Bezos says taxing him more won’t help teachers. Mamdani disagrees.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/05/21/bezos-says-taxing-him-more-wont-help-teachers-mamdani-disagrees/90192459007/
Bezos says taxing him more won’t help teachers. Mamdani disagrees.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2026/05/21/bezos-says-taxing-him-more-wont-help-teachers-mamdani-disagrees/90192459007/
31 Comments
“Bezos said villainising billionaires is the wrong approach to solving fiscal problems”
Let me stop you right there… I don’t give a fuck. You’re still a villain in my eyes. No matter how much horse shit you spew.
You know Mamdani and his team loved that Bezos quote. Gifted some fresh material to work with!
Oh well. Tax him anyway and let’s find out!
Mom who wants to eat all the ice cream tells her child its spicy
I don’t care if it doesn’t help anyone, if its just thrown in a giant pit and burned or something, I don’t want these tech bros buying foreign governments, buying up all the media, bribing every politician in the country anymore.
Billionaires should fund universal basic income ,and pay fair taxes. And stay the fuck away from politics
1) Schools have budgets, and taxes fund those budgets. Him paying his fucking taxes will help teachers.
2) He said “if we ran Amazon like NYC runs schools, it’d take six weeks to deliver a package.” No one asked, you botoxed goddamned asshole. If you’d been elected to run anything, people would care. No one elected him to run shit, so stuff it. Second, people don’t put their kids in school to get the fastest, lowest effort cheap garbage product they can get. They’re looking for quality – something you don’t fucking overnight from Amazon.
The oligarchs need to pay their fucking taxes.
I like how in the same conversation he said the bottom half only pay 3% of taxes (false) but also raising taxes on the rich won’t help.
If they pay 97% of the taxes it sure sounds like raising their taxes would help!
Bezos is either stupid, a liar, or both.
How would Bezos know? It’s known he paid $0 in federal tax from 2007 to 2011.
We should try taxing him and all find out together if it helps.
Bezos has lost his way. He forgets what made him unimaginably rich. He is no longer convenient when he bends and co-opts media and politics.
Well Bezos is not going use his wealth to help improve the economy for the lower classes. Amazon is at the forefront in terms of replacing workers through ai and overseas.
Tax them all
If you spent $100,000 per day, it would take 27 years to hit $1 billion total.
Bezos has multiple billions of dollars.
I mean, Bezos has a point that, under this administration, if he paid the same tax rate as teachers do that money definitely would not go to teachers or help them.
He should, though, if he wants to prove his point, take the amount of money that he would have to pay in taxes if he paid the same rate teachers do and give that money directly to teachers and see if that helps them or not.
“Bezos said villainising billionaires is the wrong approach to solving fiscal problems “
I say we give it a shot
Changing the Amount we tax the rich won’t change anything.
Changing HOW we tax the rich will.
A man paying so little in tax telling others he isn’t the problem is wild. How does anyone believe the horses ass when it’s says no manure comes out this end…
Billionaires are only villainized because they don’t pay their fair share.
I mean hell, we only built the national highway system, electrified the poorest parts of the nation after the Depression and set up a nationwide communications network, greatly expanded public education, *went to the fucking Moon*, and more the last time we actually taxed the wealthy and corporations at a reasonable amount. And other nations are *still* funding modern infrastructure and social programs with similar taxation.
But sure, Jeff. It wouldn’t possibly work again here, and you’re just telling us out of the goodness of your heart rather than obvious self-interest.
The faux-populism of saying ‘the bottom half should pay 0% in taxes’ is an incredibly slick distraction technique. Notice how Bezos frames the entire debate around *income* taxes? He takes a token W-2 salary, meaning his actual income tax bill is negligible compared to his actual net worth. He doesn’t want to talk about capital gains taxes, a wealth tax, closing corporate loopholes, or stopping the ‘buy, borrow, die’ strategy that allows the ultra-wealthy to avoid paying their fair share entirely. He’s deliberately pitting the working class against the middle class to keep the focus entirely off his own asset portfolio.
I teach in a very large school district – a little over 70,000 students. Our annual budget is about $1 billion. So Bezos alone could personally fund our entire district for 250 years. He’s such a selfish, dumbass prick.
Edit: I looked up more. The annual K-12 budget for the state of South Carolina is about $10 billion. He could fully fund education for the entire state for 25 years and still have money left over.
i’m no economist, but i’m not gonna trust the guy hoarding all the money about whether guys should hoard money.
Let’s try it for a bit so we can rule that out!
So having more money doesn’t fix anything? Good Jeff then you won’t mind paying more in taxes.
Let’s tax him and his billionaire buddies to see, because trusting the word of billionaire who has a habit of lying out of self-interest isn’t advisable.
Jesus H Christ on a crutch how much money does that MF’ing midas need? Gross. Just Gross.
Why don’t they try it and see then just to make sure
Well-it’s pretty obvious that taxing him LESS sure doesn’t help.
Bezo is a selfish ignorant a$$
Taxing billionaires would help us all.
Why should anybody care what the fuck Bezos says
I’m really pro honest, taxpaying billionaire.
If Paul McCartney and Lorne Michaels are billionaires, good for them.
I’d be a lot more sympathetic to Bezos if he hadn’t kissed Trump’s ring. One reason to like having billionaires around is that they can help stand up to tyranny.
Even Rupert Murdoch has the Wall Street Journal writing some tough articles about Trump.
What is Bezos doing to protect me from Trump?
Another problem is that hostility to helping to do more to pay for nice things.
If Bezos wants to say the tax should be more practical or broader: Sure. I think all of us who are comfortable should be chipping in. And, if the structure of a tax on billionaires simply ignores how rich people’s finances work, fix that.
But the idea that rich people shouldn’t pay their fair share is silly. Rich people are rich partly because other people buy their products and services, use the companies they invest in and refrain from stealing the rich people’s stuff. If rich people fail to help the rest of society, the basis for their wealth will mostly vanish.