According to the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, while profitable major corporations have paid an average of over 21 per cent in federal taxes, over the last 10 years Amazon’s use of tax loopholes has lowered its average to just three per cent. In the last two years, during which it earned US$16.8 billion in profits, it paid no federal income tax at all, thanks to its use of unspecified tax credits and executive stock options.

Amazon is already getting plenty of benefits from the federal government. The company nearly doubled its profits to $11.2bn in 2018 from $5.6bn the year before and, for the second year running didn’t pay a single cent of federal income tax. In fact, Amazon reported a federal income tax rebate for the past two years totalling almost $270m according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Netflix also paid no federal or income tax on profits of $845m last year.

For starters, Jeff Bezos is rich because of the value of Amazon stock, but for years, Wall Street loved the company even though it was a curiously unprofitable retail and technology giant. But more recently, Amazon has emerged recently as a consistently profitable firm, reporting nearly $11 billion in earnings last year. Yet during this surge into profitability — the company’s earnings doubled between 2017 and 2018 — Amazon’s tax bill has actually gone down. The company paid $0 in corporate income tax last year, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, an astonishing figure that generated dozens of news stories last week.

But at the same time, growing wealth disparity throughout the United States is fueling mistrust of large corporations. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy last week reported that Amazon has paid no federal tax the past two years, rather than the statutory 21 percent.