Gary Stevenson

government finances are quite stretched, but increasingly US finances are quite stretched as well.

The US has a large and a large deficit and a large and rapidly growing debt and borrowing costs in the US are rising like they are here.

It doesn't.

It's a strange argument, right?

It's a strange argument to say, OK, well, tax money is needed.

So instead of me paying more, how about you pay less?

And it would be easy.

And before I made this video, I watched a lot of there's been a lot of US media about this and a lot of people kind of like

on Jeff Bezos a little bit, but I think it would be easy to dismiss this as like, well, this is like a dumb argument, especially if you're viewing it from the UK perspective, because we had just a few years ago, we had a prime minister, Liz Truss, who basically came in like with this tax strategy of what we're going to do is we're going to cut tax on billionaires and we're going to use that to cut tax on working people.

And what happened is like basically immediately it caused like an enormous economic crisis.

This is not a fully fleshed out

economic argument, but I think it's a bit rash to, to immediately disregard it because I think to a degree it is an intelligent argument from a kind of like a rhetorical, like a persuasive perspective for like a very simple reason, right?

So Jeff Bezos, when he, when he made this argument, he used a lot of numbers and numbers

catch people's attention, especially when they are amounts of money.

And Jeff Bezos, he hits this number $75,000, a teacher in Queens and $75,000, which is a little bit above the American average, which means $75,000 will be quite close to the salary of a lot of Americans who watch this video.

And as soon as they hear that, they'll be like, Oh,

that's somebody similar to me similar financial situation to me and then he says we didn't show this in the clip but he says you know they're paying twelve thousand dollars a year taxes that's like one thousand dollars um a month in taxes and they could use that money to pay their bills or or to pay their rent or you know to take care of their family and

what he's doing there is he's using the persuasive power of money and he's saying well listen if you come with me you can get this one thousand dollars a month and wouldn't that be great wouldn't it be great if you if you could have one thousand dollars a month and he's contrasting that to

what what seems to many people to be a kind of abstract concept like and he's trying to make it seem like you have this like dichotomy like you have this choice you have two things you can choose from you can either choose more taxes for me jeff bezos and he says specifically in this interview that's not gonna that doesn't solve anything you know that's not gonna help you or

What we could have is less tax for you.