Someone doesn't want to work more than 40 hours then they shouldn't. That's their choice. They don't want to pool their resources with others, then don't.
Make the choices you want but stop looking for society to "make them whole" when they make choices that fail to deliver the standard of living you or they desire.
If you want people to be reasonably comfortable and secure in their lives then stop making them victims, remove the incentives that keep them from doing more for themselves and stop forcing me at gunpoint to support their lifestyle. Yes, it is as simple as that.
Every mandate you place on a business or impose from the government further limits choices and opportunities for people to succeed.
Rest, spending time with family and friends, having enough to support yourself means dignity, means lower stress and from there [much] lower health costs [include here the better food that you can afford], lower crime [lower cost of security], lower suicide rate....the benefits for SOCIETY are enormous. I am sorry but anyone who argues against this is not living in reality and is bringing more water for the mill of evil..
All of the above is your perception of what is valued and your reason for why it is of value.
I am not willing to tie my choices to someone else's value system. Nor am I willing to tie my choices to a single company and single job so that I can become a cog in someone else's idea of Utopia.
I know a lot of people who work more than 8 hours a day very productively. I did that for many years. I am not willing to trade away the benefits to me as an individual for someone else's idea of societal benefits. No one, including you, is in a position to decide what is best for me.
You can not create a world where you mandate this much in the economy without additionally mandating many things even you would not like to have.
Why should taxpayers subsidize big business more than it already does?
Indeed, they shouldn't.
If an individual feels they want a better standard of living than they get from their lower-skilled job then they should either pool their resources or get an additional job, or both. This concept that individuals should be able to get a "living wage" by working a single job and living alone is absurd.
First, you would have to define a "living wage" by also defining what an individual is allowed to purchase. Does a living wage include the ability to have a cell phone? Cable TV? An automobile? Steak vs. tofu? Abortions? Nice clothes or just so-so clothes? A shared room in a flop house, a one-bedroom apartment or a house?
Secondly, you can't have this world of a guaranteed "living wage" without taking away individual choice. You want to work part-time? Sorry, you must earn your living wage. You want to work two jobs? Sorry, that other job is required by another person so that person can earn their "living wage."
People make choices every day. They choose whether or not to improve their skills in order to earn more. They choose the items for which they will trade their currency. They choose the labor they are willing to provide in exchange for currency or barter.
There is no reason for taxpayers to subsidize big business because the mean, old businesses won't pay a "living wage."
If you can't earn a living wage from your job then choose a lower standard of living, choose to work more than one job or choose to pool your resources with another person.
This argument about government subsidies is way too fucking idiotic to have picked up this much steam.
Since when was it a good idea to mandate that a job, any job, that an individual holds must enable that person to be self-sufficient in and of itself?
What do you have against someone willing to work more than one job? What do you have against someone willing to pool their resources with another person?
This argument is essentially an argument that everyone should be guaranteed a certain amount of leisure time. Workers of the world, unite; you can, as an individual, work only 40 hours per week and have all of your dreams come true.
There are plenty of people on minimum-wage who don't get government services. You seem very willing to trade away individual liberty and choice in order to reach your Utopian world that every job provide self-sufficiency.
Megacorps, minicorps or individuals who hire service providers should pay the value of the service provided - no more, no less.
If an individual can't support themselves working full-time or any other-time job then they should either pool their resources or work more than full-time.
Your position essentially argues that individuals have a right to a certain amount of leisure time; basically that an individual shouldn't have to work more than 40 hours per week and that each individual should be able to independently live "self-sufficiently," whatever the fuck that means, by working no more than 40 hours a week.
If an individual makes a choice to have more leisure time or less leisure time, to work more hours or fewer hours, to work one job or more than one job then it is their choice. Mandating that companies pay a wage sufficient to satisfy some arbitrary definition of self-sufficiency destroys the market and requires mandates across the entire spectrum of choices that heretofore were individual in nature.
Furthermore, if your opening statement that there should be no jobs that don't allow for the worker to be self-sufficient were to become true then we would destroy a huge swath of the economy. Someone wants to work on the weekends to save for a luxury item? Sorry, no jobs for you because you couldn't be self-sufficient on a weekend-only job. Someone wants to work a couple of hours a day while their children are in school? Sorry, no jobs for you. Someone want's to do independent work as a handyman? Would you have them prove that they can be self-sufficient before being allowed to take on that job?
Is it really so difficult for you to distinguish between subsidizing infrastructure and operating expenses?
Let's have a debate about public support of infrastructure. I have no issue with user fees to cover it and could rather easily be convinced to use general tax dollars to build and maintain infrastructure.
I have a huge issue with subsidizing operating expenses, especially when a 1997 law required Amtrak to be operationally profitable by 2002.
I focus on passenger rail as the problem because we're subsidizing a lot more than the rail-line infrastructure. We are subsidizing operating expenses for a bloated inefficient organization.
There's a legitimate debate regarding the role of taxpayers subsidizing infrastructure such as roads and rails.
Give me a legitimate argument why we should be subsidizing Amtrak's daily operating expenses. Because of Congressional interference and failure to follow the 1997 law we have a situation where taxpayers are paying up to half the cost of a ticket for those almost 1 million riders who ride the northeast corridor on a daily basis.
I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?
Here's just one article that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.
Here's another article highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.
Countries don't count homicides the same way. In England and Wales, as an example, deaths don't count as homicides unless, and until, there is a conviction for the death. Here is a report that highlights that difference: www.parliament.uk
35. Homicide statistics too vary widely. In some developing countries, the statistics are known to be far from complete. Figures for crimes labelled as homicide in various countries are simply not comparable. Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction, or where the person is not prosecuted on grounds of self defence or otherwise. This reduces the apparent number of homicides by between 13 per cent and 15 per cent. The adjustment is made only in respect of figures shown in one part of the Annual Criminal Statistics. In another part relating to the use of firearms, no adjustment is made. A table of the number of homicides in which firearms were used in England and Wales will therefore differ according to which section of the annual statistics was used as its base. Similarly in statistics relating to the use of firearms, a homicide will be recorded where the firearm was used as a blunt instrument, but in the specific homicide statistics, that case will be shown under "blunt instrument".
36. Many countries, including the United States, do not adjust their statistics down in that way and their figures include cases of self defence, killings by police and justifiable homicides. In Portugal, cases in which the cause of death is unknown are included in the homicide figures, inflating the apparent homicide rate very considerably.
"...then you may want to consider moving to a safer area."
I wish that were so easy. I'm licensed to carry a concealed weapon and carry my pistol pretty much wherever I go. The only time I had to defend myself I was in a very safe area. It just so happens that was the same are where someone decided he was going to start beating the woman who was with him. He took exception to me witnessing the beating and calling the police and decided I would be the next target of his rage. Fortunately, as with most defensive uses of a handgun, I didn't have to fire a shot.
If needing to defend oneself was restricted to specific geographic areas then I would, as you suggest, simply move to a safer area. The problem is you don't know where something will happen and the only question will be whether or not you're prepared.
Your guess is wrong. It was held at this venue because of a "Stand With The Prophet" event that was held at the same place after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The purpose of that event was to highlight that the media and American Islamaphobes are the reason that Islam has such a bad reputation in the west. More can be read here.
You can continue your canard that Bush lied if it makes you feel good. Robb-Silberman placed the issue squarely at the feet of the intelligence community, generally, and the CIA specifically. Under George Tenet, the CIA assigned a 90% probability that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The real issue was Hussein's insistence on maintaining the illusion of having WMD so that Iran would not see him as week. This is the reason he wouldn't allow the inspections.
Go ahead and keep claiming that Bush lied; perhaps one day you will actually learn what that word actually means.
What, you might ask, happened in 2008? Oh yeah, that's the first fiscal year where the budget was passed by a Democratic controlled Congress. There were plenty of us begging that Bush veto those Congressional bills and he failed to do so in order to keep up the support he needed for the war.
The last year of the Bush presidency is very interesting as it relates to the budget. At the time there were a number of companies failing. Obama had been elected and Bush asked Obama what he wanted to have done. The incoming Obama administration had a lot of say in what was passed and Bush gave him full support. Even more interesting is that the TARP fund was fully funded in that budget and, hence, the huge number. However, the repayments of TARP were accounted for in the fiscal years in which they occurred. In essence, much of the budget deficits until TARP was repaid were artificially lower because they, in essence, borrowed from fiscal year 2009.
The President made that commitment with the full approval of Congress. In the House the vote was 297 for and 133 against, with 3 not voting. In the Senate the vote was 77 for and 23 against.
58% of Democratic senators voted for the resolution and 39% of Democratic representatives voted for the resolution. That's the resolution that was passed before any troops were committed.
There's a nice re-write of facts. Clinton was no moderate until a Republican controlled Congress was elected forcing him to either compromise or achieve nothing.
Los Angeles gets enough water to be self-sufficient. The problem is that Los Angeles spent their money building infrastructure based on getting too much water in the form of rain and they very efficiently send their fresh water directly into the Pacific. California has spent more money in the past few decades on flood control projects that send fresh water directly into the ocean rather than in new water treatment plants.
Now we've gone from the low-information voter to the ignore-information voter.
This isn't a minimum wage study, it's an analysis of the minimum wage studies that were published. They list the studies they analyzed at the end of the paper.
The first 12 studies listed are federal and state.
Most of the studies appear to implicate state studies and there are some that are city-level studies.
The second-to-last listed was for Oregon and Washington. They studied want-ads for eating and drinking workers and hotel and lodging workers. They found that the change in want-ads were negative and significant for all restaurant jobs except cooks (an arguably skilled work set) and for hotel housekeepers. I'm guessing that looking at want-ads is similar to counting help wanted signs.
This was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and it was an analysis of the studies on the employment effects of minimum wages.
From the abstract:
A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.
The fundamental question remains: why would a "larger" company be required to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes?
This isn't asking why an entity with more income should pay more in taxes. Why should they have to pay a higher percentage?
There's a completely different argument on why there are corporate taxes at all given that corporations don't pay the taxes out of thin air, it's the consumers of the corporate products who pay those taxes in higher prices.
The original point I argued against was the concept that the rich benefit more from US taxes than the poor or middle class. I cited a study that shows the opposite. I still await the argument that counters the study.
Amazon contracts out their delivery services. But let's assume you mean UPS, USPS or even if Amazon were itself making the deliveries.
Don't those trucks pay registration fees, tolls and fuel taxes already? Aren't those taxes and fees designed to maintain the roads?
Are you suggesting that there's some other tax Amazon should be paying in addition to the fees they already pay?
This concept that corporations somehow benefit from the roads more than the consumers who purchase their products and individual drivers who utilize those roads is incomprehensible to me. Everyone who uses the roads benefits. Those roads are supposed to be paid for by the various fees (fuel taxes, tolls, excise taxes, licensing taxes, etc.) extracted.
Further, your argument that a road in Iowa is not very beneficial to a person in Florida has no meaning outside an interstate highway. The non-interstate highways in Iowa are paid for by Iowans and those non-Iowans who drive through Iowa, likewise for Florida.
You should also look at the study and what they considered a benefit - they looked well beyond income and looked at all government services.
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Someone doesn't want to work more than 40 hours then they shouldn't. That's their choice. They don't want to pool their resources with others, then don't.
Make the choices you want but stop looking for society to "make them whole" when they make choices that fail to deliver the standard of living you or they desire.
If you want people to be reasonably comfortable and secure in their lives then stop making them victims, remove the incentives that keep them from doing more for themselves and stop forcing me at gunpoint to support their lifestyle. Yes, it is as simple as that.
Every mandate you place on a business or impose from the government further limits choices and opportunities for people to succeed.
Rest, spending time with family and friends, having enough to support yourself means dignity, means lower stress and from there [much] lower health costs [include here the better food that you can afford], lower crime [lower cost of security], lower suicide rate....the benefits for SOCIETY are enormous. I am sorry but anyone who argues against this is not living in reality and is bringing more water for the mill of evil..
All of the above is your perception of what is valued and your reason for why it is of value.
I am not willing to tie my choices to someone else's value system. Nor am I willing to tie my choices to a single company and single job so that I can become a cog in someone else's idea of Utopia.
I know a lot of people who work more than 8 hours a day very productively. I did that for many years. I am not willing to trade away the benefits to me as an individual for someone else's idea of societal benefits. No one, including you, is in a position to decide what is best for me.
You can not create a world where you mandate this much in the economy without additionally mandating many things even you would not like to have.
They don't need public assistance. They need to work an additional job or pool their resources.
What the fuck is a living wage?
Why should taxpayers subsidize big business more than it already does?
Indeed, they shouldn't.
If an individual feels they want a better standard of living than they get from their lower-skilled job then they should either pool their resources or get an additional job, or both. This concept that individuals should be able to get a "living wage" by working a single job and living alone is absurd.
First, you would have to define a "living wage" by also defining what an individual is allowed to purchase. Does a living wage include the ability to have a cell phone? Cable TV? An automobile? Steak vs. tofu? Abortions? Nice clothes or just so-so clothes? A shared room in a flop house, a one-bedroom apartment or a house?
Secondly, you can't have this world of a guaranteed "living wage" without taking away individual choice. You want to work part-time? Sorry, you must earn your living wage. You want to work two jobs? Sorry, that other job is required by another person so that person can earn their "living wage."
People make choices every day. They choose whether or not to improve their skills in order to earn more. They choose the items for which they will trade their currency. They choose the labor they are willing to provide in exchange for currency or barter.
There is no reason for taxpayers to subsidize big business because the mean, old businesses won't pay a "living wage."
If you can't earn a living wage from your job then choose a lower standard of living, choose to work more than one job or choose to pool your resources with another person.
This argument about government subsidies is way too fucking idiotic to have picked up this much steam.
Since when was it a good idea to mandate that a job, any job, that an individual holds must enable that person to be self-sufficient in and of itself?
What do you have against someone willing to work more than one job?
What do you have against someone willing to pool their resources with another person?
This argument is essentially an argument that everyone should be guaranteed a certain amount of leisure time. Workers of the world, unite; you can, as an individual, work only 40 hours per week and have all of your dreams come true.
There are plenty of people on minimum-wage who don't get government services. You seem very willing to trade away individual liberty and choice in order to reach your Utopian world that every job provide self-sufficiency.
Megacorps, minicorps or individuals who hire service providers should pay the value of the service provided - no more, no less.
If an individual can't support themselves working full-time or any other-time job then they should either pool their resources or work more than full-time.
Your position essentially argues that individuals have a right to a certain amount of leisure time; basically that an individual shouldn't have to work more than 40 hours per week and that each individual should be able to independently live "self-sufficiently," whatever the fuck that means, by working no more than 40 hours a week.
If an individual makes a choice to have more leisure time or less leisure time, to work more hours or fewer hours, to work one job or more than one job then it is their choice. Mandating that companies pay a wage sufficient to satisfy some arbitrary definition of self-sufficiency destroys the market and requires mandates across the entire spectrum of choices that heretofore were individual in nature.
Furthermore, if your opening statement that there should be no jobs that don't allow for the worker to be self-sufficient were to become true then we would destroy a huge swath of the economy. Someone wants to work on the weekends to save for a luxury item? Sorry, no jobs for you because you couldn't be self-sufficient on a weekend-only job. Someone wants to work a couple of hours a day while their children are in school? Sorry, no jobs for you. Someone want's to do independent work as a handyman? Would you have them prove that they can be self-sufficient before being allowed to take on that job?
Sounds just like a perpetual motion machine. Let me know when you get one of those working.
Is it really so difficult for you to distinguish between subsidizing infrastructure and operating expenses?
Let's have a debate about public support of infrastructure. I have no issue with user fees to cover it and could rather easily be convinced to use general tax dollars to build and maintain infrastructure.
I have a huge issue with subsidizing operating expenses, especially when a 1997 law required Amtrak to be operationally profitable by 2002.
I focus on passenger rail as the problem because we're subsidizing a lot more than the rail-line infrastructure. We are subsidizing operating expenses for a bloated inefficient organization.
There's a legitimate debate regarding the role of taxpayers subsidizing infrastructure such as roads and rails.
Give me a legitimate argument why we should be subsidizing Amtrak's daily operating expenses. Because of Congressional interference and failure to follow the 1997 law we have a situation where taxpayers are paying up to half the cost of a ticket for those almost 1 million riders who ride the northeast corridor on a daily basis.
I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?
Here's just one article that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.
Here's another article highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.
Countries don't count homicides the same way. In England and Wales, as an example, deaths don't count as homicides unless, and until, there is a conviction for the death. Here is a report that highlights that difference: www.parliament.uk
35. Homicide statistics too vary widely. In some developing countries, the statistics are known to be far from complete. Figures for crimes labelled as homicide in various countries are simply not comparable. Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction, or where the person is not prosecuted on grounds of self defence or otherwise. This reduces the apparent number of homicides by between 13 per cent and 15 per cent. The adjustment is made only in respect of figures shown in one part of the Annual Criminal Statistics. In another part relating to the use of firearms, no adjustment is made. A table of the number of homicides in which firearms were used in England and Wales will therefore differ according to which section of the annual statistics was used as its base. Similarly in statistics relating to the use of firearms, a homicide will be recorded where the firearm was used as a blunt instrument, but in the specific homicide statistics, that case will be shown under "blunt instrument".
36. Many countries, including the United States, do not adjust their statistics down in that way and their figures include cases of self defence, killings by police and justifiable homicides. In Portugal, cases in which the cause of death is unknown are included in the homicide figures, inflating the apparent homicide rate very considerably.
Don't you think it's sad that extra guards are required because of the content of someone's speech?
I guess the heckler's veto is not only alive and well but growing bolder day-by-day.
"...then you may want to consider moving to a safer area."
I wish that were so easy. I'm licensed to carry a concealed weapon and carry my pistol pretty much wherever I go. The only time I had to defend myself I was in a very safe area. It just so happens that was the same are where someone decided he was going to start beating the woman who was with him. He took exception to me witnessing the beating and calling the police and decided I would be the next target of his rage. Fortunately, as with most defensive uses of a handgun, I didn't have to fire a shot.
If needing to defend oneself was restricted to specific geographic areas then I would, as you suggest, simply move to a safer area. The problem is you don't know where something will happen and the only question will be whether or not you're prepared.
Your guess is wrong. It was held at this venue because of a "Stand With The Prophet" event that was held at the same place after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The purpose of that event was to highlight that the media and American Islamaphobes are the reason that Islam has such a bad reputation in the west. More can be read here.
You can continue your canard that Bush lied if it makes you feel good. Robb-Silberman placed the issue squarely at the feet of the intelligence community, generally, and the CIA specifically. Under George Tenet, the CIA assigned a 90% probability that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The real issue was Hussein's insistence on maintaining the illusion of having WMD so that Iran would not see him as week. This is the reason he wouldn't allow the inspections.
Go ahead and keep claiming that Bush lied; perhaps one day you will actually learn what that word actually means.
Actually, there were a lot of people complaining about the deficit in Bush's last two years in office.
Let's look at all the numbers and not just your cherry-picked selection (these numbers are total - both on- and off-budget, source is the GPO):
2002 - 157 billion
2003 - 377 billion
2004 - 412 billion
2005 - 318 billion
2006 - 248 billion
2007 - 160 billion
2008 - 458 bilion
2009 - 1,412 billion
What, you might ask, happened in 2008? Oh yeah, that's the first fiscal year where the budget was passed by a Democratic controlled Congress. There were plenty of us begging that Bush veto those Congressional bills and he failed to do so in order to keep up the support he needed for the war.
The last year of the Bush presidency is very interesting as it relates to the budget. At the time there were a number of companies failing. Obama had been elected and Bush asked Obama what he wanted to have done. The incoming Obama administration had a lot of say in what was passed and Bush gave him full support. Even more interesting is that the TARP fund was fully funded in that budget and, hence, the huge number. However, the repayments of TARP were accounted for in the fiscal years in which they occurred. In essence, much of the budget deficits until TARP was repaid were artificially lower because they, in essence, borrowed from fiscal year 2009.
The President made that commitment with the full approval of Congress. In the House the vote was 297 for and 133 against, with 3 not voting. In the Senate the vote was 77 for and 23 against.
58% of Democratic senators voted for the resolution and 39% of Democratic representatives voted for the resolution. That's the resolution that was passed before any troops were committed.
There's a nice re-write of facts. Clinton was no moderate until a Republican controlled Congress was elected forcing him to either compromise or achieve nothing.
Speaking of the "come hither" look, here's Golda with a similar pose: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/1914_Golda_in_Milwaukee.jpg.
Los Angeles gets enough water to be self-sufficient. The problem is that Los Angeles spent their money building infrastructure based on getting too much water in the form of rain and they very efficiently send their fresh water directly into the Pacific. California has spent more money in the past few decades on flood control projects that send fresh water directly into the ocean rather than in new water treatment plants.
Perhaps, instead of robots, they should look at fixing their leaky pipes (Bay Area loses billions of gallons to leaky pipes) or sending, so efficiently, most of their rainwater back into the ocean (How to fix California's drought problem) before they spend billions building desalination plants (Drinking the Pacific).
Now we've gone from the low-information voter to the ignore-information voter.
This isn't a minimum wage study, it's an analysis of the minimum wage studies that were published. They list the studies they analyzed at the end of the paper.
The first 12 studies listed are federal and state.
Most of the studies appear to implicate state studies and there are some that are city-level studies.
The second-to-last listed was for Oregon and Washington. They studied want-ads for eating and drinking workers and hotel and lodging workers. They found that the change in want-ads were negative and significant for all restaurant jobs except cooks (an arguably skilled work set) and for hotel housekeepers. I'm guessing that looking at want-ads is similar to counting help wanted signs.
I suggest you give this paper (http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663.pdf) a read.
This was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and it was an analysis of the studies on the employment effects of minimum wages.
From the abstract:
A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically
significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the
papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment
effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions
emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence
of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the
broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment
effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming
evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.
The fundamental question remains: why would a "larger" company be required to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes?
This isn't asking why an entity with more income should pay more in taxes. Why should they have to pay a higher percentage?
There's a completely different argument on why there are corporate taxes at all given that corporations don't pay the taxes out of thin air, it's the consumers of the corporate products who pay those taxes in higher prices.
The original point I argued against was the concept that the rich benefit more from US taxes than the poor or middle class. I cited a study that shows the opposite. I still await the argument that counters the study.
Amazon contracts out their delivery services. But let's assume you mean UPS, USPS or even if Amazon were itself making the deliveries.
Don't those trucks pay registration fees, tolls and fuel taxes already? Aren't those taxes and fees designed to maintain the roads?
Are you suggesting that there's some other tax Amazon should be paying in addition to the fees they already pay?
This concept that corporations somehow benefit from the roads more than the consumers who purchase their products and individual drivers who utilize those roads is incomprehensible to me. Everyone who uses the roads benefits. Those roads are supposed to be paid for by the various fees (fuel taxes, tolls, excise taxes, licensing taxes, etc.) extracted.
Further, your argument that a road in Iowa is not very beneficial to a person in Florida has no meaning outside an interstate highway. The non-interstate highways in Iowa are paid for by Iowans and those non-Iowans who drive through Iowa, likewise for Florida.
You should also look at the study and what they considered a benefit - they looked well beyond income and looked at all government services.