After backing corporate tax hikes, Amazon is lobbying for deductions
When President Joe Biden announced plans to raise taxes on the rich and corporations, Amazon supported the idea.
“We support the Biden Administration’s focus on making bold investments in American infrastructure. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported infrastructure in the past, and it’s the right time to work together to make this happen. We recognize this investment will require concessions from all sides—both on the specifics of what’s included as well as how it gets paid for (we’re supportive of a rise in the corporate tax rate). We look forward to Congress and the Administration coming together to find the right, balanced solution that maintains or enhances U.S. competitiveness.“
– Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon
Certainly, it is quite possible that the people at Amazon support “making investments” in the U.S. economy and are willing to pay higher taxes to accomplish that goal. However, looking at Amazon’s recent lobbying activity, that seems highly unlikely.
As Amazon publicly embraced President Joe Biden’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate across the board, it has also lobbied Congress to preserve a prized tax break that’s helped it lower its corporate tax bill.
The retail giant’s founder Jeff Bezos earned plaudits earlier this year when he announced that Amazon would back “a rise in the corporate tax rate” to help pay for Biden’s infrastructure package. His comments broke with most of the rest of corporate America — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable vehemently opposed such tax hikes — and served as a rejoinder to critics who have attacked Amazon for paying little to no federal income taxes. Biden himself criticized Amazon’s tax rate as too low on the campaign trail.
Behind the scenes, however, Amazon and other companies have been making moves to help keep their taxes from rising. And their efforts illustrate some of the unseen hurdles the Biden administration faces in its efforts to bring in more revenue from corporate taxation as it calls for raising the overall corporate tax rate to fund its ambitious domestic agenda.
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, according to a disclosure filing.
And the R&D Coalition — an alliance of companies that benefit from the deduction including Amazon, Intel, the National Association of Manufacturers and others — hired a squad of veteran tax lobbyists at PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this year. Those hired included a former top aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Amazon, like every other business, has an incentive to reduce its costs. So, it should not be surprising that the company is taking efforts to reduce its tax burden.
What should be concerning is that, unlike Amazon, small and mid-sized businesses do not have the resources to spend on lobbyists or comb through complicated tax and regulatory codes to use them to their advantage.
In the end, while supporting higher taxes, big corporations collude with big government to keep their own taxes low. This Twitter exchange between Elizabeth Warren and Amazon News is especially telling about the great power big businesses wield in lawmaking.
Calls to soak “corporate America” rarely hit Wall Street alone. More often, Main Street takes the blow—especially when big corporations are backing the push.