“The tax law that congressional Republicans and US President Donald Trump enacted last summer has proved to be a massive boon for Amazon, slashing the corporate behemoth’s 2025 tax bill even as its profits surged and it moved ahead with mass layoffs that have cost 30,000 workers their jobs since October.
“Citing a new securities filing, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Amazon’s “current US taxes, an accounting measure of taxes incurred last year, declined to $1.2 billion from $9 billion” while the company’s “pretax US profit increased by 44.5%, to $89.5 billion. On a cash basis, the company paid $2.8 billion in federal income taxes last year after paying more than $7 billion in each of the prior two years.””
no, it’s much simpler than that: I think that any system, no matter how well-designed, can be broken by anyone with the will and patience to break it. And in an apocalypse, there would be no shortage of people with the will to do it and the time to plan how.