Jeff Bezos is worth, by most recent published estimates, somewhere north of two hundred billion dollars. That number has grown by tens of billions in a single calendar year more than once. He owns a yacht long enough to require a smaller yacht to service it. These are not allegations. They are the public record.
Last week he took to social media to post a chart — origin: the Manhattan Institute — arguing that if the federal government seized every dollar held by every American billionaire, it would fund the government for roughly eight months and then the billionaires would be broke and the problem would remain. The implication being: do not bother taxing us. The math doesn't pencil.
Graham Platner, a Democrat running for Senate in Maine, called it “abject nonsense.” Senator Bernie Sanders called it “pitching propaganda.” Platner, specifically, said Bezos was protecting himself and what he termed his “crony friends.” He said it plainly and on the record, which is more than most candidates manage before November.
The chart Bezos shared is not fraudulent, exactly. It is the kind of arithmetic that is technically correct and morally evasive at the same time. Nobody serious is proposing a one-time total confiscation of all billionaire wealth. The proposals on the table — a minimum income tax on unrealized gains over one hundred million dollars, a wealth tax of two or three cents on every dollar above fifty million — are annual levies on accumulation, not a one-time raid followed by silence. You do not have to admire Bernie Sanders to notice that Bezos selected the most dramatic version of the argument in order to defeat it.
Amazon's federal tax rate in 2021 was reported by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy at 6.1 percent on $35 billion in U.S. income. The statutory corporate rate is 21 percent. The distance between 6.1 and 21 is not an accident. It is the result of a tax code that took years of lobbying and campaign contributions to assemble, and which Bezos and his lawyers understand better than the people who wrote it.
Platner is running against incumbent Senator Susan Collins in a state where the median household income in 2023 was $72,413. He does not have Bezos money. He has the argument that Bezos made for him, posted voluntarily, under Bezos's own name, on a platform Bezos does not own but which the current administration's allies do.
The chart is still up. The yacht — the one that needs the second yacht — is currently docked in the Mediterranean, which is not Maine.