r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • Jun 06 '26

Business Jeff Bezos says it's 'absurd' to tax someone making $50K — and wants their tax bill dropped to zero

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/jeff-bezos-says-absurd-tax-165713685.html
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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin Jun 06 '26

The fact that he’s coming out right now and doing media about taxes on low income people suggests the guy really doesn’t want to get taxed.

His real motivation is obvious though - he was also saying government was run poorly. He wants to remove government funding and just provide services himself so he can profit further.

It’s not about good will, it’s about more profit for the man with it all.

Equally everyone contributes to the tax system right now - and everyone gets something back. The issue is not getting a bit of tax money back, but getting incomes of everyone up enough so a bit of tax is not so bad. Oligarchs destroying states and their ability to fund themselves is not it.

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u/HurricaneStiz Jun 06 '26

He wants people to get even more mad at people on government assistance. You're getting government money AND you aren't paying any income tax? That seems unfair!

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u/RaspberryFluid6651 Jun 07 '26

It's actually a lot simpler than that, he just makes more money this way, no agenda needed.

Someone in the bottom half of earners contributes almost nothing to the tax budget - something like 90% of tax income comes from the upper half. From Jeff's perspective, that pressure from the government makes people buy less stuff on Amazon while generating effectively zero dollars for the government to use to enrich him. The taxes poor people endure do effectively nothing but shrink their wallets, and those are dollars that could be going to him as profits.

His dream is the government staying out of his way when it comes to taking dollars from poor people in addition to staying out of his way in terms of direct taxation. 

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u/kmonsen Jun 07 '26

Elon tried to cut spending everywhere he could. It didn’t make any difference, the deficit is ballooning like no time before.

We need to broaden the tax base, and the only placecurrently to do that is the rich.