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Jeff Bezos says bottom half of U.S. earners should pay no federal income tax

9 points by johnshades

by jfengel

2 subcomments

That's not really helping much. Yes, $0 is better than $1, but it's not really saving a ton of money.
Eliminating the need to file would be nice. That would save a lot of time.
And note that even the poorest filers still pay considerable payroll taxes, over 15%. That's actually a tax that Bezos barely pays -- it's capped at $184,000, and Bezos doesn't pay that much because his "salary" is $80,000. All of his vast earnings from capital gains pay $0 in payroll taxes.
This sounds to me like an effort to distract attention from the fact that we have a vast deficit, and we cannot close it by getting money from the bottom 50%. You're only going to reduce it meaningfully by cutting big programs (not the penny-ante ones that DOGE cut for ideological reasons, not fiscal ones) and taxing people and corporations that actually have money (people like Bezos).

by ferguess_k

0 subcomment

I actually agree with him, but maybe they will lower the salary further because of that, to make US workers more "competitive".

by smallerize

0 subcomment

The article has some good numbers, but it doesn't mention that about 30% of workers already pay zero federal income tax. So it's really the 30-50 percentiles paying that 3% of tax. That means the change would be larger for them than you might expect, but it would change nothing for the lower earners.

by MBCook

0 subcomment

Why do I have a feeling that includes him through some kind of tax doge shenanigans.

by someperson

0 subcomment

Effectively formalizing the system we have now. As the article notes bottom 50% of come earners pay ~3% of tax at 54k income, and it's less than Sen Bookers <75k zero income tax proposal.