Thank you for explaining profits to me. I'm glad you did so long after I went to business school, because your description of this situation is mostly wrong.
> WaPo is misusing the term. Profits are revenues after expenses and the numbers in that graph are not taking certain expenses into account.
"Profit" is not a defined term. It's shorthand for something else, usually gross profit, operating profit, or net income.
For 2018, AMZN had gross profit of $93B, operating profit of $12B, and net income of $11.6B. The WaPo numbers in the graph use one of the latter two figures, so the graph is absolutely correct. It is NOT revenue in the graph, and their profits have absolutely gone up.
Do you honestly think an edited and widely read paper like WaPo is going to make an incredibly basic accounting mistake in their business section?
> In your example the gains were in fact taxed.
No, they weren't. Most of Amazon's shares are not held by employees. Taxing employees is not solving the core issue that everyone is upset about, which is that Amazon (taken either as an entity or as its owners, most of whom are not employees) is paying close to 0% taxes. Period. That's it.
No one is arguing whether the activity surrounding Amazon generates tax revenue. That's outside the scope of the argument.