Our view: Trump’s baseless bashing of Amazon
Far more than previous presidents, Donald Trump has taken to picking on individual companies.
Trump has frequently taken aim at CNN parent company Time Warner, and his Justice Department is challenging its proposed merger with AT&T.
And lately he has grown fixated with Amazon, claiming several times this week, as he has before, that it pays too little in taxes and gets too good a deal from the U.S. Postal Service.
Any other administration would see the AT&T-Time Warner merger as unobjectionable. And any other administration would see Amazon as a phenomenally innovative and disruptive business that provides something of a lifeline for a troubled postal service.
For Trump, however, soundness of arguments seems to count less than his personal animosities. His distaste for CNN prompts him to oppose anything that might benefit Time Warner. And he thinks his Amazon outbursts will rattle the cage of its CEO, Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post in 2013.
It has been a while since a president engaged in this level of politicization of business. In 1962, President Kennedy pressured steel companies to give in to union demands, an unfortunate move that did nothing to save steel jobs in the long run and made government complicit in the industry’s decline.
But Trump’s actions go further as they are so petty, so personal — and so contrary to Republican orthodoxy that politicians, particularly presidents, shouldn’t be picking corporate winners and losers.
His arguments, particularly those related to Amazon, do not hold water. The company has minimized its federal tax bill by putting growth above profits. It collects and pays state sales taxes on its own products, and will do so on request for third-party vendors that account for about half of its business.
The U.S. Postal Service argument is even further off-base. It is losing money largely because of the decline in traditional first-class mail and its huge pension obligations. But its package delivery service, including what comes from Amazon, is growing.
Trump likes to cite a Citigroup analysis that the Postal Service is undercharging by $1.46 per package. That analysis applies to all packages, not just those from Amazon. It might or might not be accurate. And it does not mean the Postal Service is losing money, just that it could make more.
To these dubious claims, Trump adds an argument generally made by liberals: that Amazon is taking jobs away from its competitors. That’s obviously true. But government did not thwart cars to protect the horse-and-buggy industry or air travel to protect passenger rail. And it should not coddle Amazon’s competitors.
If Trump wanted to be useful, he would press Congress to pass longstalled measures to put the Postal Service on a sounder financial footing by closing under-utilized offices, cutting back on Saturday delivery, and reducing its labor costs — rather than bash a success story of American capitalism.