Technology

Amazon Replies After Joe Biden Claims Company Is Not Paying Its Fair Share

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Amazon pushed back Thursday against Biden’s assertions that the big tech company pays a lower tax rate than middle class workers.

“We’ve paid $2.6B in corporate taxes since 2016. We pay every penny we owe. Congress designed tax laws to encourage companies to reinvest in the American economy. We have. $200B in investments since 2011 & 300K US jobs. Assume VP Biden’s complaint is w/ the tax code, not Amazon,” Amazon’s Twitter account read Thursday.

The company was responding to a Biden tweet Thursday saying that “no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters or teachers.”

He tweeted a link to a New York Times’ article suggesting the company pays very little in federal taxes. Amazon will pay $0 in federal income taxes for the second year in a row after its total profits doubled from $5.6 billion in 2018 to $11.2 billion in 2019, according to a February report from Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced in 2018 that the company was raising its minimum wage for full- and part-time employees to $15 per hour after Whole Foods employees demanded higher wages. Other benefits, however, including incentive pay and stock rewards, were cut.

Biden is running for president in a field that includes Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has railed against big tech companies recently and is calling on the federal government to dismantle large sections of Amazon, among other behemoths. She worries that Amazon is unfairly throttling companies that use its services.

Warren wants to impose new rules on tech companies with $25 billion or more in annual ad revenue, forcing Amazon and Google to reduce their hold on online commerce. The plan would also aim to curtail mergers between companies like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.

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