Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ripped into many of the policies on the left in a recent interview that was clipped widely on social media.
Bezos took aim at schemes to raise taxes on the wealthy and advocated lower taxes on Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder. He made the comments from the factory floor of his Blue Origin aerospace company during an interview on “Squawk Box” with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin released Wednesday.
‘We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology!’
When pressed on the issue of taxes, Bezos said half of Americans shouldn’t pay federal income taxes at all. He cited the example of a theoretical nurse in Queens who earns $75,000 a year and pays about $12,000 in federal income taxes.
“People talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? At all,” he said.
“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes? That’s $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes,” Bezos added.
“It’s only 3%. We can find 3%. It’s a small amount of money for the government,” he continued. “And the more I thought about it, to me it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. You know, we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology! It really makes no sense!”
Bezos said it was fine to debate what the wealthy should pay in taxes but went on to accuse politicians of distracting voters by vilifying the wealthy. He added that politicians were ignoring the root problems causing inflation and other economic problems.
“If you’re really being honest about it, we don’t have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world,” Bezos said. “The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all tax revenue, the bottom half pay only 3%, and I think it should be zero.”
“We actually have a spending problem,” he added and cited the $44,000 that is spent on every child in the New York City school system with worse outcomes than other cities.
“If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system,” Bezos joked, “packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee, and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it!”
Sorkin didn’t laugh.
“That’s a skills issue!” Bezos added. “It’s just competence.”
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Bezos also argued that the government could double the taxes he pays and it wouldn’t help the theoretical nurse in Queens because government spending is so out of control.
“You can’t connect those two things, not logically,” he said.
The entire segment on taxes with Bezos can be viewed on CNBC’s YouTube channel.
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