Gary Stevenson

Thank you.

Alright, welcome back to Gary's Economics.

Today we are going to explain why Jeff Bezos wants to cut your taxes.

Interesting one this week.

We're going to go over to the US, our surprisingly tall little brother, which is a country I've not looked at too much recently.

For a bit of context, the tax the super rich movement has been growing a lot in basically how much public attention it's been receiving in the US for a couple of reasons.

Number one, they have a big vote on a tax

tax on the super rich in California coming up in November.

And number two, Zoran Mamdani has become mayor of New York and he's aggressively trying to tax the rich, including bringing in a tax on unoccupied second homes in New York City.

And this has really brought a lot of spotlight to the idea of tax the rich in the US.

There's going to be a vote in November and a lot of people, including the American very rich, are not happy about it.

And Jeff Bezos, who is the world's fourth richest man with a wealth of approximately about 280 billion dollars, did an interview for CNBC this week where he kind of argued that we shouldn't tax the rich.

It's been talked about a lot in the press, especially over in the US.

It's a really good opportunity for us to look at what Jeff Bezos is saying, understand why he is saying it, and basically understand where we are at the moment in the kind of global fight against inequality for a fairer tax system, for fairer taxation of the super rich, what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are.

how it's being attacked and basically how we need to be smart and what we need to understand in order to get that fair attack system that we need okay so let's jump straight into the interview now the the headline moment was jeff bezos arguing that people on average salaries should pay less tax yeah i you know i started thinking about this and doing some research a nurse in queens who makes 75 000 a year

At the first glimpse, this might seem interesting.

Why do we have a billionaire arguing for ordinary people to pay lower taxes?

At the moment we have a tax system where billionaires pay very low taxes, almost nothing, and ordinary people pay, if you add up all of their taxes, close to 50%.

So it's a great tax system, a balance in favour of Jeff Bezos and other billionaires, but he's saying ordinary people should pay less tax.

Okay, interesting, perhaps surprising.