Bankrolling the Nation

Plus: Iran, hooters, DoorDash oppression, and more...

Who should be exempt? Why does Jeff Bezos think teachers in Queens making $75,000 a year shouldn't be expected to pay taxes?

"I think what's going on is that it's kind of a tale of two economies," he told CNBC's Squawk Box yesterday. OK, uncontroversial. "You have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling—struggling to pay rent, groceries."

"A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays 12—more than $12,000 a year in taxes," continued Bezos—the veracity of which is debatable. "Does that really make sense? So, people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes?"

"Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?" he continued. "That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And so—and by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3 percent of the taxes. It's only 3 percent. We can find 3 percent. So we don't have—it's a small amount of money for the government.…We don't have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3 percent. We have already, and I think it should be zero. I don't think it should be 3 percent.…We actually have a spending problem and that's a skills issue."

I mean, some parts of this are true: The federal government does have a massive spending issue. But parts of it are very muddled: Per Tax Policy Center estimates, the bottom 40 percent of households already don't pay any federal individual income tax. We're already basically there, at the place Jeff Bezos aspires to be! And it's not great—either for those households, seemingly, which still (reasonably!) complain of high housing and healthcare and education and childcare costs, or for the federal government being able to balance the budget. (But also, the "nurse in Queens making $75,000" is an imagined person. Average salaries for New York City area registered nurses run about $96,000.)

The truth of it is that we probably need a broad tax base given how large of a welfare and entitlements state we currently have. We need taxes to fund the things we've decided to do together. I'm OK with scrapping an awful lot of that, and actually doing very little together. But in the absence of making those vast structural changes, it really rubs me the wrong way that Bezos is advocating for a further narrowing of the tax base, acting like households like mine—two income; both white collar—must bankroll nurses and teachers in Queens (both examples he cites in the interview) making $75,000 a year. These would hardly be poverty wages; but also, they're not even accurate descriptors of what nurses and teachers in New York tend to get paid these days. (And for teachers, this salary is in addition to their pensions, mind you, because, as I've reported before, blue-state teachers don't have it so bad. Tattoo that on my chest and tell it to Elizabeth Warren!)

Elsewhere, Bezos talks more sense:

"These people [Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.)] sometimes say that, that, you know, I don't pay taxes. That's not true.…If people want me to pay more billions then let's have that debate. But don't pretend you know that this, that that's going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you. You can't connect those two things, not logically. You know, there, there are more examples. Why is rent expensive? Why is rent so expensive? I recently saw somebody blamed it on Airbnb. Okay, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. It's already been outlawed in New York City. And rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn't causing high rents. What's really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build? If you want rents to come down, Econ 101—Really simple. You can't subsidize demand and constrain supply. If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody's fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue."

And, when asked about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' (D–N.Y.) recent rant—that there's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned; that you can break rules and abuse labor laws, but you can't earn billions of dollars—Bezos responded:

"Let's say you start a burger joint. And you have ten employees and you make a little bit of money.…And so then you open a second outlet. And now you're making a little bit more money and you have 20 employees and you open a third outlet. By the time you've opened 1,000 outlets, you are a billionaire. And by the way, this is a real life story. It happens all the time. It's In-N-Out burger. It's, you know, Raising Cane's Chicken. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical or it didn't? There was one outlet, and then there were two, and then there were three. What you're doing, the way, the way you make $1 billion or $100 million or $10 million or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you're going to end up with $1 billion."

Given how Bezos accurately diagnoses our political problems throughout much of the interview, it's rather disturbing how he doesn't seem to understand a) what the current tax base looks like, and how progressive or regressive federal taxation is; and b) that we probably need a broad tax base and that further splitting into payers and nonpayers might have unintended consequences (like those who pay no taxes voting as if it's all monopoly money).

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Scenes from New York: The only mergers and acquisitions I care about: "The Neue Galerie and its collections will come under the Met's administrative umbrella; Mr. Lauder and his daughter Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer will donate a further 13 paintings as well as money to cover costs associated with the merger and support an endowment that will fully fund operations and programming. The name will change to The Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie, but it will be referred to as The Met Neue Galerie," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The Met has deep holdings of work by Paul Klee and Schiele in addition to creations of the Wiener Werkstätte, a sort of early Bauhaus, only in Vienna, where a community of artists designed and made utilitarian objects. And it has a fine Beckmann painting. But its representations of other artists of these schools are spotty at best. So this alliance is transformational." The Met (as well as our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!) kept me sane when my second-born was in the hospital on the Upper East Side; what a delight that the collection will grow!

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QUICK HITS

• "To reveal how Iran has been consolidating control over this strategic chokepoint in recent weeks, Reuters interviewed 20 people with knowledge of the evolving mechanism, including Asian and European shipping sources and Iranian and Iraqi officials, reviewed Iranian documents related to the vetting process, and analysed movements of ships. Taken together, they offer rare insight into how the Iranian scheme functions, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps playing a central role." Link here.
• "Hooters Says Bring the Kids," courtesy of The New York Times.
• Insane:

Within one 24 hour period, Trump:

- got out of a $100 million IRS fine
- secured "immunity" from all future tax investigations for his family and friends
- created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters
- was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1… pic.twitter.com/8UYkuiAB5p

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) May 20, 2026

• This is patently false. The poor are not "being forced to rely on" services like DoorDash. Eating rice and beans and lentils and chicken breast and apples and dollar burritos and Folgers you brew at home—eating simply, and buying in bulk, and stretching food far by cooking at home—is not oppression. It's how most of our families ate, pretty much always, up until recently; it's how many of us were raised. And now, there's more knowledge-dissemination (check out FrugalityTok!) than ever before. (Others of us, in far less dire circumstances, have the ability to save time by getting groceries delivered, to then use that time for the higher-ROI activity of cooking at home. There are a lot of different options available to us all now, and truly none of them involve being forced to spend $40 a meal.)

This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It's an issue countless ppl have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to shame/abuse poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor https://t.co/F3azUiucBJ

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 20, 2026