Gary Stevenson

They use this confusion between a billionaire and a millionaire such that when somebody like me or somebody like Gabriel Zucman or somebody like Zoran Mamdani or Zak Bielanski says increase tax on the very rich, they want you to think we're trying to tax you.

And it's this classic bait and switch that when I say tax the super rich more, they say, watch out for Gary.

He's trying to tax you more.

And that is why I've been really aggressively focusing on this like tax wealth, not work message.

Now, tax wealth, not work is, you know, although it's extremely concisely summarized, it is a coherent economic message because we take some money from this group and we give that money to this group.

And it's like balanced from a government perspective.

What Jeff Bezos is suggesting, which is tax me less and tax you less.

It raises the obvious question of where does that money come from?

I mean, what Jeff Bezos actually said was, should we tax you more?

And he's like, don't talk about that.

Let's tax the viewer less.

And he's doing this thing which I often do in my interviews, which is when I'm being interviewed by someone who is maybe a bit of a dickhead, which happens sometimes, rather than debate the interviewer, who is often debating me in bad faith, jump over the interviewer, go to the audience and say, listen, I'm the one who is on your side, basically.

And Jeff Bezos is doing this.

But it has the obvious weakness of where does the money come from?

And the interviewer picks it up and says, OK, you want to tax ordinary people less.

How about we fund that by taxing you more?

So this is Jeff Bezos's next argument, which is, it's kind of, the shallowness of his first argument, which is like, hey, let's just not tax anyone, is,

exposed pretty quickly.

That was I don't think you'll find any economists that say like this is like really feasible.

Just don't tax anyone.