Transcription
I was going to ask you about that, because you. Well, first of all, before we talk about how we went after you specifically, you saw that CNBC interview he did earlier. The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3%. It's a complete and utter lie. If you look at it, it doesn't include social security taxes. 80% of Americans pay more social security. The bottom 80% pays more in social security than the top, uh, and it doesn't include state and local taxes, which are quite regressive.
Yeah. Well, can we, can we pause there for just in terms of explaining progressive and regressive taxes for our audience? What do we mean by that?
Well, regressive taxes mean that the poor or lower income are paying a higher percentage of their income, uh, than are the rich. And you know, Bezos says that he's paying billions. Amazon paid something in the order of 1.3% of its income in taxes. I mean, these are people like Bezos and corporations like Amazon that are getting away with murder. I mean, physically getting away with murder. They shouldn't be allowed. And for Bezos to go on television on national television on CNBC and issue these lies?
Well, and it also sort of. Again, I'm not, I'm not angry that he attacked me. Yeah. Well, so he, he reposted this thread, which we don't have to get into, from on by some essentially right-wing grifter who's been elevated by Elon Musk before on X, saying, you know, don't worry about, you know, what Robert Reich is saying, it's all lies, you know, it'll pull a little wool over from from over your eyes. But I mean, all of that is to obfuscate the fact that he's got this huge amount of money that he's borrowing against, right? To live. He doesn't have a traditional income. Could you explain that a little bit for us?
He does. This is, this is an important point. These billionaires, multi. We're talking about a set of billionaires. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money and what they can.
[laughter]
If you have that much money, what you can do is get a loan from a bank, um, um, use your money as collateral. I mean, a bank is not going to worry about ever collecting against a loan. Uh, and so Bezos, uh, goes and says, "Well, I, I, I want to take out this loan." And he takes out for all his living expenses. It's not a small loan, but it's not all his income, obviously. So, he avoids income taxes on almost all of his income.