Why Jeff Bezos wants to cut your taxes
5/31/202638 min
The world's fourth richest wants your taxes cut to 0. Why did he say this last week – and should we believe him?
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Chapters
(00:00) Intro
(02:43) Why Bezos wants lower tax
(06:34) His real argument
(09:12) How they distract you
(12:51) They think you’re stupid
(14:04) Tax wealth not work
(16:59) “Everyone hates government”
(21:45) Blaming politicians
(23:50) The broader context
(26:04) How billionaires are making you poorer
(28:37) The 5 Whys
(32:44) What progress have we made?
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsGary Stevenson· Host0:00
All right. So welcome back to Gary's Economics. Today, we are going to explain why Jeff Bezos wants to cut your taxes. Interesting one this week. We're gonna go over to the US, our surprisingly tall little brother, uh, which is a country I've not looked at too much recently. For a bit of context, the Tax the Super Rich movement has been growing a lot in basically how much public attention it's been receiving in the US for a couple of reasons. Number one, they have a big vote on a, uh, tax on the super rich in California coming up in November. And number two, uh, Zohran Mamdani has become mayor of New York, and he's aggressively trying to tax the rich, including bringing in a tax on unoccupied second homes in New York City. And this has really brought a lot of spotlight to the idea of tax the rich in the US. There's gonna be a vote in November, and a lot of people, uh, including the American very rich, uh, are not happy about it. And Jeff Bezos, who is the world's fourth richest man with a wealth of approximately about $280 billion, uh, did an interview for CNBC this week where he kind of argued that we shouldn't tax the rich. It's been talked about a lot in the press, especially over in the US. It's a really good opportunity for us to look at what Jeff Bezos is saying, understand why he is saying it, and basically understand, like,