Trump accuses Amazon of harming retailers across US

Washington, Aug 17 (IANS) US President Donald Trump slammed Amazon.com, Inc., saying the e-commerce titan was harming physical retailers and triggering job losses nationwide, media reports said.

"Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the US are being hurt - many jobs being lost!" Trump tweeted on Wednesday.

Trump has had a long-running feud with Amazon and its founder and chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, accusing that company in June of not paying "Internet taxes", Efe news reported.

In that same June tweet, he said the Washington Post, a newspaper that has been especially critical of Trump's policies and which is owned by Bezos, was the "guardian of Amazon not paying Internet taxes".

Since there is no such a thing as an Internet tax, Trump was probably referring to sales tax, which Amazon began collecting nationwide earlier this year.

Amazon's new policy, however, is not mandatory in the case of third-party businesses who sell their products to consumers on the company's digital platform and can leverage the lack of sales tax on these transactions to gain a competitive advantage over physical retailers.

Several states are pressuring Amazon and e-Bay to compel third-party merchants who use their platforms to collect state sales tax or require them to provide a detailed record of their sales.

On Monday, Trump slammed pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. over "ripoff drug prices."

That tweet came after that company's chairman and CEO, Ken Frazier, resigned from Trump's manufacturing council over what he said was the president's failure to clearly condemn the white supremacists who organised a rally last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.