GoKawiilOn Wednesday morning, Jeff Bezos said in an interview on CNBC that Americans earning in the bottom half of incomes should not pay taxes.
“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?” Bezos said. “That’s $1,000 that could help with rent, or groceries, or anything… To me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology.”
Jeff Bezos said the bottom half of Americans should pay zero federal income tax.
He cited a nurse in Queens making ~$75K and paying ~$12K in taxes saying “we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington.” pic.twitter.com/8KSgrO5TnE — Shay Boloor (@StockSavvyShay) May 20, 2026
Bezos argues that the lower half of earners only pay 3% of total taxes, so people like that nurse are struggling to make ends meet while devoting about 16% of their salary (per Bezos’ estimation) to pay taxes that barely move the needle in Washington.
This moment of empathy may be surprising coming from Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world. Billionaires like Bezos have taken advantage of holes in the tax system so that they pay income tax on just a small percentage of their annual gains. In 2007 and 2011, Bezos didn’t pay income tax at all. According to a ProPublica investigation, Bezos’ wealth increased $127 billion from 2006 to 2018, but he reported $6.5 billion in income. While this amounted to a huge $1.4 billion tax payment, this represented a tax rate of only about 1 percent.
This isn’t illegal. Americans are not taxed on unrealized capital gains, meaning that if Amazon’s stock balloons to make Bezos even more wealthy, he will only pay taxes once he sells that stock. The ultra-wealthy do whatever they can to hold onto their investments. Instead, they take out massive loans using their stock as collateral, live off of those loans, and avoid paying taxes on them, since those loans are technically debt.
Has Jeff Bezos finally realized how unfair this is? Does he now understand the frustration of the middle class, who can’t just take out loans on their heaping piles of company stock to avoid reporting capital gains?
“[Senator] Elizabeth Warren has made this point repeatedly… you and others are able to pay a lower tax rate — even though you’re paying an enormous sum in taxes — a lower tax rate than maybe I am, for example,” CNBC reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Bezos.
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