Amazon Just Scammed Taxpayers Out Of $2.4 BILLION

Politicians love telling us that we can’t afford basic necessities like universal healthcare, debt-free college, infrastructure, and everything else, but when corporations come asking for money there always seems to be some lying around waiting for them. This is the case with Amazon, the multi-billion dollar company that is going to rake in more than $2.4 billion in tax subsidies with their new headquarters in Virginia and New York. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this corporate extortion and how it isn’t limited to Amazon.

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Amazon just pulled off one of the biggest corporate con jobs that we've seen in modern times. The company is about to receive roughly 2.4 billion dollars in subsidies from states just for the privilege of being able to put their new headquarters in those states specifically. We're talking about Tennessee, Virginia and New York. Amazon decided they wanted to create new headquarters for their offices, so for the last few years they've actually been going back and forth with a bunch of different states having what's basically a bidding war to see which state was going to give them the most corporate subsidies and even though New York, Virginia and Tennessee, which Tennessee was a last minute addition for the company, even though they weren't the highest bidd ers on how much they were going to give them, they're still going to give them everything they wanted and more. Here's how it breaks down. For every job created in New York, Amazon is going to get a tax incentive, a subsidy of $48,000 for every single job in Virginia.

Numbers a little lower, but it's still $22,000 that they will be getting in subsidies for every single job they create. Now, part of the deal is that these jobs are supposed to be paying at least $100,000 a year and when you think about the fact that they're supposed to be creating 25,000 jobs in both New York and Virginia, 50,000 jobs total, uh, it's highly unlikely that every one of those jobs is actually going to be paying more than $100,000 a year. Not to mention the fact we've seen how horrible Amazon is to its employees. So again, incredibly unlikely that things are going to be different at these new headquarters and that everybody walking around those building's, going to be making over $100,000 a year. That's not going to happen, but Amazon is still going to reap in more than $2,000,000,000 in subsidies over the next few years because these states were desperate to get the company to come to them.

This is not capitalism. This is not the free market. This is corporate extortion at the hands of Amazon, and let's be clear about this. Amazon is not the only massive corporation that engages in this kind of behavior. Most of them do it. Have you ever wondered why there's not a best buy in every city that you go to where people need electronics but may have to order it online or drive 100 miles? It's because that area, that city didn't give them the subsidies and protections that they wanted, so they decided not to build there. Same thing with walmarts and targets and other big box stores. Lowe's and home depot, even Mcdonald's and other fast food chains in some instances, won't go into areas because those cities won't give them massive subsidies, so they just stay out. There is no free market system in the United States today.

I don't care what the Libertarians tell you. We have corporations that are extorting money out of city and state governments and the federal government money that comes from our tax dollars and personally I don't want to be on the hook to give companies that are making billions of dollars every year like Amazon and Walmart and best buy.