Jeff Bezos Says Taxing Him More Won't Help Anyone. Zohran Mamdani Will Take That Bet.
Mamdani's just too good at this stuff.
Bejillionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, the Washington Post, the rocket company Blue Origin, and a secret stash of bright red “Trump’s My Daddy” ball gags, sat down for an interview Wednesday with rich-people-licking cable network CNBC in which he told host Andrew Ross Sorkin that he’s very concerned about the wealth gap in these United States, saying that “It’s kind of a tale of two economies. […] You have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling.”
Well good for him for noticing, although we aren’t entirely sure he’s given a lot of thought to how it got that way. (Short answer: Since Reagan, we’ve let the investor class write the fucking tax code, with the help of pet members of Congress — mostly Republicans, but too many Democrats, too.)
He noted that the lower half of US earners pay about three percent of US taxes, and said by golly, that should be zero:
Good on him for noticing that things are a little out of balance! Bezos offered a good example of what’s screwy in this economy: “A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays more than $12,000 a year in taxes,” he said. “Does that really make sense?”
Well no, Mr. Ultrabillionaire (CNBC’s description), it really does not!
Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.
Bezos even endorsed the idea of eliminating income taxes for people in the bottom half of the US income scale, which CNBC said “some Democrats have proposed to court working-class voters,” linking to a Washington Post story about the proposal (gift link) from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland). Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) has also proposed something similar, as has Katie Porter running for governor in California.
But don’t go thinking that Jeff Bezos has actually moved himself a few slots down the list of mindless jerks who’ll be up against the wall when the revolution comes. Because while Bezos said he’d be open to some tax policy compassion toward lesser Americans, he added that he’s firmly against paying for that by raising taxes on him or his billionaire buddies. It just “doesn’t solve anything,” to treat the ultra-rich as bad guys, by asking them to pay taxes on the money they make. Instead, we need to cut spending on wasteful stuff that he didn’t quite specify.
In fact, he got quite indignant at the very idea that he isn’t paying his fair share:
“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,” he said.
Making him pay more is no solution on its own, Bezos insisted: “You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”
We guess Jeff Bezos might have a point there, considering that, like a lot of America’s billionaires, Jeff Bezos pays a far lower real tax rate than most of us. And despite what he said, Bezos actually did not pay a penny in income tax in at least two tax years, 2007 and 2012, as ProPublica revealed in its rage-inducing 2021 series of articles on how rich fuckwads avoid paying income tax. A big part of it is that their “salary” is often only a token amount, like Bezos’s $80,000 in wages. All his other billions in wealth come from other sources, of course, which get taxed differently than salary on a Form 1040. From 2014 to 2018, Bezos reported $4.22 billion in taxable income, on which he paid $973 million in federal income tax. His effective tax rate worked out to about 4.26 percent. But wait! during that time, his wealth actually increased by $99 billion, so that not-quite-a-billion in income tax reflected a true tax rate of just .98 percent. A one-percenter paying less than one percent!
Both figures are a hell of a lot lower than the typical American household rate of 14 percent, because ordinary slobs don’t have access to the neat investing and accounting tricks that work so well for Bezos. That infuriating ProPublica piece is always worth a re-read! So no, of course we shouldn’t double Jeff Bezos’s taxes. Whatever the word is for “increase eightyfold” sounds almost sufficient.
Following Bezos’s cri de privilège to CNBC, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was quick to offer a counterpoint (Bluesky image link) on the Twitterbox:
We aren’t quite sure what to make of CNBC’s number-crunching in its follow-up report on what it called the “feud between Bezos and Mamdani.” The cable network noted that, according to the conservative-funded Tax Foundation, the cutoff for the bottom half of US taxpayer income is around $54,000 in 2023. (You entered the top One Percent if you had at least $676,000 the same year.)
OK. But is it supposed to be some kind of gotcha against Mamdani that New York teachers’ starting salaries, as of 2025, are “$68,902 for those with a bachelor’s degree and no prior teaching experience, and $77,455 for those with a master’s degree,” with a raise scheduled later this year? OK, so teachers aren’t in the bottom 50 percent, and nobody had said that they were. That wasn’t the question! It’s not even wrong!
Bezos also didn’t like that Zohran Mamdani made that video where he stood in front of the palatial $238 million penthouse owned by hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin and promised to tax the rich, like he promised.
“It isn’t right” for the mayor to “stand in front of Ken Griffin’s house and act like he is some kind of villain,” Bezos said. “Ken Griffin isn’t a villain, he hasn’t hurt anybody, he’s not hurting New York, in fact quite the opposite.”
Right, right, job creators, trickling down on the rest of us, we know this song, Jeff. He’s no Warren Buffett, who for years has called out the absurdity of his secretary paying more in taxes than he does, so we should make sure that the rich pay at least as much in taxes as the middle class. In Bezos’s version of the “Buffett rule,” tax disparities would vanish by eliminating taxes on the working class, but we somehow would just make up for it through austerity, which would magically not hurt people lower on the income ladder.
No, he has not thought this through.
Still, Bezos said he thinks Mamdani’s proposed pied-à-terre tax on high-value second homes “is a fine thing for New York to do,” which mostly tells us Jeff Bezos would not be personally affected by it, huh?
Also too, Mamdani on Monday took a shot at another cherished rightwing shibboleth, Ronald Reagan’s safety-net-destroying quip that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.’” It became such a destructive truism that even some Democrats who should have known better embraced it (we are looking at you, Bill “the era of big government is over” Clinton).
While announcing the location of a new city-run grocery store in a “food desert,” Mamdani said it’s well past time to give that cliché the heave-ho:
“It’s a good quote, but I disagree,” he said. “I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can't feed my family.’”
Mamdani continued, reminding us again why the Right absolutely hates him,
“We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table. When government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind, time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today.
“It's not just that government can help, it's that government must help, and our government will help.”
Fox News helpfully countered that with a tweet from some rightwing asshat on Twitter who said Mamdani had gone “FULL DERANGED MARXIST,” and predicted that the city-run stores would be “a FREAKING DISASTER! He REALLY thinks this will work,” which proved that they can’t possibly help anyone, or if they do, it might mean a billionaire will have to pay a little more in taxes, which is the worst thing possible, OPEN THREAD.
[CNBC / Huffpost / ProPublica / CNBC / Common Dreams]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button, which will not make rude fart noises at the Reagan Library, but wouldn’t it be great if it did?
Taxing *just* him? No. Taxing ALL the billionaires? Fuck yeah. Pay up, assholes.
| "... Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes." |
CITATION NEEDED.
When someone tells you they got rich through hard work, ask them: "Whose"?