
Damn Right Amazon Runs a Fucking Deficit and So Should America - subnaught
https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/why-amazon-isn-t-a-fucking-idiot-and-runs-a-deficit-f9d5734b68ec
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tomcam
People get to invest in Amazon voluntarily. Taxpayers do not have a choice.

Our national debt comes out to about $150,000 per payer of federal taxes
(almost 50% of wage earners do not pay federal taxes), which means we are
burdening our children with this debt. They too are forced to pay for our
choices.

Investors in Amazon are not requiring their neighbors or descendants to
participate.

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hodgesrm
Google is broke? That would surprise a lot of people if it were actually true.

[https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin](https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin)

Amazon is not broke either. It announced a profit on the full company for Q3.
Also hidden underneath the results is AWS, which has a 25% profit margin [1]
that appears to be growing. At the current rate AWS is going to float the
entire company.

[1] [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2996288/cloud-
computing...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2996288/cloud-
computing/aws-offers-a-lift-to-amazons-q3-profitability.html)

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snowwrestler
The article starts out claiming that Amazon, Twitter, and Google run deficits,
which is wrong. Amazon and Google recently reported profits.

The U.S. government runs a deficit because it has nowhere to store capital
other than itself, and doing so creates additional paper debt (see: Social
Security trust fund).

Amazon, however, has plenty of places it can invest its capital, including the
U.S. government. That process also creates federal debt, BTW.

In short: the U.S. federal government is not a tech company and should not be
run like one (and vice versa).

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rythmshifter
even though this article seems to work out logically somewhat, one cannot
shake the feeling that this is invariably propaganda nonsense, even if I cant
put my finger on exactly why.

1/10 would not read again.

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TylerH
No, it shouldn't

