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Comment by larkeith | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I cannot fathom finding it preferable, or even acceptable, for Amazon to attempt to displace my local library; Much like bookstores, there's an essential soul to them any corporate invader like Amazon lacks utterly. I have fond memories of summers spent trawling the stacks, afternoons at a table with friends working on homework, DnD sessions in the private meeting rooms, and browsing old stock auctions for the eclectic. Libraries and bookstores are some of the few holdouts of the bibliophile, and remain the best place to get recommendations or spend a quiet evening immersed in a novel - even if Amazon could somehow fulfill each of the numerous services of a modern library, the idea of losing such a wonderful refuge to corporate uniformity is abhorrent.

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Expenditure of public money on an endeavor should not be driven by romantic notions like whether something has "essential soul." Tax money is a scarce resource. Money that's spent on libraries is tax money that's not available to offer better lunches to needy children. That's the calculus.

Our county library system gets $22 million a year in tax dollars to service 2.4 million visits. Could Amazon meet those needs more cheaply? If so, that is a win.

According to politifact[1], education spending accounts for just 3% of all government spending (mandatory and discretionary). Using libraries as the target for cuts so that we can feed the school-children, and citing logic, is ignoring a lot of other much more 'logical' choices we can make first. Military spending (16%), or Health spending, which is a whopping 28% because of our horse-by-committee system here in the US. We spend $10,348 per person [2], while Canada spends $6,604 per person [3], and the next highest countries reportedly spend $3,000 less per person than we do [4].

[1] - https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug... [2] - https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta... [3] - https://www.cihi.ca/en/health-spending [4] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-us-...

Education is a wonderful return on tax investment that a lot of these people claiming "we spend too much on it" don't take into account.

Just a quick example: How many of these libraries allow poor/low income/homeless to learn new skills or use their free internet to find jobs they wouldn't otherwise be able to find, in the end becoming tax paying contributing members of society?

They are an invaluable community resource that absolutely returns what goes into it.

> Education is a wonderful return on tax investment

Eh, I see both sides of the coin. Education is a great place to spend money. But American governments are really good at throwing money at things that look like education, but do very little in terms of measurable gains.

Case in point: my Cupertino public high school now has ten times the number of assistant principals as it did when I attended, but maybe 10% more students.

I definitely agree.

It's worth bearing in mind that as education is primarily a state responsibility, the vast majority of education spending is at state and local levels. Libraries also tend to be budgeted for mainly below the federal level and thus mostly don't show up in the federal budget. The Politifact article you have so wisely provided speaks solely and exclusively to the federal budget.

You're absolutely correct that education spending at the federal level is ridiculously low! There just might be an important qualifier to that.

That's a good point! Most of the funding does come from the lower levels of government, and is worth bearing in mind.

As a result, it might be possible that statements such as "Education accounts for 3% of all government spending" might benefit from the wonderful opportunity to become more congruent with salient facts.

This is wrong. Most education budget comes from your state or local (often in property) taxes, not from the federal gov't. According to US gov't spending, the fed spends $111B, but local and state about $1T in FY2018. (https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_2...). NYC has the largest enrollment in the country for instance and spends whopping $24K per pupil.

Instead of worrying about whether school lunches or libraries should be prioritized let's focus on getting Amazon to pay its fair share in taxes so we can have both.

In Alameda county we recently had a vote to raise taxes to fund libraries and it passed overwhelmingly - 76% voted yes. The people here think they're valuable.

Amazon operated under a loss for so long they have a ton of carryover tax credits

The fact they are not paying taxes right now is not a bad thing. We've benefited from them pushing commerce for the last decade

It's a bad thing. They're actively avoiding tax and hiding profits. It's not accidental and it's not all because they are reinvesting. They have decided that they shouldn't contribute to things that don't directly benefit them while using the tax payer built infrastructure and lobying to keep it that way. They're using this tax advantage to kill competition.

https://medium.com/bull-market/amazon-minimizes-profits-beca...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...

Getting "Amazon to pay its fair share in taxes" is a pipe dream. The United States is, by design, a race-to-the-bottom internal free market. Any given county has to balance tax rates with attracting/keeping businesses in the county. So the tax money coming in is what it is. Especially if you're one of the 99.9% of counties outside the Silicon Valley halo. The policy question is how to spend that tax money, and what modes of analysis you use to justify your spending. Romantic notions are not a valid mode of analysis justifying expenditures of tax money.

I think your discounting of a romantic notion, or the concept of "essential soul" overlooks the fact that this correlates highly with how the service is perceived, and thus used, as well as how it is run, which is something you can see discussed various other places in the comments. Replacing the library, whose purpose is the best interests of its users, with a business, whose purpose is the best interests of its shareholders, and expecting it to go well, seems like the real pipe dream to me.

This is exactly right. There are two ingredients to making money: providing value and externalizing costs. When the value provided by an entity is essentially that it doesn't externalize costs -- that it's a sink for societal costs -- it doesn't make sense to commercialize it. We fund libraries because we want them to do unprofitable things.

The romantic notion of a functioning free market where the largest corporations aren't subsidized by the tax payer and lobbying the government for tax breaks? The romantic notion that corporations can be used to run social services more effectively?

Hey, if Amazon's going to start providing story time every Friday morning for kids across the country, homelessness services, adult day care, job training, maker spaces, meeting rooms for community groups, and free AC in a time of hotter summers across much of the US, I'd love to see it! Especially if I don't have to pay a cent more than I already do!

And my library system already works with the schools to provide free lunches to any child, anyone under 18, all summer long. So. Have your cheese stick and carrots and eat them too, then read a book :)

As someone that obviously is a proponent of free markets, you should also be aware of the fact that granting a monopoly to a 3rd party to offer government services isn't exactly a recipe for lower costs.

Put another way: when's the last time you saw Amazon, or a company like Amazon, do something out of the "goodness of their heart" ?

> Could Amazon meet those needs more cheaply? If so, that is a win.

I question your premise. There are other KPI's in this world besides numerical financial efficiency.

Wrong. Spending on libraries is not what is causing us to not be able to afford lunch for needy children.

"Could Amazon meet those needs more cheaply? If so, that is a win."

Only if those who currently use the library are able to use Amazon with the same regularity. Is Amazon providing children's summer reading programs? Is Amazon providing an air conditioned space during the summer heat waves and a heated space during winter cold snaps? Is Amazon actually helping you do research?

Librarians at public libraries offer assistance to poor people who don't know how to use a computer and apply for jobs. They don't just wrangle books.

Amazon couldn't and shouldn't do this type of work.

To bad Amazon bookstores are such a disappointment.

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