Slashdot Mirror
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!
Isn't that, literally, why they exist?
Deliberately falsely badmouthing a company in order to drive it's stock price down is legally called "tortious interference", and is VERY actionable. I'm also pretty sure Jeff Bezos can afford some pretty could lawyers. Trump will be tied up in court until well after his death.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
He uses his government position to go after personal grudges.
Putting retailers out of business? I thought we like the free market around here?
Not paying taxes? I thought not paying taxes was smart?
use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy
Isn't that, like, LITERALLY their entire job and purpose to exist?
Saying a conglomerate doesn't pay enough taxes is Republican Sacrilege. GOP needs to get the message to Fox so they can tell him to STFU on TV, like they did on gun control when he wandered off script.
Table-ized A.I.
Hasn't Trump been the master of manipulating the tax code to his own benefit? Didn't he say during one of the debates that not paying taxes for multiple years, because of a bankruptcy filing, made him "smart"?
#DeleteChrome
they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments
Blame late-stage capitalisms race to the bottom on the state level. Without tax reform states like georgia, indiana, and missouri are basically 25-50 year shelters where companies set up shop, import H1B stem labor, churn out private profit, and leave with a superfund site to be cleaned up by taxpayers. you might get a high-rise with a name on it, or a city park/mural dedicated to the companies $important_figure or two, but none of that does anything to patch roads or fund schools.
use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.)
Blame...your own party. Republicans have been trying to deliver the killing blow to the USPS for 40 years. unable to sink it with future debt and price control, and unable to privatize it because private industries dont want the job, they've incentivised public private partnerships where companies like UPS hand-off to local carriers for last mile delivery. since every system uses barcodes and tracking exclusive to their supply chain systems, the USPS doesnt have any real tracking data to begin with and must handle these packages in a largely manual fashion. The whole end result is a package that takes 20 days to reach its destination half crushed with 40 labels and no customer savings. but hey! we "privatized" the post office!
and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!
the 90s called and they want their destructive business practices back. Wal-Mart started this trend by bankrupting suppliers into offering products with no profit margin (vlasic pickle for example.) Fast forward and theres a wal-wart on every street corner offering cut-rate oil changes and flavourless apples the size of softballs for pennies. I mean, surely you didnt snore through the 20 years it took for a single american company to bankrupt every small business in the midwest just to show up and bitch about Amazon, did you?
Good people go to bed earlier.
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
The USPS is already rolling their vehicles so the extra wear and tear is going to be minimal, in fact it's been proven that Amazon reduces fuel used to deliver goods to consumers in almost all cases so it should be going down.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I thought Republicans don't believe in the government picking winners and losers?
There is so much wrong with this tweet, and the entire line of thought. There are thousands of mom and pop places that consider Amazon a priceless tool in keeping their own costs down. Also, they are one of USPS biggest customers, and package delivery revenues are up. The reason USPS is losing billions has nothing to do with Amazon, and everything to do with first class mail and pension legal requirements. Most (all?) people pay sales tax on Amazon purchases these days, too, so a notion of an additional Internet tax is just stupid.
It's almost like everything Trump tweets is exactly wrong. SAD!
1. Since when is it the personal job of a sitting POTUS to 'rein in' any legitimate U.S. based business, regardless of size?
2. Considering Donald Trump's personality, as he demonstrates it to be, I find it much more credible an idea that what he's really all upset about is the fact that Amazon/Jeff Bezos is orders of magnitude more successful a businessman than he is, and Trump is throwing one of his typical temper-tantrums over that fact.
3. Trump claims to want to 'make America great again', and bring back jobs for American citizens from overseas. However intentionally damaging Amazon, who employs at least 341,000 people, will likely cause some of those people to lose their jobs; how is that going to make us 'great again'? (It won't)
4. Meanwhile, the guy who allegedly knows 'The Art of the Deal', and claims to be such a successful businessman, can't even keep things coherent in his own Cabinet, hiring and firing people left and right at a furious pace, and appointing cronies and yes-(wo)men to top positions instead of the people who would be best for the Country as a whole; how the actual fuck can you run the government of ostensibly the most powerful Country in the free world when there is no consistency whatsoever to the people who are making it run?
Seriously, folks, all poking the Trump supporters with a stick aside: this clown has got to go, before he completely wrecks this country.
Of course even if he left office today, it'll still likely take a full decade to repair the damage done to everything -- and we'd be stuck with Mike Pence, which in significant ways would be orders of magnitude worse. Can we just all wish real hard that a meteor falls from the sky and kills them all at the same time?
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?
because they keep getting bought up in Bain Capital style leveraged buy-outs and then saddled with debt that prevents them from adequately competing with Amazon. To cut costs they turn their stores into dirty little warehouses. This is what happened to Toys R Us. And they were one of the lucky ones. They survived 13 years before the debt crushed them.
If Trump doesn't like the post office subsidizing Amazon there's a really, really easy solution: raise the rates. Problem solved. And if he doesn't like how they treat their workers he could raise federal minimum wage and drop the work week to 30/week before overtime kicked in. The latter might require congress to act but it's popular enough that if he'd stop attacking them on Twitter and take congress to task for not doing anything for the working man he'd have it done in a week. Especially if he did it right before mid-terms.
But this is all just a distraction. And an political attack on a company run by people that don't particularly like him. It'd be funny watching to rich and powerful guys in a pissing match if their actions didn't effect me so drastically.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Is the Republican stable genius proposing to raise taxes and tighten tax laws on corporations? Is he going to reign in tax avoidance practices? I wonder what his party think of this?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
You're a fucking idiot then.
As if it wasn't obvious even at the time that Trump was vastly more corrupt and much more of a liar than Clinton.
How do you qualify that? Your shit doesn't smell as bad as my shit? They're both shit, they both stink, and whether one stinks more than the other is a matter of perception.
You're positing that the post office knowingly defrauds itself for some reason? Your own link says they make a profit delivering Amazon's stuff. The Sunday delivery guys aren't the same ones that run the route the other days, and they get to dress casual. They seem pretty happy about it, actually, when I've spoken to them.
I disagree. Trump *benefits* from WaPo attacks because WaPo is seen as elitist, what better proof to your base that you're doing the right thing than when a "swamp-supporting" newspaper is upset with you.
Rather, in my opinion, Trump is a traditionalist (despite being socially fairly liberal), and he sees Amazon as attacking the American traditional way of life, hurting the working and middle class and so on. That attitude has been a pattern of his since the 80s. I don't know that Amazon can be stopped, and I'm not 100% sure that it should be, but I think it will be interesting to see Trump try it.
A trickle-downer who signed a huge tax giveaway to corporations is complaining that a corporation doesn’t pay enough taxes? Haha what?
Don’t the trickle-downers always tell us that companies like Amazon, etc. paying more in taxes mean less jobs? So other than being butthurt over the Washington Post, shouldn’t Trump be glad that this “job creator” is only paying the bare minimum taxes to maximize hiring and shareholder return?
Hypocrisy. Thy name is Trump.
> 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.
Wait, wut?
Trump Brags About Not Paying Taxes: "That Makes Me Smart"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBZR1-onmAo
Trump is good at misdirection and baiting the media and the public-at-large. When he says "look over here at this naughty Amazon", he's not serious; he's really trying to divert attention from some fjnork-up someplace else.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
What was your first clue?
Well, i was a bit suspicious after he managed to bankrupt a casino.
I'm so waiting for this guy to release his taxes as promised since 2016.
Average cost != incremental cost.
As long as they are charging more than incremental cost, they _are_ making money. The delivery guy on the route is a sunk cost.
You should know this...it's not like your a kid.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
You are apparently under the illusion that USPS is forced to give Amazon a special deal. WTF, you are a dumbass.
Oh I see POTUS along with the director of HHS calling out an entire industry for price-gouging everyone is the same as a narcissistic 5-year-old having a temper-tantrum on Twitter against a single company? Bullshit, and your red underwear is showing, pull up your pants.
Then why is Amazon now evil for following the law?
You should know this...it's not like your a kid.
That's pretty much the entire reason everything is so screwed up and people on both sides scream incredibly stupid shit.
The average person in the US operates at the intellectual, emotional, educational, and maturity level of an 8-year-old child.
On a good day.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Even if you and your dear leader were right, it's irrelevant. There's only one question that needs to be asked: "How does the USPS set their rates, bulk-shipping or otherwise?".
If the rates are pre-set (by statute, fixed USPS policy, to be competitive with UPS/FedEx, etc.), then the onus is on those who set those rates to assure that the USPS is profitable. And if Amazon is simply purchasing a service at the price that it is offered to anyone. Nothing to see here. It's not Amazon's responsibility to see that anyone else is profitable.
If the USPS cut a deal with Amazon for lower rates, then it's still on the USPS for signing an agreement on which they wouldn't make money. They have accountants, MBAs, and the like, just like everyone else. And they went into any negotiations knowing their fixed and variable costs, and the price at which they could offer their service profitably. If they signed a deal to sell their service at a price that would lose them money, the again, that's not on Amazon. They need to suck it up, wait for the deal to expire, and raise their rates when the contract comes up for renewal. And as before, it's not Amazon's responsibility to see that anyone else is profitable.
Imagine all the people...
As many, many people point out here - and has been pointed out to you specifically in the past (I have a long memory on this) - the government does not subsidize the USPS at all. Zero dollars in subsidy. No charity.
You aren't misinformed, as you have been corrected on this befire. You are intentionally lying. Why is that?
The USPS was cut loose from government funding during the Nixon administration exactly for to meet those "run it like a business" conservative demands. The only problem is that Congress gets to pass rules about how the USPS runs - what days it delivers on, how often, how much it can charge, and especially the monumentally stupid pension pre-funding mandate, for postal workers yet unborn, that no private business - or government entity - anywhere else in the world does.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
You're missing some of the point. The US Congress has mandated the USPS to completely pre-pay into its retirement fund at (a) an accelerated rate for (b) all their employees, even ones who aren't even close to retirement. The USPS would be fine financially if they could pay into the fund more reasonably, like every other corporation does (that still have pensions). This was done by Congress partly to hinder the USPS and foster a case to privatize it -- 'cause "it's losing money". Seemingly, you've drunk their Kool-Aid.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Another factor is USPS needs the approval of Congress in order to make any financial decisions. They've asked to suspend Saturday delivery to save money, Congress did not approve. They asked for postage rate hikes, Congress did not approve. They asked to close some post offices to save money, again Congress refused. Is it any wonder they are struggling?
IANAL, but isn't deliberately publicly attacking and lying about a company in a deliberate attempt to drive down the stock price actionable in court as "tortious interference"? I.e., can't Trump be sued for as much as he has driven the market cap down, which is far more money than he has?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.