Jeff Bezos says bottom half of U.S. earners should pay no federal income tax
johnshades
11 points
11 comments
May 21, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (6 comments)
MBCook
Why do I have a feeling that includes him through some kind of tax doge shenanigans.
someperson
Effectively formalizing the system we have now. As the article notes bottom 50% of come earners pay ~3% of tax at 54k income, and it's less than Sen Bookers <75k zero income tax proposal.
ferguess_k
I actually agree with him, but maybe they will lower the salary further because of that, to make US workers more "competitive".
jfengel
That's not really helping much. Yes, $0 is better than $1, but it's not really saving a ton of money. Eliminating the need to file would be nice. That would save a lot of time. And note that even the poorest filers still pay considerable payroll taxes, over 15%. That's actually a tax that Bezos barely pays -- it's capped at $184,000, and Bezos doesn't pay that much because his "salary" is $80,000. All of his vast earnings from capital gains pay $0 in payroll taxes. This sounds to me like an effort to distract attention from the fact that we have a vast deficit, and we cannot close it by getting money from the bottom 50%. You're only going to reduce it meaningfully by cutting big programs (not the penny-ante ones that DOGE cut for ideological reasons, not fiscal ones) and taxing people and corporations that actually have money (people like Bezos).
smallerize
The article has some good numbers, but it doesn't mention that about 30% of workers already pay zero federal income tax. So it's really the 30-50 percentiles paying that 3% of tax. That means the change would be larger for them than you might expect, but it would change nothing for the lower earners.
keernan
Once again, a billionaire focuses on income: something only workers are forced to have. Billionaires only have income if they choose to have income. Billionaires obviously do not need to earn wages in order to survive. If they do, they choose to do so. And they are not required to invest their money. They do that voluntarily for the obvious reason that it makes them more money after taxes. They 100% control whether they will have any income at all. None of the rest of us get to make that choice. Yet, isn't it amazing how income is the test for the amount of taxes we pay. The wealthy control the rules and they have chosen income - earned by workers - as the measure of how much everyone shares in the cost of operating society.