Vasanth Thiruvadi describes in detail why Amazon, and other tech companies, pay so little in taxes. Vasanth has degrees in finance and accounting and until most recently worked as an accountant for start-ups, venture capital firms and other entities located around the United States.
Amazon's statement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/job-creation-and-investment/amazons-economic-impact-in-the-u-s
Vasanth's newsletter: https://nextbite.substack.com/
Vasanth's twitter: @NextVasanth
Vasanth Thiruvadi describes in detail why Amazon, and other tech companies, pay so little in taxes. Vasanth has degrees in finance and accounting and until most recently worked as an accountant for start-ups, venture capital firms and other entities located around the United States.
Amazon's statement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/job-creation-and-investment/amazons-economic-impact-in-the-u-s
Vasanth's newsletter: https://nextbite.substack.com/
Vasanth's twitter: @NextVasanth
So I was I was texting the song cause I saw a headline that said Amazon only paid like$300 in federal taxes. And I saw similar headlines for every tech company. It seems like a common story. So. This, I just don't understand it. I don't understand how I, an individual and paying more in federal taxes than like one of the most valuable companies in the history of the world. So I texted a song about that and he said that would be a super interesting episode for the podcast. I'm sure a lot of people are curious about this, how tech companies get away with tanks to live on taxes. So that's what we're going to do today. Let's do it. Tell me how did Amazon only pay$300 in federal taxes last year? Far as I think the really quick answer is that Amazon has been in reinvesting all their profits. And so they didn't even have any money for, or at least any net income for the government to tax them on. That seems like a technicality and a ridiculous loophole. You're telling me that Amazon made less money, had less profit last year than I did like that. That's just completely absurd. It seems like a complete manipulation of our system. The way the system is set up as it is right now, it incentivizes businesses, especially corporations to reinvest all their money into R and D and their operations, because in the long run, it helps you grow in the short run. You don't have to pay taxes. Also, the added benefit is you don't have to give dividends to your shareholders. The system is currently structured, This is where the incentives lie. I think the, the other thing that people just don't know about and it's rarely said, but this is sort of a key sort of the way one of the key loopholes quote, unquote, that exists in the system right now that allows Amazon to do this. Is this idea of nos. Have you heard of that? No. So Noel's are net operating losses. So year over year, especially in the early years, you think of the two thousands for Amazon you over, they were losing a lot of money. So I think there were years where they're losing like$600 million. Now when you have a loss of that much, the corporate tax rate is only only taxes income, not, not losses. So when if$600 million, the loophole that exists is that you can take this money, the loss, and you can carry it back five years, or you can carry it forward 20 years. Actually, no, it's key. You can carry forward indefinitely. So Amazon for years, year over year stacking up losses, right? 300 million, one year, 600 million the next year, you know, billion, maybe the following year. And how are they paying for this? The raising money in the capital markets and the raising debt. So a lot of companies, especially tech companies they're taking on immense amount of debt. I think Netflix is well known for taking on a lot of debt because they feel that the the business that they're in is a sort of a winner takes all business. And so they want to get all the content upfront and get as many consumers as possible. Similarly, Amazon and trying to sort of edge out competitors and take as much market share as possible was taking on a lot of debt. And raising a lot of money on capital markets. And here's the crazy thing. People were totally with this investors were totally with this. They saw what they were doing is actually smart strategy and they were giving them the money willingly because of the NLL thing. Not because of the annual thing. I think the NFL thing is more specifically geared towards explaining why they pay so little in taxes. Right. So the NFL thing is, yeah, exactly. So we're going back to NFL. You have this business where they're losing money over your, I don't know the exact details, but you know, like six or seven years where they just talked up losses every year, let's say in your 10, theoretically, they have like$2 billion in NFL, stacked up year. Over year. They can now for every year they make income in the following. Let's say they make they're profitable in the following 10 years, they can take that 2 billion and zero it out with the income they're making and effectively pay no taxes in the future years as well. Even though they're making income. This is the way the current tax law is set up. When people, especially politicians criticize Amazon for not paying tax. They're well aware of the fact that this is the tax code. This has existed for many, many years. This is before Obama. This is before Trump is before everybody. And I think it's so rarely talked about, but that that's maybe the, the biggest piece in this entire, this entire sort of debate. I don't know. I understand how this benefits anybody. What was the justification for creating an NOL system? If you asked one, one economist, they'll tell you, or, you know, one sort of accounting, PhD or one economist, they'll tell you that. I think they'll tell you that. By creating a wealth, you are incentivizing businesses to invest more upfront in the hopes of one day becoming profitable. I think the entire, I think this speaks to a bigger question is like, why is the tax system we have in the United States? The way it is? You know why is it that the dividend tax rate is 15%? Whereas the corporate tax is 22%, but then high earners who make more than 400 K have to pay like 37%. Why are these numbers the way they are? And. I think it's just a crazy sort of mess and amalgamation of multiple types of politics. Year over year, that's added like another layer of politics to it. And so now you've got this huge sort of monster that people have tried to fix. I mean, Trump passed a tax law in 2017 that actually decreased the corporate tax rate to 22%. And at the time people are outraged. It's funny. Cause he, he, he passed that and then like a year later he was like criticizing Jeff Bezos for not paying any taxes, but it's like, dude, he was paying more taxes before you passed your new tax law. So you actually, you know, you're sort of one of the, main sort of actors in this, this whole espionage that's going on. I see. So this NOL thing, which is the reason that Amazon is not paying taxes, which it's one of the reasons, one of the reasons, okay. What are the other reasons. The other reason, I think I mentioned this earlier is Amazon takes a huge amount of the income they have and also the income they don't have, which they've raised through debt and equity markets. And they put it into R and D. So I have some numbers here in 2017, Amazon invested$22 billion in R and D in 2018. It was 28 billion in 2019 was$42 billion in R and D analysts that analyze Amazon often say. Well, if you got rid of half of this R and D expense, so if it was 42 and 2019, it was like 21 in 2019, that would just add to their bottom line, right. That would just increase their net income by$21 billion. Immediately they'd be crazy profitable. They would wipe out all their animals if there were any and they'd have to pay. Tons in in, in taxes, but why would Amazon do that? There's a reason they keep doubling, you know, in some cases it seems like they're tripling year over year, their R and D expense because. That's that's how Bezos and a lot of tech companies approach the internet age of building a business. They want to continue pouring money into what they think will make them more money in the future. Beiges has always said he thinks 10 years in advance. He tries to figure out what is going to be the big thing. You know, he thinks it will maybe be to drones or maybe it's a living longer or whatever the case let's put the money into it. Now let's take advantage of it. Now. I don't. Yeah, I think that there's this other, there's this other sort of misconception, which is people think these executives make, make decisions based on taxes. I don't think I don't. I was going to ask, I was going to ask that actually, are they doing this because of taxes or are they doing it because they're sincere? It's it's really well-known in the tax industry, especially at like the big four and things like that, that deals and the way operators operate their business are never dependent on taxes and sort of the tax forecasting tax has always come third, fourth, fifth. They're never the priority. The priority is always the business itself. What is going to increase shareholder value? I think it's. Completely wrong to say, Oh, basis only put$42 billion into R and D because he wanted to pay less taxes. I think that's a false shape. Well, then that's a good argument for raising taxes because it won't change his behavior. He himself has such raise the corporate tax rate. Wow. So why is this not happening? I have no idea. You'd have to ask the politicians. You'd have to ask a political question. That's not a, that's not a finance or a, okay. Yeah. Let me see if I just understand this correctly. So Amazon pays no money in federal taxes and the way that you and I pay federal taxes because they, number one, have these NOL sells where they say we've lost so much money for so long that, and we still haven't made enough money to offset that. Which is a little ludicrous, like you're saying that Amazon in the last five years, hasn't made 10 X more than they lost in the beginning, but find that's what the NFL NFL system says. Then they can still say that they're quote unquote losing money because any, any profit that they bring in, they just spend it immediately on us. R and D R and D. Exactly. Which they say is lost. Well, they're not saying anything. This is, this is how financial statements work, right? When you spend money, it's an expense. It falls under a certain line item on the financial statements on the income statement. In this case, if they're spending money on R and D and they're developing new things, et cetera, that's going to be an R and D expense. They're not, they're not like, you know, saying anything, quote unquote, they're just, they're just doing what everybody else does. So they're not really exploiting the loophole here. This is exactly how you would, or are they. So, yeah, I think, I think loopholes are really interesting word. I think people use that word to characterize like a hundred different things. Like, for example, even with personal taxation, you know, people will say taking advantage of capital losses as a loophole. Like what I mean, to every different person in the, in the ladder, something's going to seem like a loophole. I think there are certain things in my opinion, and it's, it seems a little obscure and vague the way Amazon handles things. I think one thing that's really interesting is the way they sort of tried to get tax benefits when they're opening the new headquarters. I don't know if you remember that. Vaguely. It seemed like they were playing a bunch of cities off of each other to get the lowest tax rate. Yeah. Yeah. He's is really smart. So here's what they could have done. So they were looking for, if we go circuit 2016 or 2015, I don't know. If we go circuit 2018. Amazon was looking for a new headquarters and they publicize it. They were like, cities come and pitch it to us. Tell us what you're going to give us. And we'll decide if we want to open our new headquarters. Their cities automatically were like, well, we're going to give you all sorts of stuff. I was in Irvine at the time. I remember the guy that runs the Irvine company, which is the largest real estate. Shareholder in the, in the city, he said, we'll build you the entire offices for you for every single employee. We'll build the entire campus for you for free. And we'll give you free utilities of free rent. That was their pitch. And the city mayor was like, yeah, we'll give you all these tax loopholes. So anyway, this is, this is pretty well-documented. I think this is really interesting because if basal said not done this publicly, and he'd done this sort of, you know, the way it's typically done, which is you go meet city, city, closed doors you get their proposals at secret, and then you pick one. All of the media attention would have gone on Bezos. They would have been like, look at this guy, he's he? He just decided he's going to build this new thing in DC. New offices in DC, DC is literally giving them an arm going into like to run their business. And then everybody would have criticize basis, but because the public, all the criticism, like go to the cities and they're like, these mayors are just corrupt corrupted. They're giving this big wealthy, Baron, whatever he wants. Do I, my opinion on that is that yes, that whole, that hold the way they played out a little weird, a little obscure, but. That's the free market, right? That's the way the system is set up. If the mayor and the elected representative one-off or these sort of benefits and tax incentives, it's in their authority to do so. What economic value, why are the, mayor's doing this? Assuming with our corrupt, does it actually add economic value to have a company there? Who's not paying you any tax? I think the metrics to determine if a corporation brings a value to the set city. I mean, we grew up in Cupertino. We see. The value that's been generated. Everybody's paid really well in Cupertino because Amazon Apple's there. And a lot of tech companies are there. Real estate values in Cupertino are sky high because Apple and police keep moving into the city. And there's no new housing is being built now. Based on those metrics. Yes. Amazon will bring immense value to whatever city they ended up going to house values would increase people on average would get paid more, but it'd be new people. Would it be the existing citizens? I don't, I'm not really sure. Maybe in certain roles if they qualify. I mean, if you ask different people, the answer is going to be different. If you asked an existing sort of resident, that's been there for generations, their families family's been there for generations. They're going to say no. Like you've made everything more expensive. You know, our real estate taxes have gone up year over year because they're, you know, correlated with how much your house is worth. They'll say living here is more expensive. I have to sell my house. I have to move out. That's a more political question. I'm sure there's answers to both sides. I can't really speak to it. Right. Just, I just spoke to it, but yeah, it's okay. You've had appropriately. So so is Amazon paying any taxes? Yes. Yes. In fact, they are and I think this, this will really shed a light on how little they're paying. So in between 2017 and 2019, Amazon paid$2.6 billion in corporate tax. Now that seems like a high amount. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait. So how is the$300 federal tax headline? Correct. If they could$2.6 billion in corporate tax, what is the difference? So I was doing some research before our podcast. And I noticed there's a lot of confusion about how much taxes Amazon's really paying. Like CNBC will say a certain number. You know, Fox news will say another number and like wall street journal say another number. And it's because P they keep mixing up what they're paying corporate tax and state tax local tax. That's one reason. The other reason is all these articles are have been published in different years. And so one article was state what they paid like in 2017, which is barely anything because they had a lot of nos. And then another article quote what's being said in 2019, politicians will pick and choose which source they want to choose. There'll be like, they'll say this year, they paid this much other projects like this year, they paid that much. That's why there's so much confusion on how much are they really paying? So Amazon to their credit actually put out a block statement, which we'll link in the show notes saying exactly how much they paid and. In their own words, they paid six, 2.6 billion in corporate tax and they paid about 800 million in state and local taxes. Actually, when I first read that, I was like, wow, that's actually a lot. But let me put that in perspective, that equates to a 1.2% corporate tax rate for Amazon, whereas wow. So Walmart over 10 year period paid$70 billion in federal income taxes, Amazon. And that same 10 year period paid 3 billion. And which one is the big more money? I'm actually not sure who's making more money, but Amazon is worth a lot more than one. Okay. They probably have a profitable, they probably have better margins. That's actually hard to say. I think Walmart is more profitable because that's why they're paying more taxes at least a gap per gap. And I think that's actually the more, that's another interesting point that, that we could talk about, which is how financial statements are represented in the first place. So you have gap financials and you have tax financials. You pay taxes based on tax financials, not gap financials. So when people look at gap financials, they'll see that Amazon is making a ton of money or they're worth a lot, but that's not what they're paying. What does gap? So gap is the accounting framework that all us publicly listed companies have to follow and abide by gap stands for generally accepted accounting principles. It's so there's, there's globally, there's two respected frameworks once gap, the other one's ifrifrst like other countries typically use Iris. I believe America's the only country that uses gap, but it's just a way it's like, it's like any other thing it's this big book that says, you know, if you have certain, if you come across a certain issue with your financials, this is how you should represent it. This is the accurate way to represent it. And that's why accountants exist. Right. They know gap, they know gap really well. And they know how to represent things. Part gap. So according to gap, Amazon is making all this money and all this profit. Yes. So let me give you an example. So unrealized income is a, is a huge difference between gap financials and tax financials. So Amazon could have invested in, let's say like a lot of property, right. For the warehouses. And this is actually a really good and very applicable case. In recent years, they've been buying a lot of warehouses. I think their eventual goal is to have one hour prime delivery. So in order to do that, if go to every city to buy up all this unused space, they build up their warehouses and they stock all their goods. The underlying real estate value is increasing all the time. Typically on average, it's increasing all the time. This is on gap financials, considered unrealized gain Right, but on tax financials, you cannot tax anything that's unrealized. You can only tax things that have been realized, meaning you've sold the land and you've made it exactly meaning you've sold it. You've made some money. And then that gets taxed. There's this huge, huge discrepancy arises because especially if there's like a billion dollars in In unrealized value that they've gained in the last year. None of that's taxed until they sell it. They're never going to sell it. Why would they sell it? And I think that actually is, is it more, she's more cause you know, there's been a lot of headlines recently about Elon Musk and him buying Bitcoin and the headlines read that, Oh, in the two months that Yolanda held Bitcoin, he's made more income than all the cars he's ever sold. All the cars that Tesla's ever sold. Yes. But it's unrealized income and Ilan is never going to sell that and sell that Bitcoin. So then the question is, why don't we go to gap? Yeah. Why don't we go to get finances? In other words, why don't we just tax Amazon on this unrealized gain? Let me ask you a question then, if you had some asset that you'd invested in, you had all your money invested in these in sort of like the equity market, which is to say stocks, and then these stocks have increased and they've done really well in the past year, but you've chosen not to sell because you're still bullish and you want to keep your money in the market. But the government came and said, well, for whatever Delta that you've made, we want to tax you on it. Would you agree to that? You don't have any cash to pay them? Right. I would sell it off without selling my stock without selling your stock. It doesn't make sense to tax unrealized gain. I think, I guess nowadays it's political to say that because we have seen Elizabeth Warren come out with policies where she suggests that we should tax unrealized gain for incredibly wealthy people. But if you'd gone 10 years ago and somebody suggested taxing unrealized gain everybody would have scoffed at you. They would have been like, there's no logical reasoning behind it. Well, there is logical reasoning, which is that Amazon is getting away with this because of the concept of unrealized gain, but it doesn't seem like it's a solution without side effects. So I wouldn't say that Amazon's getting away with not paying taxes because of unrealized. Again, I don't know if they have any unrealistic and I'm sure they have some because of the underlying real estate value for the warehouses. But I think there's a lot, a lot of larger issues that, that are sort of preventing Amazon from paying. Taxes. And maybe the biggest one, which we mentioned much earlier is that they reinvest all their profits into R and D and operations. And so they don't even have any money to pay taxes. They're losing money year over year. So Amazon is paying a 1% tax rate. Are they adding any value to our economy? Are they adding like that small value? So I, I think Amazon has brought incredible value to our economy. Some of the economy, our lives the world. I think it's one of the most revolutionary companies to ever exist in the United States or in the history of the history of the world. But we're paying them for it. Right? Amazon is bringing this, this amazing technology, but me and you are paying it out of our pocket. Does it actually increase how much everyone can afford, how much everyone's society can like our quality of life. Maybe the way to frame it is if Amazon did didn't exist, would we be better or worse off? Yes. Sure. I think we'd be worse off. I mean, for us, you, yourself, you know, you code all the time, you use AWS products, I'm sure you did in your old job. It's the underlying infrastructure of the entire internet. I feel like true. And, you know, no, we can speak on and on about whether Amazon's providing value through taxation, which I think is a. Very valid question. Whether Amazon, the company has provided value. That's not really a debate at all. I think everybody would agree with that, but then you can argue, but then you could argue that no company needs to pay any taxes because they're adding value to society through other means, which I think we agree is not fair. Ted the taxation in America is broken. I think if you ask both sides, people on both sides to agree with you for maybe different reasons, but yeah, the deficit continues to grow. Every dollar we're spending in the United States now is actually, or not every dollar from most of every dollar that we're spending in United States now is borrowed. It's not even from texts, from what we've taxed. So it's like, okay. Yeah, you can tax them. But it just goes into this black hole of. In this black hole where it does it, where does it go? Now? We knows there's no transparency. Here's the other thing, when we, when we think of, when you think of corporate taxation, right? We, we always focus in the headlines, always focused on corporate tax rate. Why don't we ever talk about the dividend tax rate and a corporate, a capital gains tax rate? Because this is also money that is in some way related to the underlying asset of the corporation, right? So when. A business. So here's how the financial breakdown you have the income, you have the expenses that you're left with the net income from the net income. You can do two things. You can either give it away as dividends. If you have income that's to say, if you have income and you're not a loss-making corporation, well publicly traded company and I get income, then I can either give some of that income back to the shareholders as dividends, or I can reinvest in the business. Or hold it as cash. No. So at this point you've already reinvested. If you've decided to, because this is the net income you've already been accounted for and expenses. So at this point with electrodes, you've either chosen to reinvest it or you have not chosen to reinvest it. And you have, you have a bunch of money leftover, right. And your income making, you can either give that money away as dividends to shareholders or. You can keep it as retained earnings for the next year. And that's just some money that flows back into your fault, your financials, when you give it away as dividends. I think the dividend tax rate right now is about 15%. So, so keep this in mind and it's really doing double taxation. They've taxed the net income with the corporate tax rate. They take out their piece. Then you have the income that's left over that piece then goes to the dividend. You give some to the dividend. When I get the dividend, I have to pay. Dividend tax rate. So they take another 15% great. I have some money in the future when I sell that company stock and I have capital gains, boom, then I'll have to pay tax again to the government. So the government is very sharp, or I should say the government is very wary of the many opportunities where they could take a piece of the pie and they do, they do it all the time. Now I think it's pretty crazy that Walmart paid$70 billion in a 10 year period. And and Amazon only paid 3 billion. I think that's a crazy number, but you also have to realize Walmart's been around for 40 years. So if we fast forward 20 years, maybe there comes a day where if Amazon still exists, I'm sure which I'm sure it will. They're also paying$70 billion over a 10 year period. They're more mature company. And th there's maybe another startup and Amazon equivalent, you know, nipping at Amazon skills at that time. Here's the real question, you know, for us, this is the question, right? Which is so there's two ways to frame the argument. One is Amazon is not paying enough taxes. The other way is Amazon is not paying their employees well enough. Why is a company that has 42 billion in R and D spend? Not allocate, maybe 5 billion on that. To better pay their employees. Yes. It's a great question. That's the better question. And that's honestly what, I don't know why Bernie Sanders and other politicians don't bring these numbers up 42 billion in R and D spend that's UN compared to 26 billion. The previous year. That's almost double the amount You didn't think to put a couple billion away for benefits and healthcare for your, your employees. That's the more cause see birdies the taxes. Cause that's what poles. Well, and that's what is going to, you know, people like that from a politician, like getting more taxes and they think getting more taxes means the government's going to give them more money or get them better infrastructure or something, which is not, we know that's not the case, so, but. I mean, he does to be fair. He has pushed Amazon to like increasing the minimum wage and things like that, which kudos. And Amazon will tell you, compared to other other companies, they're the best at paying their employees. Like at that level, like at that stage, like entry-level positions, they're better at paying compared to other businesses and things like that. But when you're spending$42 billion in R and D. It seems a little like sus I mean, I'd have to go look at how much you're paying in wages. Usually in the income statement, you'll have to break out for salaries and Regis salaries, being employees that are, you know, in salaries and we just being employees that are hourly. So I think that'd be another interesting thing to look into is, is to see that proportion and how that falls out. And then also to look at the number of waged employees versus number of salaried employees and try to figure out. You know, how much less are they really getting paid? Because, you know, Amazon pays really well for, for software engineers and project managers and things like that. But where else people now warehouse people? So what let's say that the government did want to take 30% from Amazon. They looked at the system, they said the system needs to be overhauled. We know that Amazon can afford to pay 30% taxes, just like normal people are paying 30% federal taxes, just like normal people are paying 30% taxes. Is this enforceable because as you described the unrealized gain thing, doesn't really work. And the, just looking at the profit versus losses doesn't work. So is this even enforceable? So I think at some point Amazon will be incentivized to show profit and they have insurance profit in recent years. Like they, they, I think in 2018 is the first year that they showed gap profit. And that's because shareholders, the shareholders, the way people invest is very cyclical some years. I don't know if you're familiar with the growth investing versus a value investing. No. So there's sort of two you know, investors typically fall into sort of tier two frameworks when it comes to investing and I'll do a quick sort summary of this, which is value investing is what Warren buffet may popular, which is you buy a company that's worth a dollar for 90 cents and you hold it forever. And then, you know, someday will be worth more and so on, so forth. And you found value, right? You find that 10 cent value you did the groundwork. Did the, like where you find that that value growth investing find a company that's losing money every year, but they're reinvesting the reason they're losing all their money is because they're reinvesting into operations and R and D and they're growing at a ridiculous rate. Think like 60, 70 in some cases, a hundred, 200%. And hold onto that and compound on that and you'll do really well, but in recent and really in the last year during COVID, we saw this weird trend in investing where more and more people were like, I want to see profits now. I don't want to see any more. Loss-making like, I want to see your income statement, show a profit. Uber especially has been like the victim of this sort of a new narrative. So I think. Taxation, won't be the way we sort of structure the tax tax code. Won't be the thing that makes Amazon pay more taxes. I think it'll be the sentiment of the investors in the stakeholders and what they expect out of their companies. If they expect their companies to make money, then that's what basis will do it because at the end of the day basis is just an agent for his stakeholders and he has to do what they expect him to do. Interesting. So, I guess the best way in your opinion, to have Amazon contributes more of this money, not to the investors, but to ordinary people is for them to pay more in income. So you think this can be enforced by increasing the minimum wage. Yes, I think we need to focus more on how much Amazon pays their employees. I think that's a more worthwhile way for people and, you know, people, politicians, and just generally everybody in this debate to spend their time. How do you enforce that with laws? Well, I mean, the obvious law is to just increase the minimum wage, but the issue is a minimum wage, I think sits at like$9 right now, or$8. And Amazon's already paying a$15 minimum wage internally. That's their part of their policy. So unless we increase the minimum wage, like$20, which I think. Would be an issue for smaller businesses that can't afford to pay their employees$20, which might actually be beneficial for Amazon because Amazon can actually afford to pay their employees$20, but it would wipe out all the other small businesses are competing against Amazon. And in a way you're creating an artificial barrier to entry for new businesses. So I think politicians are aware of this even if they may act like they are not that you don't want to create too many. Policies around and sort of barriers around building a business because at the end of the America is run by small businesses. That's that's, that's like the heart and blood of our economy. Well, yeah, this has been a very interesting discussion. I guess the summary, I guess the takeaway for me is that these are just really tough problems that don't have such clear cut solutions. But still, I can't be left with feeling like the status quo has to change. There needs to be something that is done here. For us, I think you're right. In a perfect world, Amazon employees get paid more and you know, they're not forced to pay them more. It's just out of their own willingness to take some of that R and D budget and put it away for their employees. Maybe give them healthcare. But other than that, I can't really think of. Any group policy that politicians are going to come up with and mutually agree on. That's going to, it's going to make Amazon do anything that's beneficial for anybody other than what they're doing already, which is great. R and D and putting out great products and providing services to us. Right. But everyone provides great services. Most people who have a job provide services to other people. That's why they get paid for it. Yeah. But nobody's giving same-day delivery. Dude, I could give you same same-day delivery. If you give me no taxes. If I, if I paid you, like Amazon's getting paid you to say, yeah, dude, I'll just hop in my car and drive over. Or you're 10 years too late. You could have done this. Could have built door dash. So that's it for our episode for today. Make sure to like comment, subscribe, actually. I don't think you do. You can do any of those things for podcasts except for subscribe, but make sure to subscribe to us on Apple podcasts or Spotify, rate us on Apple podcast. Tell your friends about the show. You can follow me on Twitter at F Z from Cupertino. You can follow me on Twitter at next the sun. I also run a small newsletter where I sort of talk about tech and other things recently released a. Letter on building a great podcast though. I'm not sure we have yet, but we're working on it. If you want to go to, that was a good letter though. Yeah. If you wanna check that out, put that in the show notes, but it's at next bite dot sub stack.com. What does the next free fix and all of your names? Okay. That's a great question. I was thinking of a good prefix and that's only one I came up with and there were a lot of so I wanted to do one where I was like it's me or something like that, but it seemed to Mario, like it's a, B or it's like a Whoa there. Whoa. There was a little too much. Yeah. I'm not about that life. Yeah. You're just, you're just Emsi which are new stuff. Well, I was gonna make it for Oz from Cupertino, but there weren't enough characters, so. Gotcha. All right. See you guys next week.