Right, because tax money, once collected, simply vanishes into thin air and never, ever shows up as the income of private companies, nor drives entire sectors of the economy.
At least that's how it works under the purple skies of planet Libertaria.
It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.
The article actually says they received $129 million instead of paying taxes on $11 billion profit!
https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-2018-aws-delivered-most-of-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-antitrust/e...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...
It's "simply their desire" not to pay taxes? You think the IRS accepts that? Do you think they just write in "sry guys, we'd rather not pay"?
No, they aren't paying taxes on this money because it's offsetting prior losses. This is a perfectly reasonable way to structure the tax code, and it only seems like malfeasance to you because you haven't bothered to understand it.
I am not an accountant, so I can't claim to fully understand what qualifies as a gain or loss, but my assumption has always been that the accounting rules are supposed to be sane and reflect the difference between these concepts (a real loss vs. going into debt).
If you see a problem with this picture, the problem IMO is an overly complicated tax code that mostly benefits people/businesses with the resources to navigate it.
That aside, if Amazon paying nothing in federal income tax largely has to do with offsetting previous losses, what's the problem? That seems fair, and I would really want someone who has a problem with this to explain why it would be more fair to tax a business' gains one year by ignoring previous years' losses.
From the second paragraph of the article:
> "The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the company is subject to a 21 percent tax rate on its U.S. income. However, through various tax breaks and credits, the company will receive a tax rebate of $129 million."
