Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said during a CNBC interview,“I pay billions in taxes; you could double that and it still won’t help.” He argued that local, state and federal governments have an excessive spending problem through unnecessary spending and cronyism, not a revenue problem.
He stated that governments lack the skill and competency to effectively manage and operate the massive bureaucracy that exist on the local, state and federal levels of government. If he ran Amazon in a similar manner, it would cost hundreds of dollars to ship packages, the packages would take weeks to arrive, and the order would be incorrect.
If you’re going to have a progressive tax policy, the money needs to get to solving the real problem, not wasted on bureaucratic waste, incompetence and inefficiencies. Our government needs to address excessive spending and ensure capital flows directly to those who need.
He feels that taxes for lower salary employees is too high. He stated that “The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all tax revenue while the bottom half pay just 3%. I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero. I don’t want to reduce it. I want to eliminate it. I think there’s something very powerful about zero.”
While some Americans are doing very well, while others are struggling, we must fix issues at the root. For example, if you want rents in New York City to come down, you can’t subsidize demand and constrain supply of housing. Zoning and bureaucratic overregulation constrain housing supply in major cities like New York and Los Angeles.
It’s perfectly fine for Americans to have a tax policy debate. But, it’s absurd to stand in front of an individual’s residence and demonize millionaires and billionaires.
Policy debates do not have to be finger pointing. Unfortunately, when politicians do not know how or have the political courage to solve the root problem, they resort to finger pointing and demonizing the rich or their political adversaries.
He closed by saying that he is very optimistic about America. “We live in the wealthiest country in the world and it is the greatest country in the world”, he said. “America has more entrepreneurial dynamism than anywhere else in the world. It’s the best time to be alive in America. Because we have access to capital that is so easy right now.”