Gary Stevenson

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.

One thousand dollars every single month in your pocket.

And obviously, as I've said, like you don't need to dig far into it before you realize that this is you know, this is not just not taxing anyone is is not a

really at all a feasible economic strategy but you know we live in a world where people for better or worse are a little bit obsessed with money we live in in a society which is obsessed with money we live in an economy where a lot of people are struggling for money and if this guy turns around and says look these guys are trying to tax me but we have an alternative which is to give every single one of you one thousand dollars a month

it's gonna be like potentially quite persuasive right and when I saw it like it shouldn't be funny because it's like a really serious issue and you know my whole channel is about this but it is quite what what made me laugh about this is it immediately reminded me of like this is how you distract

like a child or a baby who is doing something that you don't like.

You say to them, hey, look, do you want to use the iPad?

Do you want to get some ice cream?

You just switch the conversation immediately away from something you don't want the child to do.

Don't text me.

And you say, oh, but if you do what I want, I'll give you $1,000.

dollars a month, you know, and of course Jeff Bezos knows like he's probably not gonna get this policy that that he's he's demanding but it doesn't matter because all he's trying to do is just distract you away from the thing that he doesn't want you to talk about by giving you this like a luring thing here like about who doesn't want a thousand dollars a month that would be like fantastic basically and it takes advantage of like a lack of basically economics understanding

And I think this is the reason why I try so hard to like create a public that just has a basic understanding of basic economic ideas.