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President Trump Slams Amazon For 'Causing Tremendous Loss To the United States' (cnet.com)
President Trump escalated his attack on Amazon on Thursday, saying that the e-commerce giant does not pay enough taxes, and strongly suggested that he may try to rein in the e-commerce business. From a report: The president took aim at Amazon's tax contributions, its use of the US Postal Service and practices that put "many thousands of retailers out of business!" The accusations aren't new. The tweet was likely prompted by an Axios story on Wednesday that claimed Trump was weighing "going after" Amazon over alleged antitrust activities or violations of competition laws. The Axios story appeared to contribute to a selloff of Amazon stock Wednesday, with Amazon shares dropping 4.4 percent, even though Trump's disdain for Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, was already well-known. Bezos owns The Washington Post, whose coverage has been less than glowing about the new president, which may be a factor in Trump's attacks. Trump's tweet, in full: I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!
This isn't about Amazon's business practices. This is about Donald Trump attacking the Washington Post, a news outlet that reports true but unflattering things about the President.
I mean, come on. There is literally no question why Trump has chosen Amazon as one of his favorite bugbears. Trump's well-known "disdain" for Jeff Bezos and WaPo is the lede, not an aside buried under the fold.
Trump is going after an entire corporation simply because a part of it has the sheer temerity to say things about him that he doesn't like.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Probably the only thing keeping the postal service afloat right now is Amazon. And pretty sure I pay sales tax on purchases through amazon if purchased from amazon.
1. The post office runs a deficit of about $5 billion per year when you include their retirement funding requirements, so in a very strong sense they are undercharging for delivery or overpaying for retirement. Either way, the taxpayers in general are supporting delivery instead of the deliverer/deliveree.
2. There is no federal government sales tax, of which Trump is the chief executive. From his department's point of view, Amazon pays little tax. Your local state/city/county government gets the sales taxes collected by Amazon during your purchases.
The Postal Service has a mandate to pre-fund their retirement program, mandated by Congress. This is where the deficit comes from. This is something no other government or private entity is forced to do. Do you think FedEx is pre-funding their retirement programs?
b) Exactly, USPS *makes* money on packages, they lose money on letters. (plus there is the whole pension thing that really is the reason they are in financial trouble.)
Trump has been silent about other CEOs who he agrees with more than Bezos. Take for example Eddie Lampert who has been running Sears / KMart into the ground. They have been losing money constantly while doing nothing to reward employees or even maintain their stores. Nearly every month they announce more store closures. But Lampert's golden parachute just keeps getting better and better - he's first in line to cash out from Sears when he finally pulls the plug due to the special loans he's issued to them from his own funds.
When Sears finally goes kaput the job losses will vastly outnumber the largest number of coal miners we've had in this country in the past 100 years, and they are distributed across the country. These aren't just high school and college kids working retail until they can find a steady job either; retail at Sears used to be a steady job with a career path. Now every town has lost a Sears, a KMart, or both in the past 5-10 years. All that's left of it is a real estate firm now.
Yeah, I know I'll be down-modded into oblivion on this. Go ahead. If you are too cowardly to reply to ahead and hit me with "offtopic" and "overrated".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The Postal service does not operate at a loss. Instead, they have been forced to pre-pay into a fund to cover retirement for postal workers that haven't even been born yet. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/fy2010/ar2010_4_002.htm
There is nothing that says that the postal service need delivery packages at a loss.
False. They don't have a special rate. They get a discount, but that same discount is available to all bulk shippers.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
This is in reference to the post office subsidizing Amazon deliveries.
Short summary: Amazon pays $1.46 per package less than it actually costs to deliver. That is absolutely Amazon's gain at the expense of the post office.
If you doubt the post office is in a special relationship, what other company gets Sunday delivery for the post office? How is that fair to the workers, it's not like the post office charges Amazon more for that. They deliver the most mundane things on a Sunday, it's not even special orders...
This is why I like Trump's tweets quite a bit, as he seems to have a habit of making public things people seem to want to hide or ignore.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only public tax return we have from Trump shows he paid about $38 million in taxes at least one year.
Not paying taxes after a bankruptcy is smart because then you are following the tax law which allows deductions for things like that. Not doing so would indeed be the opposite of smart: AKA dumb, which is what you are for implying taking deductions is not smart...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Amazon has profited at our expense. They should be paying for the burden
Wrong:
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/29/16830128/amazon-trump-twitter-postal-service-feud
"But break down the losses, and the situation is a bit more nuanced. Delivering packages, it turns out, is a growth business, and it actually makes the Postal Service money: The revenue from package increased $2.1 billion, and was up 11.8 percent for fiscal year 2017. "
Furthermore, the financial crisis the USPS is currently in is entirely manufactured by the Republican congress of 2006:
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-usps-trump-20180102-story.html
"What the Postal Service's critics (including Trump) almost never mention is that the real drag on its earnings is another congressional directive. I wrote in 2012 that the USPS' fiscal crisis was "as artificial as they come" — it was the product of a 2006 congressional mandate that the service must prepay over the next 10 years all its future expected retiree healthcare benefits."
"Those payments totaled $38 billion through 2011, with further installments of between $5.6 billion and $11.1 billion a year due through 2016. At least $34 billion is still owed, according to the annual report."
***"Conservatives who maintain that the USPS should be operated profitably, like a private business, fail to explain why the service should be burdened with a prepayment mandate that its competitors don't face." ***
The Republicans have had the knives out for the USPS for decades and this is straight up right wing ops 101 as seen worldwide. Take public service, cut funding, burden it financially until it can't function, loudly scream about how public services just don't work, and then privatize it and sell the scraps off to your donors for pennies on the dollar. Move on to the next one.
They do not. That link refers to a WaPo op-ed by a guy who *gasp* is heavily invested in FedEx stock.
Amazon pays exactly what the Postal Regulatory Commission told them to, which in turn has year after year deemed Amazon's contract with the USPS to be profitable.