breaks are the great folly of our time. They can bring in a large-looking number of jobs to an area and make a politician look good for a limited amount of time, then the companies bail and often the taxpayers got very little for their money.
It's amazing that everyone thinks that big business is what drives jobs. That's a joke. The real job growth comes with small business. Big businesses will soon just be only the elite people at the top ordering all their stock from the 3rd world sweatshops. They aren't going to save the economy of the U.S. Why aren't we spending our money to support these small businesses that actually care about their communities instead of giving these huge breaks to companies that will leave at the drop of a hat. My guess it all has to do with who have the most lobbyists.
Yes actually. the poor spend near 100% of their income on basic goods and necessities and outnumber the wealthy 10 to 1.
A wealthy person only buys so much crap. A hypothetical 10% sales tax takes ~10% of a poor persons income while the same 10% sales tax may take 0.01% of a wealthy persons income.
The only way for sales tax to be close to "flat" is if you charged it on the purchase of financial instruments like stock.
Bullshit. You worked your ass off, AND GOT LUCKY. You didn't get sick, or have to take care of a relative. You had no financial misfortune to overcome. You were born intelligent enough to take advantage of opportunity when it came. I'm also willing to bet you are white, and a native English speaker. Working your ass off is not sufficient. Not everyone is as smart or as lucky as or as white as you, and to suggest that poverty is their fault ignores your own good fortune. Yes, it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But it is also possible to work just as hard as you did, and have bad things happen to you. The whole "the poor are poor because they are not as good as me" idea was rejected with the rest of Victorian ideology. You sir are a throwback.