Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts took her war for higher corporate taxes to Twitter Friday in a duel with giant retailer Amazon, and wound up complaining about âsnotty tweetsâ from Big Tech.
Warren began the battle by uploading a video of an exchange from a  Thursday hearing by the Senate Finance Committee in which Kimberly Clausing, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the Department of the Treasury discussed the retailerâs taxes.
Clausing said that the âCorporate tax rate was 21 percent at the regular rate,â according to a transcript of the hearing posted on Warrenâs website.
Warren then asked about Amazonâs profits and taxes over the past three years.
âSo there was a recent high techstudy that looked at this, and Amazon earned over $40 billion dollars over that three year period, and paid about 4.5 % tax rate,â Clausing said.
Clausing later used the word âloopholesâ to describe how Amazon was able to lower its taxes.
In her tweet accompanying the video, Warren wrote, âGiant corporations like Amazon report huge profits to their shareholders â but they exploit loopholes and tax havens to pay close to nothing in taxes.â
âThatâs just not right â and itâs why Iâll be introducing a bill to make the most profitable companies pay a fair share,â she added.
Amazon fired back in a three-tweet message.
âYou make the tax laws@SenWarren; we just follow them. If you donât like the laws youâve created, by all means, change them. Here are the facts: Amazon has paid billions of dollars in corporate taxes over the past few years alone. In 2020, we had another $1.7B in federal tax expense and thatâs on top of the $18 billion we generated in sales taxes for states and localities in the U.S. Congress designed tax laws to encourage investment in the economy. So what have we done about that? $350B in investments since 2010 & 400K new US jobs last year alone. And while youâre working on changing the tax code, can we please raise the federal minimum wage to $15?â Amazon tweeted.
Warren could not let that pass unanswered.
âI didnât write the loopholes you exploit, @amazon â your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did. But you bet Iâll fight to make you pay your fair share. And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so youâre not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets,â she wrote.
Some noted that while Amazon has some issues, Warrenâs remark also crossed a line.
President Joe Biden has indicated that a corporate tax increase is part of his plan to pay for future spending that could include a $3 trillion infrastructure package,
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
