People get to invest in Amazon voluntarily. Taxpayers do not have a choice.<p>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.<p>Investors in Amazon are not requiring their neighbors or descendants to participate.
Google is broke? That would surprise a lot of people if it were actually true.<p><a href="https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin" rel="nofollow">https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin</a><p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2996288/cloud-computing/aws-offers-a-lift-to-amazons-q3-profitability.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.computerworld.com/article/2996288/cloud-computing...</a>
The article starts out claiming that Amazon, Twitter, and Google run deficits, which is wrong. Amazon and Google recently reported profits.<p>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).<p>Amazon, however, has plenty of places it can invest its capital, including the U.S. government. That process also creates federal debt, BTW.<p>In short: the U.S. federal government is not a tech company and should not be run like one (and vice versa).
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.<p>1/10 would not read again.