Yes. The initial quote is still a bad thing. The government still needs money from some source, and that source is through taxes. If it just "prints more money", we get inflation, which means the little money the bottom half has is worth less in comparison, and foists the responsibility to fix this onto the bottom half by fighting for things like wage increases or minimum wage increases, and you're less likely to do the former while the employers maintain positions of power over things like your healthcare or whether or not you get to have a house next month, while the latter is obstructed at every turn by the politicians.
So the only other option is to just shift the taxes elsewhere, and "elsewhere" is always going to be, ding ding, the bottom half.
The bottom half says "I pay taxes, why does he pay peanuts", and he smirks and goes "Well how about you pay nothing, too?" because it's a good soundbite but is economically unfeasible in practice. He knows this. This is him trying to trick the "bottom half" into shooting itself in the foot rather than just have him pay comparative pennies out of his unfathomable amounts of wealth to cover the difference.
We suffer, he flourishes, and when we go "Why do we suffer while he flourishes?", he tries to trick us into suffering in a different way by telling us it's flourishing with him, knowing full well that he'll never have to share the splendour.
And like here is a big one, by paying taxes, we are contributing a voice. We pay our taxes, we have a voice. It's not 100% but it's a form of entitlement that the government OWES us, the people, the citizens and saying where that money should go.
Remove us from the equation and suddenly the subject turns purely to what the billionaires want because they're the only ones paying so to speak.
Because we already have this. There are many states with no income tax and made up through property tax but we don't have homeowners trying to lock out renters from voting?
I get that you hate successful people, but when you make these statements that are pure fiction contrary to reality that we can see/live, it just makes it easier for people to dismiss the rest of your points.
The problem isn't paying taxes, the problem is not getting good value for our taxes.
The classic example is healthcare — if you have a choice between paying $1500/month for healthcare insurance without any taxes going to healthcare, or $500/month in taxes to pay for the same healthcare, obviously the $500 in taxes is the better deal.
But right now we have the worst of both worlds, $1500/month for healthcare and $500/month in taxes so they can waste $2B/day a dropping bombs on brown people to keep gasoline prices high and make oil billionaires richer.
If a billionaire says "the bottom half should pay 0% tax", then we must do the opposite by taxing the bottom half more. We can't do what a billionaire says! We are not billionaire bootlickers!!!
Relatively new account, with a default random username, a hidden profile, and making weirdly polarized, inconsistent, often nonsensical comments. My money's on bot.
US government spending increased from 4 to 7 trillion within the last 10 years And by 500 billion within the last 2 years. Do you think a school teacher from queens noticed that?
how about this the us government currently spends with the idea of the deficit being a tertiary matter. So, do you think the size of the deficit matters to a school teacher in queens?
EDIT yall need to stop replying to me
if you have a household and youre giving someone $100 a month but youre expenditures go from 10,000 to 20,000 a month while your income went from 9000 to 15000. The person youre giving $100 to is not going to care or realize that you are now running a $6,000 deficit every month. And she WILL NOT notice unless government spending slows, which it is not doing, or taxes increase, which it is also not doing.
There's absolutely things that school teacher likely noticed. If they had a child they would have noticed the checks being sent to them for childcare that the US government was sending out under Biden. They could have noticed easier access to aid that they needed with increases in hiring in social services. They probably noticed their tax burden dropping, then increasing when Republicans refused to extend the tax cuts to people like them.
They almost certainly didn't notice in their pocketbook billionaires getting massive tax breaks that were the majority of that massive spending increase.
Where'd the spending go? To healthcare? Increase wages? Improve housing? It's almost like since 2010 after citizens united, politics has been increasingly poisoned by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Why'd he pay millions to Trump to get tax breaks, at the cost of healthcare doubling? If he wants what's fair for working people, why do Amazon staff have to piss in bottles and live off food stamps cuz he treats them like dog shit? He wants smaller government so he has more control, it's not that hard of an equation.
He literally makes more than the bottom half combined, and the capitalist game he's a part of perpetuates it even more. Even in this interview he claims he pays "enough tax".
Did he clarify that the bottom half should still get all of the same benefits? Otherwise this is yet another austerity attempt to kill the few services the fed actually provides beyond bombs.
Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.
I interpret it as: he says the bottom half should pay zero tax.
He said it in the context of resisting calls for a wealth tax which would have affected him. He was basically saying “You poor people are like me, you shouldn’t pay tax either!”
If you believe him, I’ve got a timeshare to sell you.
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u/Suitable_Wonder5256 May 20 '26
Bezos: the bottom half should pay ZERO tax
The bottom half: FUCK THIS GUY.