Why is it so hard to tax billionaires? (Part 2)
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That's MUBI.com slash search engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. I'm going to try The Substance even though I'm scared of scary movies. If you watch it, shoot me an email. Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. Today, if we've done our jobs correctly, and who knows, we've hopefully suckered you into paying attention to a story about 110 years of American tax policy. Let's find out. So September 2020, Jesse Isinger, a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica, had gotten this leak of internal documents from an anonymous source, the tax returns of thousands of the wealthiest Americans dating back over 15 years. In those leaked tax returns, Jesse and the team at ProPublica could see proof of this maneuver, a maneuver that some academics and economists had suspected was now being deployed by the country's wealthiest. What did the documents help you understand that you hadn't understood before?
Well, I mean, me, non-tax reporter, non-tax expert, it was all extraordinarily revelatory. But even tax experts didn't understand this fully. So, you know, I think there's a general lay understanding that the wealthy avoid taxes. And that's the kind of eye roll thing that you would hear in a bar if you were talking about these stories with someone. drinking next to you, but they didn't know that Jeff Bezos and Musk and Bloomberg and Carl Icahn and George Soros literally could pay zero in federal income tax in recent years. They didn't know that Jeff Bezos got a child tax credit because his income was so low. Experts understood that in the abstract, and no one understood it in the specific until we
proved it because we had the specific numbers and the names.
So let's get into the actual specifics. In this episode, we're going to dig into how it is that some billionaires end up paying zero dollars in federal income tax. Chapter one, one weird trick. I asked Jesse to walk me through, step by step, how the trick works. I gave him Jeff Bezos as my hypothetical billionaire who might want to not pay his federal income taxes. So let me tell you, like, my dum-dum's view of what Jeff Bezos' life looks like. My dum-dum view of Jeff Bezos is like... He's working out. He works out a lot. He takes a lot of pictures with his beautiful partner. And then every two weeks...
his phone buses, and it's his Chase bank account, and it says that his payroll deposit is in, and that Amazon.com pays him, I don't know, Jeff Bezos, $10 million a year. So he gets almost $200,000 a week. So every two weeks, he gets $400,000. They take out all the stuff the government takes out. So after taxes, he gets $200,000 that goes into his checking account. That's not what happens.
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