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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!
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.
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"?
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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.
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> 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.
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