Re: Tax Revenue
Stop hankering after the past for the sake of the past. The high streets twenty years ago were not the same as they were one hundred years previously; Does this make one better than the other. Things change, get over it.
This doesn't mean that things shouldn't be fair, but needlessly attempting to punish online retailers with a higher VAT rate helps nobody. In particular it would not help all the smaller businesses who operate online in some manner, would you suggest forcing all of these offline instead?
If what Amazon is doing is legal, as in taking the profit and reinvesting it, that is fine and this is a perfectly fair and ethical way to operate. If they are instead using tax loopholes to move the money out of the country to where it can be taxed at a cheaper rate, aka a "tax haven" (one of BoJo's "great plans" to encourage the remnants of the UK economy once he's finished destroying it), then that is very different. The UK operates a couple of these tax havens already anyway so why not extend them to the mainland? If Amazon is paying such low wages that staff have to supplement their income and food using government subsidies then that is very bad and indicates a thoroughly broken social and economic model. Raising the minimum income will not fix this, as the increased wages will generally just loop back in the system increasing costs for the recipient and in the end nobody really benefits. None of these problems can be tacked in isolation.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
