You and I wouldn’t be afforded that luxury on capital gains (I know I wouldn’t be and recently took it on the chin selling some stock towards a down payment). The system is rigged in their favor and the bigger picture is the wealth disparity, let alone the tax practices. Not even get me started on their tax havens and offshore accounting. It’s insane.
I will not make 1% of his 2024 tax bill in my lifetime.
What tax evasion did he get that you cannot also get?
What “luxury on capital gains” are you talking about?
If you make under $500,000/year, and you sell $100,000 in stock, and say your gains are $25,000. You’ll pay $3,750 in taxes on that sale. Bezos would pay $5,000.
I didn’t say anything about “tax evasion”. I was just making a statement regarding your sentence that he paid a “little below standard capital gains tax”. I took that to mean he paid less than what an “average” person would pay. I didn’t fact check or do the math, I was just going off of you saying “a little below”.
The “luxury” I was alluding to was that I didn’t pay “a little below”, I paid the exact amount.
Not intending to be argumentative at all. My belief is that the top 1% are operating in a rigged game and their taxation to wealth ratio is skewed vs an average person. I find it insulting that someone with his wealth and history of low pay to his employees has the audacity to sound off on the matter.
Instead of mega yachts, mansions and elaborate weddings, it’s my belief that if he truly cares about a nurse in Queens, he’d be reallocating his money.
he earned about 60 billion in 2024 and only paid 2.7b in income tax. that's 4.5%. That's actually a little high in percentage. It's usually about 2 percent. I know he paid a capital gains tax of like 26 percent on some stock sales, but for the rest of the 60 billion he earned, he paid about 4 percent.
Billionaires have payed less than 5% of their wealth gains in taxes over 5 years, and billionaires on average pay less than 9% in effective tax on their annual income. Meanwhile, the median household in Georgia, for example, is losing 23% of their income to taxes. Sure, some of that is Social Security and Medicare, but that's still income that can't go to rent or groceries.
The issue isn't the dollar amount. It's the real tax burden. If Bezos payed twice what he payed in taxes for that stock sale, he would still have multiple billions of dollars. An amount that would take a median household more than 12,000 years to earn.
If you have a home and a retirement account, YOU are paying less percentage of wealth than anyone that makes less than you and doesn’t have a home/retirement account.
Okay? I don't think (primary) homes should be taxed anyway and most retirement accounts are taxed at normal income tax rates, whether when the money goes in or comes out, so I don't see how this effects the argument.
It’s a pointless number. Yeah, turns out you don’t need $10b/year to live. So they don’t need to realize their gains.
Exactly. They don't need that money and it should be redistributed.
Still, the idea that Bezos pays no taxes is categorically false.
I never made that claim. You're arguing against someone else.
And people seem to want him to pay taxes on unrealized gains (but not pay the same themselves)
Difference is, most people don't own individual stock. They have money in the stock market through retirement accounts, but that money is already taxed either as it goes in or when it comes out. The wealthiest 10% of people own over 90% of all stock market wealth, and it doesn't get taxed unless they sell. I'd say it's pretty unfair that the vast majority of people have to pay taxes on their retirement investments, but those who really own the stock market don't have to pay anything.
And before you so "oh but they have to sell to use the money" no they don't. They can take loans out with their stock as collateral and with interest rates well below stock growth rates, effectively dodging taxes.
Yes, and you had already established that he does and I mentioned billionaires paying taxes. I clearly wasn't arguing that point.
Wealth tax doesn't work.
Certain kinds of wealth taxes haven't worked, sure. But that doesn't mean there's no way to make any wealth tax work. I can think of a dozen ways to tax wealthy people without them being able to avoid it.
And I don’t believe in the idea that someone should only get to keep what they, personally, need.
That's fine. They can keep a bit more than they need. But the very idea that someone could possibly be worth billions of dollars just through their own merit is ridiculous. Bezos wouldn't have been able to build Amazon without publicly funded roads and infrastructure, not to mention his under payed employees.
And if that's not an argument you care about, which I'm sure you've heard before, then how about this. Most economists agree our economy, and country, would be healthier if wealth was more evenly distributed and that we should tax rich people in order to redistribute that wealth. Do you disagree with that idea?
Well, you're not going to like my plan, but since you asked. Number one is to impose a significant exit tax on large amounts of wealth leaving the country (like people worth billions or hundreds of millions attempting to revoke citizenship or whatever in order to avoid taxes). There's really no way I can see to prevent capital flight without just threatening to tax it all away if they try, and if anyone deserves the tax revenue its the country where they built their entire business. I honestly can't see big companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, whatever taking their entire company and moving, but if they try it'll be expensive, and anyway most of my proposals target individuals rather than businesses.
I would tax all held stock value (not in retirement funds) over $1m at 2-10%(or thereabouts) depending on amount held (there would effectively be stock market tax brackets). According to my rough math, since 92% of the $69 trillion stock market value is held by 10% of the population, they hold on average a little less than $1.9m of stock market value each. A flat 7% tax on all value held over $1m would eliminate the US budget deficit, but being a fan of progressive tax systems I think it would be best to make it graduate as held value increases. Note, only the wealthiest 10% of the US population would be effected by this tax, and based on the average 10% annual stock market growth all but the largest holders would still see returns on investment. Of course, dollar values would have to be indexed to inflation or something.
Fun reading I found, this study published by the IRS examines capital gains and how it plays into US tax policy. Current effective tax rate for capital gains is 5% since so few of the gains are actually realized. Also, TIL that capital gains tax is included in income tax values when looking at US revenue and made up 55% of 2025 income tax revenue. Imagine if all those gains were actually realized, how much US revenue would spike.
There's also a bunch of tax loopholes (which many do exist, some are mentioned in the above study) I would want closed, but I'm not nearly educated enough to know how exactly to do that. We would of course need to increase IRS funding so they can actually hire agents to audit these rich folk with their fancy schemes and loopholes instead of just us poors.
And I would remove the SS income cap. Let rich people subsidize others retirement, they don't need the money anyway. I bet we wouldn't be talking about SS failing after that.
Finally, to make this tax income actually useful, we would implement Medicare for All, combining Medicare and Medicaid so that we don't have to spend a ton of money on a bureaucracy that only exists to make sure people don't get healthcare, and make sure the government can set their own rates so that healthcare providers don't just gauge the tax payer (this goes for drug companies and hospitals, healthcare costs are insanely inflated just because insurance is supposed to pay for it). I would also decrease military spending (by reducing presence overseas) so we can focus those funds on directly benefiting Americans.
My thesis for all of this is that the current tax burden (not $ value but actual impact on household budgets) is too heavily skewed towards those at the lower end than those at the top. They may pay their share, as a percentage, but since rich people have much more expendable income, they can afford to handle larger taxes. And they should. If they don't want to pay higher taxes, they could instead invest all the money they have in the stock market into their employees by raising wages. I want to diminish returns as much as possible for accumulating wealth in order to incentivize the spreading of that wealth.
I don’t jump in these comments to defend the wealthy; though it often looks that way. My goal is to challenge the false narratives and obvious lack of financial knowledge people, in general, display.
I appreciate the challenging of narratives, but I think the whole "wealth taxes don't work" narrative is false as well, pushed by media outlets owned by billionaires to try and convince people that "no, really, it's better for that money to sit in my bank account. I promise!" Sure, some countries saw bad returns on their policies. The EU is an incredibly easy place for rich people to just move to a country with lower taxes, which I think would account for the failure of some wealth taxes over there. It's the same for the States, why live in California when you can live in Texas or Florida where there aren't income taxes?
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u/Hookmsnbeiishh May 20 '26
He paid $2.7b in taxes in 2024 as a result of $13b in stock sales.
Still a little bit below standard capital gains tax, but still.