…the money companies like not just Netflix, but Amazon as well who’s also seeing record gains, would be returned back to their workers and consumers who have made the success possible.

Econ 101 teaches that competition drives price to cost. When big companies avoid taxes, they are doing something that We, the People, in Congress assembled, decided we would rather have them do than pay taxes. We are free to alter the allocation of corporate revenues through legislation, but we must understand that the default allocation of tax avoidance money is not to some anonymous thing called “the company” or even its shareholders; it’s to customers through competitive practices (lower prices, better products and services) that enhance or protect market share.

All tax burdens are imposed on the economy as a whole; their incidence is negotiated between the payers and those who deal with them, through actual haggling but, more importantly, through the negotiation we call “politics. So, for example, lowering the payroll tax would likely result in lower prices, through one-on-one negotiation between buyers and sellers, but it can result in a higher minimum wage through negotiation between workers and employers in the halls of Congress. When our workforce was less gig-ish, Congress merely gave workers the tools to unionize, and the unions did (the rest of) the negotiating. Now, organizing unions is difficult, so minimum wage laws need to address the problem directly.

Pretending that the companies, and not their customers, are the “bad guys” in this negotiation is a good way to get the customers to vote themselves higher prices. It’s dishonest (when it isn’t just ignorant), but this is a country that elected Donald Trump, so it’s not clear that honesty or facts really are all they’re cracked up to be.