Jeff Bezos on Wednesday morning floated a Jeff Bezos tax proposal that would lower, and in some cases eliminate, taxes for workers below a certain income threshold. Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box, the Amazon founder said people who are just getting started should not be taxed while they are struggling.
“When people are starting out and they’re struggling, stop taxing them, we don’t need it,” Bezos said. He added that he wanted “to make sure that the people struggling today have the chance to do that too, to bring themselves up,” and said, “Maybe they [or] one of their kids will be the next Steve Jobs, I don’t know.”
Bezos put numbers to the idea. He said a teacher or nurse in New York earning a $75,000 salary should not be taxed, and said an Amazon employee making around $50,000 a year is someone he thinks it is “absurd” to tax. “But we can give them a better chance by eliminating their tax bill,” he said.
The comments landed at a moment when attitudes toward ultra-rich people have soured as wealth gaps widen and more places move to raise taxes on top earners. New or increased taxes on the wealthy are appearing in places including Maine, Washington, Massachusetts and New York City, making Bezos’s pitch a direct challenge to the idea that the biggest fiscal fix is to make the rich pay more.
He argued that it is not that simple. Bezos said, “I pay billions of dollars in taxes,” and added, “If people want me to pay more billions… don’t pretend that’s going to solve the problem.” He also said, “You could double the taxes that I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens.”
That is the friction in Bezos’s case: he is not rejecting higher taxes on himself so much as insisting they are the wrong tool for the problem he wants to solve. He has also criticized corporate subsidies, corporate and union influence over public policy, and bureaucracy, putting his tax comments in a broader argument that government should make room for work, not just collect from it.
For now, the proposal is a political marker as much as a policy blueprint. Bezos used one of the biggest stages in business television to argue that the first tax bill should be the one people do not have to pay while they are still trying to get on their feet.
