Tweet Trouble
President should think before posting
President Donald Trump has never been shy about expressing his opinions and calling out those who get on his bad side. And that’s not always a good thing.
Take a Tweet he posted Thursday morning taking the online retailer Amazon to task.
“I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state and local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” the president wrote.
As the stock market opened, Amazon shares took a tumble, though they recovered later in the day.
Now, the idea that online commerce is hurting brick-and-mortar businesses is nothing new and is hard to refute. But Amazon does pay sales tax on its own sales in all 45 states that charge it. Whether they have to collect tax on sales from third-party sellers is a case for the courts. And while the figures aren’t public, the company seems to be more of a boon than a bust to the U.S. Postal Service. First class mail is down, but post office revenue is way up on packages, about 13 percent higher in 2017 than 2016, according to a story published Thursday by the news service Reuters.
There is some speculation that President Trump’s animosity toward Amazon has more to do with its founder Jeff Bezos than the company itself. Bezos owns the Washington Post, not a publication that finds favor with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The Trump administration denies there was anything personal about the Tweet.
President Trump is his own man and does not feel bound by the traditional constraints of presidential decorum. That’s why his supporters love him. But it’s one thing to take the gloves off with foreign governments or even political opponents. It’s quite another to go after an American business that employs American workers and whose stock price has a very real effect on the nest egg of countless others.
So why did the president go after Amazon on Twitter? Who knows? But there was no reason for it. It served no useful purpose. We can only hope the president thinks twice before doing so again.