This story is just dreadful.
A crack investigative analysis by the Huffington Post has unearthed one of the truly disgusting facets of public assistance in this country. The report finds that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has received about $4 billion in government assistance through Amazon’s longtime exemption from most sales taxes. According to the report:
The basic point is a simple one: the brick and mortar retailers with whom Amazon competes are required to collect state and local sales taxes on the products they sell. For most of its existence, Amazon was exempted from this requirement in most of the states it did business.
This amounts to a massive subsidy to Amazon at the expense of both big chains and tiny family operated business. For example, in a state like New York, where combined state and local sales taxes average over 8.0 percent, Amazon could charge a price that was 1.0 percent below its brick and mortar competition, and still have an additional profit of 7 percent on everything it sold. That is a huge deal in an industry where profits are often just 2-3 percent of revenue.
And just how much did Bezos profit in his twisted public assistance scheme?
We calculated how much Amazon's has saved over its existence by not having to collect sales taxes in most states for most of the twenty years since it was founded. While an increasing number of states do now require Amazon to collect the sales tax, we calculated the cumulative savings to the company as more than $20 billion in 2015 dollars. With Jeff Bezos owning a 20 percent stake in the company, his personal share would be roughly $4 billion.
Guess what that means? That welfare king Jeff Bezos has been eating steak and lobster dinners, flying on private jets, and buying luxury goods that you can’t afford with your money. You hard-working middle class people pay for every meal you eat1 and this guy gets not only the healthy stuff, but lobster! And how much lobster? By California market rates, our money can buy him 450 million pounds of lobster, or 225,000 tons, which is almost as much lobster as we produce in a country in a year!
What proof do we have that Bezos is insidiously gaming the system and spending the tax money of millions of hard-working Americans?
Well, here’s Bezos dining at Indiana fine dining location McGraw’s Steak Chop and Fish House, where plates of filet mignon go for $33 dollars. Thirty three whole dollars! And then there are reports that Bezos regularly attends a weird party where people eat all kinds of extravagant things like goat penises and tarantulas.
Jeff Bezos is eating tarantulas with your hard-earned money!
This is anything but an attack on those who receive government aid. But it’s the government’s job to ensure people like Bezos can afford basic nutrition like whole fruits and vegetables, not provide him the means to throw goat penis parties. This isn’t controlling what people can or can’t do with their money or lives. Again, this is your money! You should call your congress member and demand that people who game the system like this be held accountable, or he’ll continue his expensive food-eating ways.
Keep an eye out for our next story on how the United States government provided billions of taxpayer money to the children of Syrian immigrants.
1-Disregard the fact that most people receive taxpayer assistance