While Amazon oligarch Jeff Bezos called upon Washington D.C. to impose higher taxes on other corporations, his flagship company tried to keep its own tax breaks in place according to Politico.
Bezos, who also owns the left-wing Washington Post, basked in progressive attention earlier this year for publicly supporting the proposed Biden tax increase, even while he sought to use progressive insiders to help him curb Amazon’s corporate tax bill.
Hmm…wonder why we didn’t see this in the Washington Post.
As Bezos called for tax hikes, Amazon lobbied to keep its tax bill low https://t.co/iiBEkcDNfw via @politico— John Weisman (@JohnWeisman1) July 8, 2021
“The company hired the tax lobbyist Joshua Odintz, a former Democratic congressional aide and veteran of the Obama administration, last month to lobby on the section of the tax code dealing with the research and development tax deduction,” said Politico, which obtained a disclosure filing.
Biden is seeking to raise taxes on corporations from 21% to 28%.
Despite a recent pact by globalist G7 member-nations to impose a basic-minimum tax, some contend this hike will put the U.S. at a disadvantage against lower-tax countries, like Ireland, and those with more tax discretion, like China.
“China stands to gain thousands of jobs as employers flee the crushing tax and regulatory burden of Joe Biden’s America,” wrote the Heritage Foundation, a free-market think-tank.
Domestically, the rate increase will be another blow to small and mid-size independent businesses that are unable to leverage their clout, connections and high-powered legal maneuvers to avoid it.
Amazon and other tech-based companies likewise took advantage of pandemic lock-downs to significantly boost their profit-margins through door-to-door drone deliveries while independent competitors were choked by the draconian constraints.
The recent disclosure, however, was not the first time that Amazon has been charged with hypocrisy on corporate taxes.
In 2014, the National Bureau for Economic Research found that much of Amazon’s success came from its ability to avoid the state- and local-level sales taxes that actual bookstores were obligated to pay, according to a report by Salon.
“A large chunk of Amazon’s success came, not as the result of private-sector brilliance, but because of a simple tax loophole,” it said.
Amazon today is seeking to keep in place a loophole that allows companies to write off the investment in research and development.
Big tech companies like Amazon pour money into so-called R&D operations, in part because of the tax breaks.
“It’s very likely [Amazon’s] getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in R&D tax credits,” Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy told Politico.
Under Biden’s proposal the tax write off for R&D wouldn’t be eliminated, but would be amortized over a five-year period, reducing the value of the deduction.
According to the federal government, businesses spent $441 billion on research and development costs in 2018, up 10.2% over the previous year.
