- The bottom 50% paid roughly $71 billion in federal income tax — a rounding error against $7 trillion in federal spending.
- Eliminating it is arithmetically trivial; the hard part is naming the offset, since every dollar of spending has a constituency.
- A $200 billion package of defensible cuts funds the elimination with $129 billion left for the deficit — without touching anti-poverty programs.
CNBC Squawk Box, May 20, 2026.
Jeff Bezos gave an interview on Wednesday, May 20th with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s Squawk Box. The most notable comment he gave during the hour-long conversation was when he endorsed a 0% federal income tax on the bottom half of workers. He claimed any corporate or Amazon CFO could find 3% to cut in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon to fund the elimination. I am neither of those things, and it is a Wednesday evening turning into a Thursday morning while I am writing this frantically to try and get it out before this is old news, but I will try my hand at his task and see just how possible and most importantly plausible this idea is.
I highly suggest everyone watches the full hour, but if not, this breakdown is based around the following two clips from the interview that are linked here:
The three lines at the core:
“It’s a skills issue. You want to say any corporate CEO, CFO worth their salt — Amazon’s CFO could find 3% in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon. This is, there is, there is so much waste in government spending.”
“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%. I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”
“A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays more than $12,000 a year in taxes. Does that really make sense? We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology.”
My first piece for Louisburg Strategies was on the millionaire tax that Washington State passed earlier this year, and one of the things I argued is that the wealthy-versus-everyone-else framing is doing more work in our politics than it should be. Former Washington governor Christine Gregoire recently went scorched earth (and I hate that term) on how the Washington State legislature is spending and the direction the state is going. Her concerns will of course be met with crickets from Governor Ferguson. But what she said is correct. Washington’s biennial budget was $38.2 billion in 2015-17. It is $80.2 billion in 2025-27 — a 110% increase, more than double. Median household income over the same period grew 54%. Inflation grew roughly 38%. The state government has expanded roughly twice as fast as the underlying economy, and if you ask Washington residents whether they are receiving twice the value in public services that they were a decade ago, I think you would be hard-pressed to find many who say yes. K-12 funding as a share of the state budget is lower today than it was at the time of the McCleary ruling that supposedly forced the state to fund education adequately. Higher education funding share is at an all-time low. The money is being collected and spent, but the outcomes aren’t tracking. Jeff Bezos was a Washington State resident up until the state passed a capital gains tax a few years ago — I touched on that in my millionaire tax piece — and one can safely assume he has been watching state and federal spending very closely.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published Abundance last year, arguing that the American left has spent decades getting tangled up in process and proceduralism while losing sight of whether government actually produces results that materially improve people’s lives. Bezos, whether he uses the language or not, is making an Abundance argument. The Amazon thesis — relentless lowering of cost and friction so that more people can have access to more things — basically is the Abundance thesis dressed in a corporate setting. The disagreement between Bezos and the median Democrat on this is about implementation, not philosophy. To which I say: my brother, amen.
Jeff Bezos said the bottom 50% of earners should pay zero in federal income tax. The math to fund that elimination is sitting in the federal budget right now — not in a complicated way, not buried in some clever accounting trick, but in obvious places that any honest analyst can point to. Bezos is right that there is so much waste in federal spending that a competent CFO could find the money. He is more right than he let on — you actually don’t even need 3% of the budget. The bottom 50% paid about $71 billion in federal income tax last year. That is a small fraction of the cumulative cost overrun on the F-35 program alone, which was originally projected at $233 billion in 2001 and now carries a lifetime cost estimate of $2.1 trillion — a roughly $1.87 trillion gap. We are not a country that has trouble finding money for things we have decided we want to do.
According to Bezos, the reason we haven’t done this isn’t that government is structurally incapable — it is that the people we have elected to do it haven’t tried, or are simply too incompetent to do it (he didn’t say that last part out loud, but he came close). He said it multiple times in the interview: it is a skills problem, and competent management could solve it. It is fundamentally a critique of leadership, not of constitutional design. And on that critique, I think he’s right.
Who Pays Federal Income Taxes
Below is the most recent data that Bezos likely was referencing in the interview.
The top 1% — people with adjusted gross income above $676,000 — earned 20.6% of all reported AGI and paid 38.4% of all federal individual income taxes. That’s roughly $821 billion out of the $2.14 trillion in total federal income tax collected from individuals. Their share of taxes paid dropped a bit from 2022 (when it was 40.4%), mostly because capital gains realizations cooled off as markets digested rate uncertainty. This is 2023 data, and one could safely assume that with the bull market we have been on over the last two years, the top 1% share will grow when 2024 and 2025 data lands.
The top 10% — people above $187,608 in AGI — paid 70.5% of all federal income taxes. The top 25% paid 86.3%. The top 50%, in aggregate, paid 96.7%.
The bottom 50% paid 3.3%.
| Income Tier | AGI Threshold | Share of AGI | Share of Income Tax Paid | Average Effective Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | $676,000+ | 20.6% | 38.4% | 26.1% |
| Top 5% | $272,209+ | 36.4% | 59.3% | 23.6% |
| Top 10% | $187,608+ | 47.7% | 70.5% | 21.5% |
| Top 25% | $99,857+ | 67.9% | 86.3% | 18.4% |
| Top 50% | $53,801+ | 87.7% | 96.7% | 15.4% |
| Bottom 50% | under $53,801 | 12.3% | 3.3% | 3.7% |
Source: Tax Foundation analysis of IRS Statistics of Income, tax year 2023 (released April 2026).
This is only federal income tax. It does not include other taxes a person may pay, such as sales tax or sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco. But in a lot of places food is exempt from sales tax, and sin taxes are treated by governments as taxes “by choice” — you pay them if you decide to drink or smoke. The idea is that the federal income tax burden on half the country should go to zero. The number we are working with to cut: $71 billion.
Where Federal Money Actually Goes
The chart below shows our federal spending at $7.0 trillion against $5.2 trillion in receipts — a $1.8 trillion deficit. That is FY2025 finalized data from the CBO’s Monthly Budget Review series. FY2026, currently in progress, is on track for $7.4 trillion in total spending and a $1.9 trillion deficit per CBO’s February 2026 projections, so the picture is widening, not improving. We need to know where the $7 trillion goes before we can know where to find the $71 billion to cut.
| Category | Spending (FY2025) | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Social Security | $1.55 trillion | 22% |
| Medicare | $1.05 trillion | 15% |
| Medicaid + CHIP + Health | $755 billion | 11% |
| National Defense | $900 billion | 13% |
| Net Interest on Debt | $1.0 trillion | 14% |
| Income Security (welfare, food assistance, UI, federal pensions) | $700 billion | 10% |
| Veterans Benefits & Services | $335 billion | 5% |
| Education, Training, Social Services | $250 billion | 4% |
| All Other (transportation, agriculture, justice, international, science, energy, etc.) | $460 billion | 6% |
| Total Federal Spending | $7.0 trillion | 100% |
Source: Congressional Budget Office Monthly Budget Review series, FY2025.
A few things worth pointing out from this table.
Mandatory spending — programs whose budgets are set by statute and don’t go through annual congressional appropriations — is about 73% of the total, or $5.1 trillion. That includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, net interest, and various other entitlement programs. The remaining 27%, or $1.9 trillion, is discretionary — the stuff that goes through the appropriations process every year. Defense is roughly half of discretionary. Everything else the federal government does — every cabinet agency, every regulator, every grant program, every dollar of foreign aid, every science investment — has to fit in the other ~$1 trillion. “Mandatory” doesn’t mean “untouchable” — it means “set by statute,” and statutes get amended. The mortgage interest deduction was a $66 billion line item before TCJA narrowed it in 2017.
Net interest on the debt is now above $1 trillion annually. It’s the fourth-largest single line item in the federal budget, bigger than Medicaid, bigger than veterans’ benefits, and within striking distance of defense. Interest is the one thing you actually can’t cut — defaulting blows up global capital markets — but every year of inaction makes the next year’s interest bill larger.
The “Big Three” — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — together account for 48% of all federal spending. They grew $249 billion in FY2025 alone. The constituencies they serve are the most reliable voters in American politics, which is the actual reason they don’t get touched.
Defense at $900 billion is the largest single discretionary line item. A 5% reduction in defense spending would produce $45 billion — roughly two-thirds of the cost of eliminating the bottom-50% income tax burden. A 10% cut would more than fully fund it. We can come back to that in a little.
What Can Actually Be Cut
The bottom 50% paid $71 billion in federal income tax last year. That is actually only about 1% of federal spending. Bezos said 3%, and 1% is enough.
Here are five places to find it:
The Pentagon Audit Problem
This is the easiest argument to make because the data is unambiguous and unusually bipartisan. The Department of Defense has failed every annual financial audit since 2018 — seven consecutive failures as of the FY2024 audit, released in November 2024. The Pentagon, by its own admission, cannot fully account for roughly half of its $3.8 trillion in total assets. Seven years. Half the assets. That is not a partisan accusation. It is what the DoD Inspector General’s office — the Pentagon’s own auditor — has been writing in plain English for seven years. Most Americans would lose their jobs if they failed their performance review twice. The Pentagon has failed seven and gotten budget increases every single year.
The implication isn’t that defense should be slashed indiscriminately. It’s that an organization that doesn’t know what it owns and can’t produce a clean set of books is, almost certainly, wasting money in ways it can’t even quantify yet. The specific procurement programs you can point to are the F-35, the Sentinel ICBM, the Columbia-class submarine program, and the Constellation-class frigate. The F-35’s projected lifetime cost has grown from $233 billion in 2001 to $2.1 trillion today — a ninefold increase against the original baseline. The Sentinel program is 81% over its original estimate and has triggered a Nunn-McCurdy breach review (the statutory mechanism that’s supposed to force review when programs go this far over budget). The Constellation-class frigate program was supposed to deliver 20 ships by 2030 at $1.3 billion each. It has delivered zero, and per-hull cost estimates are now north of $1.9 billion.
These aren’t opinions. They’re findings from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service. The savings opportunity from a serious procurement reform effort — focused on the top five DoD programs in active cost breach, without reducing force structure — is plausibly in the $40-80 billion annual range over a five-to-ten year horizon. That’s just from delivering programs at or near their original baselines instead of 80-100% over them. Per year. Recurring. From one agency. That’s between half and more than the entire cost of eliminating the bottom-50% income tax burden, just by making the Pentagon do its job.
The reason we don’t do this isn’t structural — it’s that every one of these programs has a congressional-district economy attached. The F-35 has suppliers in 45 states. The Sentinel supports manufacturing across the Mountain West. The Constellation is built in Marinette, Wisconsin. Cutting any of them triggers a job-loss fight that has bipartisan opposition because both parties protect specific programs in specific districts. This is a leadership problem, not a math problem. A CFO with real authority would have audited and cut this years ago. Congress hasn’t because Congress doesn’t want to.
There is another political catch worth naming. Any defense cut, however well-justified by the audit findings, gets turned into an attack ad accusing whichever president and members of Congress voted for it of “not backing the troops.” That is just the political reality we are operating in. Worth saying plainly: nobody is proposing a pay cut for the men and women in uniform. The cuts on the table are to procurement contracts and program overruns that the Pentagon’s own auditor cannot account for — a categorically different conversation.
There may be reason for cautious optimism on this front. Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries — a defense tech startup founded in 2017 by the same guy who built Oculus — has been winning major Pentagon contracts on a fundamentally different model than the legacy primes. Anduril funds R&D internally with venture capital and brings near-finished products to the government at fixed prices, rather than negotiating cost-plus contracts where the contractor bills the government for overruns. In March 2026, the Army awarded Anduril a 10-year enterprise contract worth up to $20 billion — the largest single award ever made to a venture-backed defense company — that consolidated more than 120 separate procurement actions into a single agreement. Luckey has been publicly vocal that the cost-plus model “discourages efficiency and punishes contractors who deliver ahead of schedule.” If the Anduril model continues to take share — and the contract activity in 2025-26 suggests it will — the way the Pentagon buys things could meaningfully change over the next decade, and the chronic underestimating of defense contract costs could start to ease.
Farm Subsidies
Federal farm subsidies in 2024 totaled roughly $45 billion across commodity payments ($9.3B), crop insurance premium subsidies ($12.8B), and ad hoc disaster and trade-war payments (USDA projects over $23B for 2025-26). The distribution is the opposite of what the “family farmer” rhetoric suggests. In 2024, the top 10% of recipients collected 65% of all commodity subsidies. The top 1% averaged over $108,000 each. According to the Environmental Working Group, nearly 10,000 farmers have received subsidies every single year for forty consecutive years — averaging $28,000 per year over the full period, totaling $10.7 billion. These are not struggling family farms. They are large, often corporate, agricultural operations that have made farm subsidies a permanent revenue stream.
If you means-tested farm subsidies the way SNAP is means-tested — and SNAP recipients face much stricter income and asset tests than farm subsidy recipients do — you could plausibly eliminate $15-25 billion in annual payments to large operations without touching a single actual family farm. That alone covers one-fifth to one-third of the bottom-50% income tax elimination.
The political problem is the same one we keep running into: every congressional district with significant agriculture has a representative who will fight any cut, and rural states are overrepresented in the Senate. Both parties have voted for the Farm Bill every five years for decades, and the subsidies keep growing regardless of which side is in charge.
Duplicative Programs
The Government Accountability Office issues an annual report on federal programs that are fragmented, overlap, or duplicate each other. The May 2026 report identifies $774 billion in financial benefits achieved since 2011 from implementing GAO’s recommendations, with $100 billion or more still available from 589 open recommendations Congress and federal agencies have not yet acted on.
Some of the specific examples are almost comical. There are 47 separate federal employment and training programs across nine different agencies. Multiple federal broadband programs across 15 agencies with overlapping mandates. More than 30 federal entities involved in disaster recovery, with no coordinating authority. Federal courthouse construction standards that have not been reassessed in years and are driving cost overruns in the tens of millions per project. The Department of Energy could save tens of billions on nuclear waste management by reclassifying certain waste streams. These are real GAO findings with real dollar values attached.
The total savings opportunity from fully addressing the 589 open recommendations is, by GAO’s own conservative estimate, north of $100 billion over the next several years. Some of that is one-time savings; some is recurring annual savings from program consolidation. Even the recurring annual portion alone — plausibly $20-40 billion if you actually executed on the consolidations — would substantially fund the bottom-50% income tax elimination. And critically, none of this involves cutting services to anyone. It involves doing the same things more efficiently with fewer agencies and less administrative overhead. This is exactly the kind of management reform Bezos was describing, and it is sitting in plain English in a GAO report Congress has been receiving every year for over a decade.
Tax Subsidies for the Wealthy
The federal government chooses not to collect about $1.9 trillion every year — that is $1,900,000,000,000 — through credits, deductions, exclusions, and preferential rates. That is almost exactly equal to total individual income tax collections. We collect $2.14 trillion from individuals in income tax. We choose, through the tax code, to subsidize another $1.9 trillion in activities and asset classes. There are various retirement account exclusions that total $300+ billion combined. I don’t think those should be touched; some of these are probably good things that help society prosper, such as the biggest item: the employer-provided health insurance exclusion ($300+ billion); some, like the preferential treatment of long-term capital gains and dividends ($175+ billion) or the step-up in basis at death ($60+ billion), probably are not as much, and could be looked at more thoroughly.
These are spending decisions. They just happen to be implemented through the tax code instead of through appropriations. When the government decides not to tax the unrealized gains in your stock portfolio when you die, that is a fiscal choice equivalent to writing a check to your estate. We call it a tax expenditure because it is, functionally, an expenditure. And most of these expenditures flow upward. Capital gains preferential rates primarily benefit the top 1%, where most capital income is concentrated. Step-up in basis primarily benefits wealthy estates. The employer health insurance exclusion is the largest single subsidy in the U.S. healthcare system and primarily benefits middle and upper-income workers with comprehensive employer plans. The bottom 50% — the people we’re talking about giving an income tax break to — see almost none of these benefits.
Cutting tax subsidies is, in real budgetary terms, the same as cutting spending. It just doesn’t show up in the appropriations process. A 10% reduction in tax expenditures across the board would reduce federal subsidies to wealthy households and corporations by roughly $190 billion annually — almost exactly the 3% figure Bezos cited. Congress has not meaningfully reformed tax expenditures since 1986. That’s forty years. The reason isn’t that it’s hard. The reason is that each line item has an organized constituency, and Congress has been unwilling to take them on. This is, again, governance failure dressed up as complexity.
Improper Payments and Fraud
The Government Accountability Office estimates federal losses to fraud and improper payments at $233-521 billion annually. Most of that is concentrated in three programs: Medicare ($61 billion in improper payments in FY2024), Medicaid ($85 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (~$18 billion in improper claims). To be clear: most of this isn’t fraud in the criminal sense. It’s coding errors, eligibility verification failures, administrative gaps. But it’s real money that left the Treasury without reaching the people it was supposed to reach.
Recovering even 25% of the improper payment universe would generate $50-130 billion annually — enough on its own to fund the bottom-50% elimination, with hundreds of billions left over. Doing so requires investment in claims processing, data integration, and verification infrastructure. The irony is that the efficiency Bezos is describing requires more federal administrative capacity, not less — which is exactly the kind of investment “small government” reform efforts usually cut first.
What I Would Cut
Bezos said 3% on a Tuesday afternoon. When I looked at the actual taxes paid by the bottom 50%, the math came in closer to 1% — $71 billion against $7 trillion in total federal spending. But once I started going line by line through the cuts above, the 3% number wasn’t hard to hit either. Of the $200 billion below, the first $71 billion funds the bottom-50% income tax elimination — that is the original goal. The remaining $129 billion is the extra that closes the gap to Bezos’s 3% target and goes toward deficit reduction. Here is how I got there.
Each number sits within the savings ranges already cited in the body above. Here is what each cut looks like against the current size of the underlying program, and — critically — who actually bears it:
| Category | Current Program Size | Annual Cut | % Decline | Who Bears the Cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pentagon procurement reform | $900B total defense / ~$185B procurement | $60B | 6.7% of total defense | Large defense contractors with cost-plus contracts (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, RTX, General Dynamics) — programs continue, contractor margins on cost overruns shrink |
| Tax expenditure reform | $1.9T in foregone federal revenue | $50B | 2.6% reduction | Wealthy households — primarily capital gains preferential rates and step-up in basis at death, both concentrated in the top 1% |
| Improper payment recovery | $233-521B annual improper payments | $40B | ~12% of midpoint | Healthcare providers with billing and coding errors — Medicare ($61B improper FY2024) and Medicaid ($85B). NOT EITC claimants. NOT Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries |
| Duplicative program consolidation | $100B+ identified by GAO across 589 open recommendations | $30B | ~30% of recurring savings opportunity | Federal agency overhead — 47 employment training programs across 9 agencies, broadband programs across 15 agencies. Services to citizens unaffected |
| Farm subsidy means-testing | $45B annual farm subsidies | $20B | 44% reduction | Top 10% of recipients (currently collect 65% of commodity payments) and top 1% (averaging $108K each). Family farms NOT touched |
This is the part of the proposal that should matter most to anyone reading. None of these cuts come out of poor people’s pockets. No EITC claimants get audited harder. No Medicare or Medicaid beneficiary loses access to care. No family farmer loses a payment. No federal services to citizens get cut. We are not stealing from the poor to feed the poor.
What gets cut, in plain English:
- Cost overruns on weapons systems that the Pentagon’s own auditor cannot account for, billed under cost-plus contracts that reward delays
- Tax breaks that flow predominantly to the top 10% of households — capital gains preferential rates, step-up in basis at death, mortgage interest on second homes
- Provider billing errors in Medicare and Medicaid that already get flagged by federal auditors every year
- Federal agency overhead and program duplication that GAO has been documenting in plain English for fifteen years
- Subsidies to the largest agricultural operations that currently capture two-thirds of the commodity payment pool
We are reallocating from corporations, wealthy households, healthcare billing errors, and administrative overhead — to a tax cut for working-class Americans. That distinction is the entire ethical case for the proposal.
Outside Federal Taxes — What the Bottom 50% Still Pays
One more thing to acknowledge before the conclusion. Even if Bezos’s proposal passed exactly as he framed it — federal income tax for the bottom 50% goes to zero — the tax burden on those households does not go to zero. State and city governments tax income, sales, property, and consumption independently of federal policy. Some of them tax it pretty hard.
For Bezos’s hypothetical Queens nurse making $75,000:
| Tax | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Federal income tax (current) | $8,800 | After standard deduction |
| FICA (employee-side) | $5,737 | 7.65% — NOT affected by Bezos’s proposal |
| NY State income tax | $3,500 | ~5.0% effective on $75K |
| NYC income tax | $2,700 | 3.6% effective on $75K |
| Sales tax (NYC 8.875% on ~$22K consumption) | $1,950 | Approximate |
| Total current burden | ~$22,700 | 30% effective rate |
| Total with no federal income tax | $13,900 | Federal income tax → $0 |
The federal income tax elimination would reduce her total tax burden by 39% — a meaningful improvement, but a long way from the “send her an apology” rhetorical zeroing-out. The federal payroll tax stays. The state and city income taxes stay. The sales tax stays. The property tax (paid through her rent) stays.
And the picture is wildly different in different parts of the country. Major U.S. cities span the full range of state-and-local tax regimes:
| City | State Income Tax (~$54K AGI) | City Income Tax | Sales Tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | $2,500 | $1,700 | 8.875% |
| Boston, MA | $2,700 | $0 | 6.25% |
| San Francisco, CA | $2,200 | $0 | 8.625% |
| Seattle, WA | $0 | $0 | 10.35% |
| Los Angeles, CA | $2,200 | $0 | 9.50% |
| Miami, FL | $0 | $0 | 7.00% |
| Austin, TX | $0 | $0 | 8.25% |
Federal income tax elimination is most consequential in low-state-tax places (Miami, Austin, Seattle) and least consequential in high-state-tax places (NYC, San Francisco). For a bottom-50% earner in Miami, eliminating federal income tax would reduce total burden by roughly half. For the same earner in NYC, the reduction is closer to 30%.
And then there’s sin and excise taxes, which are not mentioned by Bezos at all and which fall disproportionately on lower-income households. Federal excise taxes on gasoline ($0.184/gallon), tobacco, and alcohol are flat-dollar levies that eat a higher percentage of income at the bottom. A bottom-50% earner who buys a pack of cigarettes in Manhattan pays roughly $8 in combined federal, state, and local taxes on a single $14 transaction — New York State alone charges $5.35/pack in excise tax, the highest in the country, on top of the federal $1.01/pack and the NYC $1.50/pack. That works out to a 58% effective tax rate on that purchase, higher than any income tax bracket most will ever face. Zeroing out federal income tax wouldn’t touch or affect these things.
None of the above is an argument against what Bezos spoke about on Squawk Box. The federal income tax piece would change a lot of people’s lives. But it wouldn’t reduce a lower-income person’s tax bill to $0, which is part of what Bezos said the goal was. Bringing down the tax bill for low-income workers at the state and local level is a separate conversation and would require a lot more than me spending 8 hours throwing idea darts at a keyboard while paying a sin tax of my own (drinking a Michelob Ultra). State and local governments can’t deficit spend like the federal government, and there is a belief (I’m in this camp and you should be too) that tax dollars spent at home go farther for the person than the ones you’re sending to Washington, D.C. However, the possibilities of what the federal government can do far outweigh what a state can do. It is kind of like comparing Amazon to Barnes and Noble.
Conclusion
Is it possible? Yes. The math seems to be even more generous than Bezos let on — you actually don’t need 3% of the budget, you need around 1%. The bottom 50% paid $71 billion in federal income tax last year against $7 trillion in total federal spending. None of the cuts are hidden.
Society is becoming ever more one of haves and have-nots, and it is the job of the people in the “haves” to make sure that those who aren’t don’t continue to get absolutely screwed, especially as we head into further unprecedented times with AI, automation, and robotics. That isn’t to say this is the best solution — it is just one that was presented on CNBC, and I wanted to do the mental exercise myself and see if I could find $71 billion. I was able to. If there is a CFO position open at Amazon, I would like to be in consideration for the role.
Jokes aside — the CFO consideration was not one — I think we should look at this proposal on the merits, instead of (speaking as a Democrat) just giving Bezos and the other ultra-wealthy the entire dessert blame pie as the sole reason why we are in this predicament, or (for the Republican readers) looking at the people who would get the proposed relief as freeloaders. Newsflash: poverty is not partisan. It is not MAGA or part of the DSA. This is a bold proposal, and I believe now more than ever bold should be embraced.
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Suggested citation: Sterling Rettke, “Jeff Bezos Suggests No Income Tax for the Bottom 50% of Workers. Is That Possible?” Sterling Rettke Commentary, May 21, 2026.
The content on this site is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Sterling Rettke is not a registered investment adviser. The author may hold positions in securities discussed. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.