Why Jeff Bezos Loves Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill
By a one-vote margin, the House has just passed a bill brimming with tax giveaways for large corporations and billionaires. One major corporation—Amazon—provides a telling example of the high costs of these giveaways for working people and our democracy.
President Trump had made some noises about increasing the top marginal income tax rate, but House leaders opted instead to keep that rate at 37 percent—down from 39.6 percent before the last big tax cuts for the wealthy in 2017.
According to a report our organizations recently released with the Athena Coalition, Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy has enjoyed about $1 million a year in tax windfalls from that rate cut.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a stake in the income tax rate because he, like most other ultra-wealthy Americans, gets nearly all his money from investment profits. And that money is taxed at about half the rate as income from work. The House bill preserves this perversity, meaning that millions of middle-class Americans will continue to pay a higher tax rate than many billionaires.
